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JustTheWord is a completely new kind of aid to help you with writing English and choosing just the word. If English is your first language, JustTheWord can help you express that elusive idea with le mot juste. If you're learning English, JustTheWord can justify your choice of words or suggest improvements - and JustTheWord knows about some common errors made by speakers of your mother tongue. When we write, we search our knowledge of words in two ways. We choose between words that mean similar things. A thesaurus gives us access to this sort of knowledge. But our choice constrains and is constrained by the other words in the sentence. We know, or need to know, which word combinations sound natural. A dictionary gives us access to some of this sort of knowledge. Based on the latest advances in statistical linguistics, and exploiting Sharp's patented analysis technology, JustTheWord combines the advantages of thesaurus and dictionary, and enhances the usefulness of both. By analysing a huge amount of English text, we've built up a highly detailed knowledge base of the word combinations whose mastery is at the heart of fluent English.

"This lesson uses the four modalities of reading (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) on a math word problem to bridge the gap between reading and math. After a read-aloud from the book Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, students create their own word problems with answers. Students solve each other's problems. As they reread the word problems, fluency and comprehension increase. Finally, students use the skills they've learned creating word problems to complete a crossword puzzle. As students read the math concept words presented in the puzzle and write the correct answers, their reading and writing math vocabulary skills increase."

Thinkfinity resource

It's an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and draw connections to associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it.

I like this site. You put a word into the random slot and you get a mindmap of all the related words and meanings.

"Can do for you: Highlight multiple english words (whole matching). Store the highlight words list locally. Re-do highlighting automatically when page content changed. In coming features: Add a context menu button, to add selected word on page. Shortcuts. Phrase support. Add a setting/option page, to set whole word matching or not. Configurable highlight style. Make it faster."

cluemaster, a free subscription service for grades 5-12, offers a collection of hundreds of crossword puzzles, word searches, and othe rword games that can be pirnted from your browser. The 50 quizk crosswords and word searches are suitable for younger students, whereas the more challenging cryptic crosswords are suitable for high school students. Each word puzzle includes a printable answer sheet.

Word Twist is an online version of the popular board game, Boggle. Word Twist comes in two versions a four by four grid and a five by five grid. The purpose of Word Twist is to identify as many words as possible using the letters in the grid.

The Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions, within Microsoft Office Word. Additionally, it enables the creation of inline "chemical zones," the rendering of print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures, and the ability to store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner.

Here is an add-in for word that can be downloaded

"turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text."

Joy Weikdert shared this site. Very cool!

Super Text Twist is a simple word game similar to Word Twist which asks plays to identify words from a set of jumbled letters. The Super Text Twist game be played online or downloaded for use offline.

It's an free English online thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it.

Confusing Words Website. It has a collection of 3210 words that are often confusing to readers and writers. This is what would be called an orphaned site, but the creator, while not updating it, has left it up because many people still find it usefull.

Wordhippo is a great vocabulary web tool that lets you easily provide antonyms and synonyms to your words.

This would be a good site to have available to students on a moodle or wiki as a student resource. It would be very helpful when students are writing and want to vary their words.

Website - A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.

Explains new words and phrases with new entries added regularly, plus archives of previous entries.

Interesting. I didn't realize there were so many new words.

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context.

This poem generator makes you an instant poet. Pick a type of poem, place your words into the form, and you imediately become a success. The site, suitable for grades 5-12, consists of 60 kinds of writing activities in an interactive frame format including cinuain, haiku, limerick, septet, and other forms. Poems can then be exported into Word for revision and editing.

A free windows text-to-speech plugin for Microsoft Word. It will speak the text of the document and will highlight it as it goes. It contains a talking dictornary and a text-to-mp3 converter. Wordtalk: A call scotland website

Braingle hosts more than 20,000 brain teasers, trivia quizzes, games, and mentalrobics (aerobics for the brain). The games section is comprised of popular games like chess, checkers, sudoku, and common word games. The Mentalrobics section of Braingle is what makes it worth mentioning. Mentalrobics includes memory tests, flashcards, and vocabulary building activities. The vocabulary builder activities require users to register for a free Braingle account. To help users practice more effectively the Braingle vocabulary builder tracks the words users know and the ones they don't.

Smart Kit (no affiliation with SMART) offers a large collection of games, puzzles, and riddles for students of all ages. The content of the collection ranges from simple drilling-style games to challenging word puzzles. There are sixteen categories of games offered by Smart Kit. The categories of most interest to educators are probably the math puzzles and word puzzles categories.

Lingro provides an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them. You place a web address within this site and all the words on that web page will become clickable.

This site would be really helpful for those students who are struggling readers and often don't know the meanings of words they are reading.