Russell Stannard, Winner of British Council Innovations Award 2010, writes about Word Magnets 2.0.
I am always looking out for interesting tools that you can use with an interactive whiteboard. This latest find works great with an IWB but you can use it just as well on a computer screen or projector. The site is called Word Magnets and it is one of the best websites I have found in the last year.
The idea of Word Magnets is quite simple. You write a sentence, a paragraph or just a selection of words. You then press a button and each of the words becomes an individual word magnet and they are randmomized at the bottom of the screen. You can then move the word magnets around the screen and they will “stick” anywhere and make a nice sound too, which really gives the feel that you are working with word magnets. The obvious thing is to write out a sentence, create word magnets of all the words and then get the students to re-build the sentence as class or in pairs or groups if you have lots of computers at your disposal. However you can do much much more with this tool.