WordSift – A Free, New Tech Tool to Try!

Submitted by Bonnie Parsons, Greensboro College MATESOL Program

There is a new tool for teachers and students being developed by Kenji Hakuta of Stanford University.  He and Greg Wientjes, Diego Roman and Karen Thompson are in the process of refining their new website WordSift.  Teachers and students see a visual representation of academic and content words as well as  links these words to a variety of definitions and visuals.

WordSift was developed under a grant from the Council of Great City Schools to Kenji Hakuta. Website production was developed by Greg Wientjes, a doctoral student at Stanford.  Functionality design assistance by Diego Roman and Karen Thompson, both doctoral students at Stanford, and both former teachers.  WordSift follows two main principles: simplicity and utility. 

It is easy to use and free (important for cash-strapped school systems!) Try http://www.wordsift.com out by copying any piece of text into the frame on the site, click the SIFT button and just see what happens. It will only take a minute to appreciate WordSift’s main features. The output will be a panel display showing the main vocabulary, the academic words, the Visual Thesaurus word web, pictures and videos from Google searches, and sentences in the text containing targeted vocabulary words. Since the tool is still in development, you can send the team suggestions about any ways you think WordSift might be made more useful.