Using ICT in Further Education

Lexipedia is a visual online dictionary and thesaurus providing examples of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, fuzzynyms, synonyms and antonyms for your chosen word.

Visually, Lexipedia reveals the related words in an animated visual word web showing their semantic relationships. Just hover over any word in the web to reveal its definition and an example of how it is used. The same information is also provided in the categorized side menu.

Lexipedia supports English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Could be particularly useful for communications, english and language classes.

Came across Confusing Words thanks to Jane Hart and I think it could be a very useful aid for students. Personally, I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen ‘there’ and ‘their’ misused over the last few years.

Confusing Words is a collection of over 3000 words that are “troublesome to readers and writers. Some of these words are homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently) and some are just commonly confused“.

Confusing Words provides a quick and easy way to check for potential mistakes.

Webopedia is a great starting point for finding definitions of most common computer terms. The definitions given in Webopedia are not too technical being written in a way that is easy to understand.

For example, here’s the entry for USB Flash Drive:
“A small, portable flash memory card that plugs into a computer’s USB port and functions as a portable hard drive. USB flash drives are touted as being easy-to-use as they are small enough to be carried in a pocket and can plug into any computer with a USB drive. USB flash drives have less storage capacity than an external hard drive, but they are smaller and more durable because they do not contain any internal moving parts. USB flash drives also are called thumb drives, jump drives, pen drives, key drives, tokens, or simply USB drives“.

Links are also provided to definitions of other relevant terms, where appropriate.

The only drawback is that images/diagrams are not provided for every definition. That said, Webopedia is still a very useful resource for those learning or interested in ICT.

By using a simple piece of code from Answers.com, you can add instant definitions and explanations for every single word on your blog or web site.

Users can look up word meanings with a simple ‘double click’. The information appears in a pop up box so that they don’t have to leave your site at all!! 

In fact, the pop up box includes a selection of links to different sites so the first answer can be cross referenced if necessary.

Students can find the meaning for any word on your site, immediately, without going anywhere. Amazing!!!!  I love it

The dictionary reference from Answers.com also provides an audio pronunciation  – an added bonus for language learning!

Together with Apture, reviewed here earlier, you can create an incredibly information rich, multimedia experience for your students.

Thanks to E|FL 2.0, where I saw Answers.com in action for the first time!

The Visual Dictionary Online is “an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach“. There are 15 major themes to access with more than 6,000 images and words to view.

The Visual Dictionary Online is designed to help you “find the right word at a glance“. Simply click on any word in the diagram to see the corresponding definition.

What I really like about the Visual Dictionary Online is that an audio pronunciation is also included for every word – so really you could think of this site as the ’Audio-Visual Dictionary’!!

A game of the week is also included where you can build your vocabulary or test your knowledge by associating words with images – archived games are also available.

Visuwords is an online visual dictionary and thesaurus based on an opensource database, WordNet, built by students and language researchers at Princeton University. You can even download a local copy of WordNet from the Princeton site (without the visualization however).

With Visuwords, you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts.

It is very easy to manipulate Visuwords as you can click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. To see a definition you just hover over its node. You can also click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

I think this is a great tool for all us visual learners out there. First spotted it on Judy’s blog.