The Ultimate Word Search Maker!

Make Your Own Word Search

Using the Ultimate Word Search Maker, Jane Croft head of the MFL Faculty at Ridgeway School and winner of the Guardian award for secondary teacher of the year for the South-west in 2003 has published an embeddable wordsearch on her languages blog to offer distance learning opportunities to her pupils during the holidays.

I know wordsearches are not everyone's cup of tea, but I can see this tool being a useful way of not only creating resources for use outside of classroom time, but also during lessons as a whole class starter or in a computer suite to practise simple vocabulary. Just click on the first and last letter of your word and it will be automatically crossed out and highlighted in yellow. I created the pet example in a couple of minutes and was pleased to see that I could insert accents and delete items from the word bank with no bother.

Making the wordsearch fit was straightforward too. You just have to drag the bottom right hand corner to the size you want and then copy the generated embed code and paste the HTML into your blog post. Simple.

Comments

[Sue Lyon Jones]

Hi Joe,

Many thanks for sharing this simple, user-friendly tool!

I teach ESL with ICT and I've been using interactive wordsearches with my students for a number of years. Like Jane, I embed them on my website for learners to use between lessons and for use in class as warm-ups. On the whole, the students seem to find them fun and it does seem to help them remember new vocabulary.

I could see this being very useful for collaborative tasks, with the students working together in small groups to create their own wordsearches on classroom blogs.

I would add one tiny note of caution though, based on personal experience, for anyone thinking of using wordsearches during lessons: the code is driven by the wordsearchmaker.net site, which means that if their site goes down during a lesson the wordsearch will disappear into the ether and it can make for a lot of frustration!

Educators with a bit of programming knowledge (javascript) might also find Robert Klein's free jsWordsearch program useful. You can download it from here: http://jswordsearch.sourceforge.net/

You can see an example wordsearch I created with it for my learners here: http://tinyurl.com/esl-summer-weather

best wishes,

Sue

[Joe Dale]

Hi Sue,

Thank you for your wonderful comment and helpful advice.

:)