I'm studying on an amazing course at the moment called Images4Education. We are looking at tools on the web for helping to teach English through images. Great, but how can it help spelling?
View my page on Images4Education
Flickr
Flickr is a fantastic tool in its own right but there are also all sorts of things you can do with the images there. I came across something today that I thought it might help people learn to spell words that they find particularly difficult.
One letter
There is a group on Flickr called 'One Letter' where people post photos of single letters of the alphabet.
Spell with Flickr and Ramsomizr
And then I found two little applications people have made that let you spell words with these letters. You just type any word into the program and it spells it with the images like this:
I like Spell with Flickr (above) because if you don't like one letter tile you click on it and get an alternative one. So we can have the two 'l's the same to highlight the double letter. But the tiles are a bit big for this blog!
ransomizr
And Ransomizr (above) does a similar thing but the advantage with this one is that you can change the size of the tiles easily. You can also get different tiles but you can't change them one by one. Just type a space after the word and you get a different selection of images.
How could we use it?
Think of a word that you find difficult to spell. Type it (correctly!) into one of the programs above. Then play around with it until you get the letter shapes and colours that you like. Try to make double letters the same and make difficult parts of the words stand out in bright colours. The more you work on it the more likely you are to remember the spelling.
Then you could print it and stick it on the fridge, in your office, above your bed, wherever. Leave it there until you don't need it any more.
Or you could copy the whole image onto onto your desktop to remind yourself.
Do it yourself
You could go to the Flickr One Letter group and find the letters you want yourself. Then copy and paste them into a document. This will give you a greater choice of letters and you could try to find letter images that fit in with the meaning of the word. (But be careful about copyright if you use other people's pictures - check their copyright restrictions and make sure you link back to their original photo, especially if you are publishing it in any form.)
Do it completely yourself
Or perhaps just use the idea as inspiration. Grab your camera, go out and take your own pictures of the letters. If possible try to make them relevant to the meaning of the word. They don't even need to be real letters, as long as they are the same shape as letters - such as a circle for 'o', a right-angle for 'L', a pattern in wallpaper might look like an 's'. It might take a week of carrying your camera round until you find all the letters, but I guarantee you'll know the spelling by then!
And then you could join the Flickr One Letter group and post your pics for others to use.
Have fun!
Any other ideas how we could use this to help with spelling?
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