What it is: Word Magnets is a fantastic little website that lets you type or copy and paste words into a field and create virtual word magnets out of them (think of the popular word magnets sold for refrigerators). After you have typed in the words to transform into magnets, you can choose a “magnetic” background for your words. There are several backgrounds to choose from including grids, venn diagrams, time lines, arrows, stair steps, targets, boxes, numbers, alphabet, circles, webs, flow sequences, tables, present/absent, and many more. After you choose your background, students can create sentences, sort, and interact with the virtual magnetic words. Words can be added to the board at any time and the color of the background and size of the magnets can be adjusted.
How to integrate Word Magnets into the classroom: The background options for your word magnets are really the highlight of this website. You can do everything from word sorts, to venn diagrams, to practicing alphabetic order. Create tables; sort words by their root, prefix, or suffix; link ideas; practice building sentences; create a time line of events, take attendance…the possibilities with this site are endless! If you are going to use this site for taking attendance, I would suggest creating a master list in a saved word document that you can copy and paste from (this will save you from re-typing names every morning). This is an excellent site for an interactive whiteboard or to use as a center activity. This is an easy way to create customized interactive lessons for your classroom. Because you enter the content, this site is appropriate for any grade level.
Tips: One thing I wish this site had: the ability to save. If you want to save words to interact with over and over, create a document that you can copy and paste from. If you want to save a copy of the word magnets after students have interacted with them, take a screen shot of it.
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Word Magnets in your classroom.
Hello,
Thanks for taking the time to write about our Word Magnet resource – it is great that it is proving to be so popular with teachers all over the world. I am pleased that people are finding the different backgrounds to be useful too. Please feel free to contact me if you have any requests for new backgrounds you’d like us to add to the resource – there is a contact page on our website.
We have many other free IWB resources on our website – hopefully there will be other things there which will be useful to teachers.
Thanks again for the blog post,
David
http://www.triptico.co.uk
This site is good for interactive whiteboards. Agree, the ability to save would be great!
Thanks
This has been used with various levels of success in our classrooms that are equipped with SMART(tm) Brand Interactive Whiteboards. The large display size enhances the experience quite profoundly; to boot, the SMART Notebook software has capture tools that allow finished creations to be captured as static images that are automatically saved to new pages in the SMART Notebook software.
For those who do not have this software, one consideration would be to use the “Print Scn” key to copy the display to the clipboard, then paste the captured screen grab into MS Publisher or some other application. Although not as convenient as a built-in ability to save or use the SMART Notebook tools, this latter method does provide one solution to being able to “save” what one has done.
In addition to William’s comments, pressing the ‘up’ arrow on the keyboard before taking a screen print will remove the blue background.
This could be handy if you were wanting to print your magnet board for display or in order to distribute copies to students.
The save option is something I will investigate. In terms of saving ‘raw data’, you could have a Word document with activites ready to cut and paste into the resource. However, this doesn’t help if you are looking to save your magnets once you have ordered them. A screen print, pasted into something like PowerPoint is a good way to save and display a board. However, I appreciate that you can’t then move the magnets.
Thanks again for the blog post and subsequent comments,
David
http://www.triptico.co.uk
Thanks for taking the time to write about our Word Magnet resource – it is great that it is proving to be so popular with teachers all over the world. I am pleased that people are finding the different backgrounds to be useful too.
http://www.magnets-fasts.com