Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Visual Thesaurus

To think we used to have to look up vocabulary words in a dictionary and copy the meanings down by hand {rubs eyes and pretends to cry}. Today's fourth graders and word lovers in general now have the Visual Thesaurus, which is a dictionary and thesaurus rolled into one. It's great for finding the word that's on the tip of your tongue, or a better word when you know the one you're thinking of isn't quite right.

Using the vocab grabber, you can copy and paste the text of any document and automatically create word maps for each word found in the text.
If you never understood the pronunciation symbols in the dictionary, and therefore can never remember how to pronounce libel, the audio pronunciation feature in VT is a godsend. And the daily column is always interesting. Today's topic is going as in going rogue and going quant.

To log into Visual Thesaurus, go to the library web site and click on Remote Databases.

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