Vocabulary

There has been quite a bit going on with my Google Reader and talk about Vocabulary. The emphasis seems to be on the visual, which is a much higher level thinking skill that recall. I like the way that Langwiches put a couple of posts all together on her blog. It seems that Mr. Robinson, who must currently be teaching in China, has taken some old school ideas about drawing pictures to illustrate meaning and kicked them up a notch by adding a visual component. I like this idea and was intrigued when the emphasis on a variety of visuals was presented by Jamie McKenzie, Garr Reynolds, and Daniel Pink. I think this is a good time to note about the power of Visual Thesaurus, by Thinkmap, which is a very reasonably priced product to purchase for a school. A school subscription also allows for at home usage by the students as well as in house. you may be familiar with the product if you use i Google as it provides the user with an option to have it appear on their home page. Without a subscription, you only get to try out about 2 definitions.
I really like this product because of what it has to offer. Pronunciation, color coded parts of speech, multiple definitions, and grouping based on denotation as well as connotation. You can also look for images which explain the word.
I had wanted my picture today to be from spell with Flickr, and I finally did!! I guess you have to get the HTML code from the spell site , copy and paste into Blogger using the edit html tab in the editing box. Phew!