Welcome | Wordnik via kwout

On an initial viewing Wordnik appears to be a dictionary but upon further investigation it is not. In their own words

“Wordnik is not a traditional dictionary (in fact, we’ve seriously considered not calling Wordnik a dictionary at all)”.

The fact of the matter is that Wordnik is a dictionary on steroids that uses words and definitions that are in “traditional” dictionaries and ones that have not made it there yet. It also works much like Wikipedia allowing users to record pronunciation, add images and give their own definitions.

So what good is it then? There are tons of dictionaries on the internet how does this help me? Well what Wordnik does have going for it is a great way of looking at words beyond their definition, synonyms and antonyms. It looks at word relationships and knows when words end up in the same sentence more often than not, like for instance:

“cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.”

Now before you get all huffy and start saying “If it is not official dictionary words and definitions then I don’t want my students even harboring the idea of using it”. Oh on the contrary, here is a list of some of the features that Wordnik employs.

• Dictionary definitions from multiple official sources like American Heritage and Webster.
• Statistics and meaningful information on the frequency and use patters of a word over the past 200+ years
• Real world examples in articles, books, quotes and other great resources to show how professional authors use the word
• Real world examples for social media like Twitter to show how the everyday person uses the word
• The etymology of the word
• Related words such as synonyms
• Words used in the same context, like the word fries is paired with burger
• Audio Pronunciation
• Chart of other forms of a word and their usage.

As you can see Wordnik is a very useful un-dictionary that can easily be integrated into yours and your students every day search for knowledge because we don’t know all the words out there.

How can I use this in education?

Use it like any other dictionary but because of its nature it adds so much more information that can be grasped if you only want to have it. For instance I really enjoy knowing the etymology of words but rarely seek out any of it, now whenever I want a word definition I use Wordnik and get a plethora of value added information that fills that void. So you can use it for yourself and/or pass it along to your students and let them enjoy it, hey you never know maybe they will start using actual words instead of instant messaging lingo

Make a Print Friendly Version of any WebPage, save Webpages as a PDF via kwout

Ever get to a web page and you want to print it out but when you try it prints out an exact replica right down to the background used. You really only wanted the content and not all the images, banners and footers.

Print friendly is a fabulous free service that saves ink and paper by letting you take any web page and removing only the things that you want to remove from a web page. The resulting printer friendly page can either be emailed, saved as a PDF, Tweet it, or of course printed. It can take a 16 page printed website and turn it into a 4 page printed website or even less. It puts you in control of a printed page.

The whole service is incredibly easy. Just go to the website and drag the bookmarklet onto your bookmark bar (FireFox, Chrome or Safari). Go to a website you want to “print” and click the bookmarklet and you are presented with a popup window that lets you customize the page the way you want. Alternatively just paste the url that you want to print into PrintFriendly website. Now don’t think you have to spend several minutes doing this, the service essentially does it all for you, gives you all the content with pictures included then all you need to do is click on the paragraphs or images that you don’t want and your done. All of this can be done in under a minute.

Test it out right here with this button.

How can this be used for education?

• First off it could save a ton of paper and ink if you print out content regularly for yourself or students.
• Instead of sending a link via email take an extra 15 seconds to send only the important information on a page so that the recipient doesn’t have to dig to find out what you are referencing.
• Save a page with selected information to a PDF for reference later on so you don’t have to dig through a lengthy article later on.

In what ways do you think it would benefit education or yourself?