Life in a Single Word

A fun project we had last week was to write a story that included other authors that we have never met and are not within two states away. At first I thought this meant we would be passing bits of text back and forth, a team member showed me that we would be doing this over EtherPad.

If you have not visited it, EtherPad.com is a simple concept allowing many people to collaborate on a single document in real time. I’m having a hard time being very casual about how exciting it was for us to see our work come together using such easy tools.We played with limiting how many words each person got to add and again without any restrictions to see how well the document came together.

The service is free and no sign up is required. While we were using it in a business project enviroment, what a great site for kids in education…

I know I’m not the only one, but it seems like it at times. I’m thinking of the perfect word to get my point across, only to find that what I thought it meant isn’t exactly right. Or, more often, spell checker changes a word spelling that sounds the same but now changes the meaning of what I just wrote.

Precede to come before
Proceed to go forward

Historic means an important event.
Historical means something that happened in the past.

A year ago, I found a iPhone (and Touch) application called WordPal that has a list of words that have multiple meanings depending on how you spell them, even though the different spellings sound the same. It was 99 cents so I grabbed it to have it handy when something just doesn’t look right. You can see WordPal in the iTunes App Store here…

If your online with your computer, you can always visit a variety of Web sites that have many words as well… and Free is a even better price! A couple of these sites are CopyBlogger (List of 27 Misused Words) and Richmond Education (Commonly Confused Words). Both handy to look over when online – while not ‘searchable’ they are fun and informative.