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Online Picture Dictionary

Online Picture Dictionary

A site similar to this one, which also uses a lot of the same content , is opdome.com.  The site is less about fun or playing mini games and more about being a resource.

The main purpose of the site is again helping English Language Learners.

The idea is that it's an online picture dictionary, hence the name opdome, and so you can browse through sets of images and see vocabulary items.

You can see the text or listen to the word spoken by a Canadian.

The content is organized into sets of 10 according to broad categories.  For example there are 7 different sets of animal vocabulary items each with picture, text and audio.

To view content you first select a general category such as food or animals.  Then you are shown the first set of items from that category.  To view the next set you click on the arrow on the right of the page and the next set loads.  To return to the main category menu you click the return button in the top right.

There are two ways you can view a set of images.  The default, shown in the picture here, shows you all ten images for a set.  Moving the mouse over one image will show the text.  Clicking on the image will play the audio.  You can also switch to a individual image view.  When viewing individual images you get a main image in the center and an image bar at the bottom.  Clicking on an image from the image bar will show the image and play the sound.  To switch between views you click on the option in the top right of the screen.

The aim of the site is to browse and review basic vocab items.  You can discover new vocabulary or review and re-enforce vocab you already know.  The content in 10 main categories includes more than 500 items.  While most are basic the hope is that a good enough range of items is covered for a learner at elementary level.

You can visit the site by clicking here and any comments you have about the site are more than welcome.


 

New game - spelling

translationsAdded new content this morning. A game called Spell Off.  This is the first game I made which uses background music.  The music is just a basic loop I downloaded from a free site.  It's about 20s long and adds quite a lot to the size of the game.  Takes a little longer to download and maybe adds 25% to the size of the .swf file.

I think it make the game appear better although am not sure if it's worth it in terms of size.  A lot of the time background music can be quite annoying.  Especially if you prefer to listen to your own music while browsing.

However as this game requires you to listen to sounds anyway I guess users would be less likely to listen to their own music.  There is an option to turn the background music off which is visible at all times.

This game involves spelling, it's something I'd been meaning to put together for a while now as spelling is quite an important aspect of langauge learning.  Also this could perhaps be something that non-esl learners could find useful too.

Initially you get 30s to spell as many words as you can.  Then if your time is under 10s then you get additional time added after you spell a word (depending on the length of that word).  I've tried to get the timing right so that the time counting down is very challenging but not impossibly fast.  I've tested it myself a bunch of times and can keep going for quite a while.  It is however impossible to keep going indefinitely.

There's also a review section which I hope can be useful to review and study the spelling of any words.  The content is all animal names and most should be pretty easy for users.  There are a couple which maybe trouble some for beginner esl learners and so the review section can be used to check and learn any spellings used in the game.  For example words such as "hedgehog", "grasshopper" or "badger" may be unfamiliar to some.  I tried to make it appropriate to a range of levels however there is also the option of setting the content to easy or difficult.  In the game simply click on the options at the top.  There isn't too much difference, the harder level doesn't include the basic words like "cat" where-as the easier level doesn't include less familiar animals.  Although changing the level does have an impact on the score you get for each word spelt.

As always there is a high score table and I look forward to seeing how many words users can spell.  As well as reading comments people may have.


 

Translations

translationsAdded a translations module which in theory allows the site to be translated into any language that you can find a flag for.

The module is called JoomFish and is really easy to use, however as I don't have any translations done I'm just using Google translate and sticking the dodgy translations next to the original English.

The site should default to the language the user sets in their browser.


 
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