Ed Tech Ideas

I had a teacher I work with wanting to purchase a thesaurus program to use for her English language learners and my principal was wise enough to say no. With Microsoft’s built in synonym finder and a plethora of online word sites, why would anyone want to spend money on something you can get for free?

So here are my top 3 synonym sites:

1. Free Thesaurus is a clean, googlesque site that provides over 2.5 million synonyms. Simple to use and no frills. I challenge anyone to find a more user-friendly word finder than freethesaurus.net.  
2. Wordsmyth is a great, free, easy to use online synonym finder. With a free registration, educators can not only look up words for definitions and synonyms, but also create quizzes, glossaries, and get help on anagrams and crosswords. There’s also a children’s dictionary section that states the following:
   

   Wordsmyth proudly introduces the first real Web-based dictionary made expressly for elementary-school-aged children. This new electronic dictionary from the Wordsmyth Collaboratory features over 30,000 entries and an array of multimedia, including spoken pronunciations, animations, and colorful illustrations.  

3. When right-clicking for synonyms doesn’t meet your needs, WordsLike, a similar word finding site might just do the trick.
   WordsLike.net is a free service that allows you to find words and phrases that are similar or related to each other.
   Type in a word or a phrase and Words Like.net will come up with a list of related words and their corresponding definitions.
   Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for finding this one.
4. Bonus: Not really related, but interesting nonetheless is this site:  Connecting Mathematics.  Connecting Mathematics contains brief explanations of mathematical terms and ideas in English, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak.

Got others? Add them in the comment section.