From the website:
"Welcome to the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive tool that allows you to discover the connections between words in a visually captivating display. Word maps let you search for just the right word and then explore related concepts, revealing the way words and meanings relate to each other. It's a word-lover's delight, with more than 145,000 words and 115,000 meanings organized in an innovative and intuitive design." However, it costs $3/month and $20/year to subscribe.
Print out this personal Thesaurus for younger learners. This PDF has a collection of words in each section, plus space for your children to write their own.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Very powerful little JS dictionary/thesaurus tool which also displays word relationships as well as context. It offers language learners deeper insight into the words they choose. Pass it on!
Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly:
"Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."
"For fun, the writer and children's book illustrator has created a series of images that can help young writers broaden their language and writing, encouraging young authors to "Fill your stories with a rainbow of images" - A great resource for the primary/elementary classroom and beyond…"
From Gretchen Schroeder: What I like about WordWeb Online is its ability to do "fuzzy" spelling suggesting words close to the spelling you entered. Cross linking to related words, and if it doesn't find a word in its, more than 300,000 word database, it will search the web for definitions for you. It is also available in both an iApp and an Android app.
Phraseology is an iPad writing app that breaks the mold by integrating language analytics, visual organization of paragraphs, and a well-thought-out partnership with Terminology, a semantic dictionary/thesaurus app. This would be really useful for student writers because it does more than just provide a clean interface for writing, it gives them tools to improve their drafts.