 Hello, and welcome to Digital Tools for Differentiating Vocabulary Instruction. My name is Susan Axmavad, and I'll be your host for this 20-minute K-12 online conference session. During this session, we'll explore some free and user-friendly digital tools for helping students construct deep knowledge about vocabulary. The session's been divided into three sections. During the first part, we're going to learn about some digital tools for helping students construct deep knowledge about vocabulary. Next, we'll explore some 10-minute tech tools that you can use right away in your classroom, starting tomorrow. And finally, we'll explore a handful of reference tools and dictionaries to support unique learning styles. To begin with, I'd like to provide some rationale for providing students with learning experiences that help them build deep knowledge about vocabulary. Vocabulary is one of the best predictors of academic success. Experts agree that vocabulary development is an attainable goal if teachers provide students with direct instruction to improve their comprehension. And of course, vocabulary extends across all curriculum areas. So why use technology to teach vocabulary? Well, technology is an efficient and engaging tool that teachers can use to design vocabulary lessons to provide students with flexible learning paths and built-in supports. This instructional design strategy is based on the concept of universal design for learning. In addition, the Common Core places a lot of emphasis on building vocabulary. There are six instructional shifts needed to effectively implement the Common Core English Language Arts Literacy Standards. As you can see, Shift 6 focuses on academic vocabulary. The idea here is words are broken down into three tiers. Tier 1 is basic vocabulary words that most people acquire through sight words and through reading and through discussion. Tier 2 words are more sophisticated words that are often used, but they change meaning depending on their context. And Tier 3 words are low-frequency words that are content-specific. These are the types of words you'd find in glossaries of textbooks. Words that are often taught because they need to be taught to understand the content. So the focus of Shift 6 is that teachers need to spend some time teaching these Tier 2 words because they do have multiple meanings. Across all grade levels, standards 4, 5, and 6 are dedicated to vocabulary. So it's clear that there is some rationale for teaching vocabulary. Now let's take a look at some tools to construct knowledge and develop deep learning about vocabulary. ThingLink is a multimedia-supported tool for creating interactive graphics, which makes it well suited for vocabulary instruction. Teachers can create interactive graphics to launch student-driven learning experiences that support the unique learning needs of all students in the classroom. And students can use the tool to construct knowledge about vocabulary. Let's take a look at this example. So here's an example of a ThingLink vocabulary activity that I've embedded in my wiki. And as you can see, all of these little tags pop out to media that's been attached to it. My idea for this lesson would be that students would work in groups and they would discover a deep meaning of the word boycott simply by starting to do some research. And when I did this lesson for myself to see how it would work, I was able to come up with several historical boycotts. And so that's what I based the lesson on. And so if students were doing this, they could each, you know, work in groups to provide multimedia resources for some of the most popular boycotts. So in this case, we have the Montgomery bus boycott over here. Now when I scroll over, you can see that all these little things are links. They can link to a Google map or a website with more information. I'm going to show you what a video looks like, but I don't think I should play the video. So you can see right here that a video will actually play here if I let it right embedded right on the page, which is very nice. Also, you can create links to anything on the web. Now this might look like it's a complicated to do, so I'm going to show you how to do it right in front of your eyes. All you need to do is after you sign up for a ThingLink account, create and upload your image. But this is how easy it is to add a link. I just click on this little edit image button and I'm able to add a link. I just drag my mouse, position it, paste a link that I've copied from YouTube. It automatically tells me that it's a YouTube tag. I choose my icon and in this case I like play for movies and then I write a little description and that's all you have to do. You save it and then the link is there and it's live right away. Now you can see the video. I have to refresh my page and you'll be able to see the video that I just embedded right in front of us. There's the movie that I just added. You can see this is a very easy tool. It has a lot of possibilities because you can link to anything that's available on the web. Just like I demonstrated, it's used for student construction of knowledge. Teachers starting out would probably want to make a thing link graphic of your own and use it as a multimedia launcher because it's always a good idea to try it before you assign it to students. Another great tool for helping students build deep knowledge about vocabulary is Wallwisher. Wallwisher is a free tool where you can build a collaborative digital word wall like you see here on the Roaring 20s. One of the great things about Wallwisher is that it does not require a student login to contribute and it's really easy to create. You can have a wall up and running fairly quickly. Once students create this wall, then they can find the resources for a whole unit of vocabulary words just in one place. Here's an example of work in progress of a vocabulary word wall to cover Roaring 20s words. What I've done here is as the teacher, you would go ahead and just put the words on the wall and that's as simple as just clicking, tapping, and adding a sticky note. I would then assign students or groups of students individual words or let them choose their own words and then go ahead and write their own definition of it based on the multimedia that they found. So in this case, this is a movie and again we can play it right there on the screen so I love that. You can also embed a picture. You can link to another website and it's just as easy as copying and pasting and like all of these tools, they're available 24-7. So that's all students need to do is connect to the Internet and if they miss school or if they got lost, they can certainly contribute to the word wall from home. And here's another tool. I used Google Docs, the presentation mode to create vocabulary cards. So I used it in a very non-traditional way but it works really well to provide students with those flexible learning paths to meet their needs and all on a multimedia platform that's available 24-7. In this case, this is a math vocabulary card and students worked in groups to create it. This is a live video and one student found a video and another student would find an image, hopefully a copyright free image and then the final student would use some dictionary tools to build a definition and when they're all done, they have a nice vocabulary card that shows a deeper meaning of the word and here it is live in action. The video plays right on the page and also with Google Presentation, you can embed the video. You don't have to go through a lot of steps. You just click a button and you can do it right within Google Presentation. Now another piece of this, if you're going to have kids create using technology to do all kinds of different things in your classroom like you've seen with ThingLink, Wallwisher and this Google Presentation, it's a good idea to provide them with some built-in text support so that you're not answering the same question all the time and so that you can serve as a facilitator who goes around and answers questions in response to students' comments and challenges and reteaches them. The only way you're ever going to get away from the technology is to provide them with the support they need. So here on this part of the tutorial, I have some links to some tutorials that I made and when students want to know how to do something like draw on a slide, they just click and they watch a YouTube video and they can learn at their own pace with the pause button. And another tool, still part of the tools starting deeper knowledge about vocabulary is Instagrock. And Instagrock is a great website which is a search engine and also an interactive learning tool and it displays content in the form of a word cloud and then on the side, it also offers a variety of multimedia features to support the learning. It's got a lot of nice features such as being able to adjust the difficulty level of your search and there's also an interactive journal that collects your ideas. So let me show you what that looks like. So here's a live picture of the Instagrock screen and as you can see, the first thing that's important to note is that when I did a search I looked for bull market and the roaring 20s to more fine tune the search and I was able to come up with this word cloud which has bull market and it's different word meanings and I can click on any of those. I also like you to notice that there is a switch for making it easier or harder. So the ABC is the easiest and the professor is the hardest so students can find information at their level. So in addition to this wonderful word cloud on the side you have a bunch of things. First of all you have key facts and if you find something that you like you can pin it and it goes directly on the word cloud. There are more things here. I can close this menu and scroll down. In addition to the key facts there are websites and you can go there. You can also pin those directly to the word cloud. There are videos and I can pin those to the word cloud and there are images, quizzes, glossary and suggested books. So the idea here is there's lots of multimedia that I can go ahead and build my definition and construct knowledge. Now the next thing I want to show you is the journal. So right on top of the page you click on journal and you come to an interactive page. So when you go to the journal view everything that you've pinned to your word cloud shows up in the journal. There are the excerpts and the website and the videos and at the bottom there are some images. What I'd like to share with you though is that students can then write their own information right in here. There's just a regular word processing button bar and they can go ahead and add information and their own ideas. A good idea here is also to add citations so that you can have all the information in one spot. So that's Instagram and it's truly an interactive learning tool and great for building vocabulary. And the final tool in this category is flash card stash. Flash card stash is a digital, is a tool for creating digital flash cards. It can be used at a variety of levels. Teachers can sign up for free accounts. They can create their own word lists and then students can join teachers' accounts and access word lists and review words and get some very nice vocabulary cards and play some games. But I think I put this in the category of constructing knowledge because you can also allow students to create their own vocabulary cards and that will help them build knowledge. What you'll see in flash card stash is the opportunity to create a word card and you can go ahead and click your definition or add your own definition and then you can click on an image. It searches some Flickr images and some Wikipedia images and those images upon first search are not always appropriate or fine-tuned. So one of the things students have to do is learn how to search for an appropriate term. When I created this word card about territory, it took me a lot of effort and I really had to learn about the Louisiana Purchase before I could come up with such a great flash card. So I think for students, this can be used at two levels. Start out by creating a word list for them and then ask them to construct knowledge about their own words. Now we're going to take a look at some 10-minute tools. These tools are also free and user-friendly but the difference between these tools and the tools that I previously highlighted is that these tools could be used right away. You can just step up, go to your classroom tomorrow and use these tools because there's no prep or not too much planning involved. And so the first tool is called vocab grabber. Vocab grabber was created by the makers of the Visual Thesaurus. There's a whole section on their website dedicated to how it's aligned with the Common Core Standards. Basically it's a word cloud generator and similar to Wordle or even similar to Instagram where you get more ideas on one page. This tool is user-friendly and ready to go for students. So let me show you how that works. So here we are on the Vocab Grabber website. The first thing you want to do is find your digital text and copy it and then paste it into this box and click on grab vocabulary. For the purposes of this definition I'm just going to use one that's already created. Okay, so this is the U.S. Bill of Rights. So I'm going to go ahead and grab the vocabulary. And what you see here is a word cloud of relevant terms. The most commonly used terms are the biggest. So state and law and right and people are important words in this document. But you can also sort the words by subjects. So if you're just interested in vocabulary you can do that or you can find social studies vocabulary. So I think that makes this a nice tool. Also on the side you'll see examples from text with some live links to find out more information. It talks about the type of speech as well. But each of these words you see here are actually live and they'll show up in the visual thesaurus which is the companion tool and you'll get more information. So I clicked on the word jury or the word cloud of words and associated words. I can also click on one of those words and it'll take me out to the visual thesaurus. So when you click on visual thesaurus you will see a message about this being a trial version. But it does actually work every time. So the message is a little frustrating but still you get a comprehensive list of word cloud. And if you look over here it identifies words by nouns or adjectives or verbs. So there's a lot here with this tool and again you don't need much prep for it so that's why I put it in my 10 minute tech tools category. And the next tool is wordal which is probably the original word cloud. But a lot of students really like to use this because picture the words are very colorful and it's a very easy tool to use. Now my use for wordal in this example is putting this tool to the test. So what you're going to do is you're going to use it as a starting point for vocabulary instruction. You copy and paste the digital text into wordal and then of course the words that appear more frequently in the text are larger in the word cloud. So these are your key vocabulary definitions. I'm going to combine it with the find tool so that you can find instances of the word and analyze one word at a time within a document. So let me show you what that looks like. So here I've simply copied and pasted the first three paragraphs of the Gettysburg Address into wordal and this is what I ended up with. You can see what the most important words are. Now remember when we were talking about the common core standards we talked about the different levels of vocabulary or tiers of vocabulary, the middle tier, the words that changed in meaning but were commonly used were the ones that we were supposed to really focus on as teachers. So this is a tool that helps you take a look at that document and pull out the important vocabulary words. And in this case you can see that one of those important words is dedicated and dedicated is one of those tier two words. So I'm going to show you how you would use the find tool and go back to the digital text to analyze the word. And here are the directions for doing that. And here is how you use the find tool which is a built-in support on your computer. You can just type control plus F and you'll find a small box that shows up on your screen and then you type in a word and it'll find all of the instances of the word in the text. And here's an example of that text and it's found all the words dedicated. So the activity here would be to wordal and then to find the words and then to as a class break down and talk about the different meanings of the words. And in this case the word dedicated is clearly a tier two and very important word because it is used in different ways. So this is a way to use wordal to take it, to kick it up a notch. And the next tool is Lingrow. Lingrow is a very simple to use tool that turns any website into a clickable dictionary. All you do is go to the Lingrow site, copy and paste the web address into Lingrow and it displays the web page. Looks just like a regular web page except it has the Lingrow on top and every single word is clickable. It also translates into 12 different languages. And I'd like to thank everybody for attending this session. I hear some resources if you want to learn more. My blog is a source of effective ideas for tech integration and I often blog about new vocabulary tools. I also blog on the Getting Smart blog as a guest blogger and please follow me on Twitter for more information about efficient and effective ways to integrate technology for learning. Thank you very much.