Endnote and lextutor

I have to say that Endnoteweb is really where it's at.  In fact, I've spent the last several days finding sources for my terminal project, which I suspect Endnoteweb, unlike Zotero, will actually make it easy to find and organize articles. So far, I've got about 25 articles in the queue. Perhaps the nicest part of the program was its ability to put the citations into an almost complete APA format. It really just required some minor tweaking. Here's a peek.

The one thing I missed was the capitalization of proper names. There is one downside for me, though. While I know that Endnoteweb it is free for me to use right now because I am a student at UO, paying for the service doesn't sound nearly so enticing.

As far as the second part of the class goes, lextutor.ca is quite possibly the ugliest, most unfriendly website I've seen in quite some time. However, it has some tools which are quite useful. The first one I'd like to address is vocabprofile. In developing one of my lessons for Trish's class, I decided to use this article as material for a level 4 RWG class. My question is whether or not the article was appropriate for the students' level.

So Nation's theory of vocabulary learning says that students should know at least 80 percent of the words in the article in order to be able to learn new vocabulary from context. In checking the text of this article, I was surprised to find many of the words in this article were "off-list words". In fact, 19 percent were off list, which means they are not on AWL, first 1000 list or first 2000 words list. This says to me I should have edited the article somewhat in order to ensure students have a better chance at comprehension.

I then put the same article through the familiarizer as well to see the word families lists and I could see using this as a tool for vocabulary expansion for students.

Finally, I really didn't get much of a chance to play with the concordancer on lextutor but I've seen it in action before. I have no doubt at all that this function will be tremendously useful for me as a teacher in the future.