Using WordSift With Discovery Education
About a month ago I discovered a Web 2.0 literacy tool, WordSift.
I Tweeted it out and was instantly swamped with questions from fellow educators.
Since then, I have been telling anyone and everyone who will listen about WordSift.
I was working on a presentation called “Oh, the Humanities!” for the TCEA Discovery Education pre-conference, Beyond the Textbook. I was compiling pre, during, and post-reading resources like AutoSummary in Word, ReadWriteThink, Wordle, TagCrowd, and Great Summary that can be used with digital text to help students identify themes, main ideas, and key vocabulary when I stumbled upon WordSift. Unlike many of the similar word cloud tools, WordSift was created with the expressed goal of supporting education.
WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts — just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we have added the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. We have also integrated it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.
Click here to take a quick video tour of the service.
Here is an overview of how I would use WordSift with a primary source speech available from Discovery Education streaming.
Step 1: Search for the speech and download the transcript.
Step 2: Copy/paste the transcript text into WordSift.
Step 3: Use the word cloud to ask students to identify main ideas, themes, goals of the speech, intended audience, or to develop questions they believe should be answered by the speech. This could be done as a “pre-reading” strategy to develop the structures for “during reading” focus.
Step 4: Identify key vocabulary by creating customized word lists to make the vocabulary stand out as a different color.
Step 5: Isolate words for further discussion by dragging them to the workspace.
Step 6: Use image and video clues.
Step 7: Click on the words to populate the Visual Thesaurus widget.
Step 8: Use sentence context clues to make meaning of the vocabulary in the context of the speech.
Step 9: Place the sentences back into the full text to use nearby context clues.
Here are some quick tips for bringing WordSift into desktop presentations.
Click on the About link on WordSift to see the myriad ways educators have been using the service and visit the educator videos posted under Demonstrations.
For Discovery Education subscribers, you can use WordSift with the Encyclopedia Articles, Speech Transcripts, Reading Passages, and any other media asset types that contain digital text. Quick Tip: If you are using a speech, be sure to check out the Speech Guide that contains media resources for scaffolding and provides historical context for the speech.
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I was thrilled to join Mike Bryant and Steve Dembo at the Anoka-Hennepin Day of Discovery in Minnesota earlier this week. There was so much positive energy I could practically hear bells ringing . . . okay, so maybe that was the fire alarm that forced us to evacuate the building towards the end of the day, yet this was a high-energy event and I thoroughly enjoyed working with the inspiring educators from Anoka-Hennepin.
When my plane landed in Minot, North Dakota, I was treated to my first snowfall of the season. I love winter weather and the beautiful snow that accompanies the chill.