Today I would like to talk about a good tool called Wordsift. This tool functions as a medium to summarise text into keywords in a form of word cloud. The site of Wordsift helps more in giving more additional tools besides grouping the keywords into a cloud. It has Thesaurus in it, example of the word from the source that has been sifted as well as videos for further reference.
You can learn more to use this website by clicking here.( A tutorial by Russell Stannard).
How can Wordsift be used in language classroom??
Wordsift is a good tool to be used by teacher to introduce a reading text to the students in a classroom. This tool will give out a word cloud of the fifty most frequent word used in the text. Teacher would then ask the students to guess the main theme or topic of the text that the students would be reading for the lesson.Next, by using this tool, students themselves could use this tool by putting their own essay in tool and sifted it. After having the word cloud, they can always print it out. Then, students could exchange their word cloud with their peers and then guess what their essay is all about.
This shows that Wordsift is a great tool to be used for pre-reading activities in language classroom.
Advantages of using this tool:
- It is free.
- It is a great tool to be used for guessing what a text is all about.
- Students could get to know the synonymy of any words in the cloud if they clicked on it.
- The words in the cloud could be marked in different categories.
- It is user friendly.
Disadvantages of using this tool:
- Its look boring compare to others word cloud making tools.
