WordSift

Visualize Text﻿ [|www.wordsift.com]  [|About] I [|Features] I [|Word Lists] I [|Tips] I media type="youtube" key="1JfvsQzcCWU?fs=1" height="385" width="480" align="center"

A Text Analysis Tool
1. Choose a favorite poem, speech, wikipedia selection or specific writing and paste in to the text area. Push S﻿IFT button. 2. The words in the cloud are alphabetically ordered, and their relative frequency is indicated by text size.

3.The cloud can be sorted according to their frequency in the printed English language from common-to-rare and rare-to-common, and alphabetically from A-to-Z and Z-to-A. The cloud can also be made to disappear and re-appear by clicking on squish and unsquish.

4. Words from selected word lists can be marked by clicking on the appropriate list name, and they are displayed in orange. The current lists are: Academic Word List (AWL), General Service List (GSL), Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies words. The user may also cut and paste a customized word list into a separate pop-up box under “Custom”.

5. The most frequent word is entered into the Visual Thesaurus® and the result is displayed as a word web.

6. The Visual Thesaurus® display is interactive: the definition of each word on the display pops up when the cursor is scrolled over it, and a click on any word on the web re-configures the display to bring that word to the center. This display is just a sampler taken from the Visual Thesaurus® website, and after several clicks, it will ask you if you want to subscribe (we believe it is well worth it for a modest price, even though we are not affiliated with the company). If you click “remind me later” it will continue to function without much annoyance.

7. Word Text below the Thesaurus- will show you what sentence(s) the word appears and where it is located in the speech.

8. The images related of the two most used words will appear in the left bottom window. The search feature is available to locate other images.

a. Show a word cloud live on projection screen. Preview the work cloud before introducing the passage. Ask: All of these works are going to be in what we are about to read. What do you **predict** that we are going to read about? Brainstorm predictions.
 * __Lesson Ideas__**

b. Choose unfamilar words. Ask: What context do you think this word is being used?

c. Review. Display the cloud and have students use at least 10 words in a paragraph.

d. Ask students how words are related to each other.

e. [|Using Wordsift with Discovery Education]

[|Famous Poets and Poems]

[|Famous Speeches]