Instructify

September 3, 2010

Often when we ask students to read, we want them to pick out key words or organize the text into categories. VocabGrabber is a powerful tool that helps do just that: organize, analyze, and understand a reading.

Simply paste the text and click the button marked (you guessed it) “Grab Vocabulary!” This generates a word cloud of the most frequently used terms. Clicking a word shows its definition and an example of how it’s used in the passage.

Furthermore, the options in VocabGrabber allow you to explore the text in a multitude of ways. The cloud can be configured to display words alphabetically, by frequency, or by relevance. If you’re looking to categorize terms by content area, it can sort them into topics like People, Science, Geography, etc. There’s practically no limit to what you can analyze because VocabGrabber will accept a text up to 200,000 characters. With the proliferation of online resources and e-books, you can try VocabGrabber with news articles, story excerpts, and even textbook readings.

This is a useful tool for everyone in the classroom. VocabGrabber can help teachers pre-screen a reading for key terms or new vocabulary, with the main words in the text becoming a vocabulary list for that assignment. Students can use it to check their understanding of frequently occurring words both before and after they read. Or, for a truly insightful experience, have them analyze their own writing and VocabGrabber will help students see their own work as others see it.

VocabGrabber