WordFiller

Students usually have a very short attention span, especially for classwork and anything that involves a pen and a piece of paper.

WordFiller lends a helping hand to teachers, by enabling them to create word fill language exercises on smart boards, with the help of a Kinect device.

The texts you create for your students are called resources inside the application and their creation process is very simple and straightforward. To begin with, you have to give a title to the entry, so you can differentiate it from the other stored resources.

As far as the actual text content goes, things are just as simple, since all you have to do is copy-paste it into the dedicated window, or manually write it directly into the application. To cut a certain word from the text and make it draggable, you can select it with the mouse and press the “Brackets” button, or just enter the brackets yourself using the keyboard.

You can use a Kinect device to drag the words around the screen, using your hands as controllers. WordFiller enables you to adjust the camera tilt and choose the hand orientation for the board control, to let the device know which hand is used to perform which operation.

The text size is also customizable and you can enlarge it using the slider in the settings window. The size property of the text can be very important when it comes to accuracy of the Kinect device, since it might not work properly if it is too small and you are unable to precisely pinpoint the piece of text you want to move.

WordFiller is a handy utility that can really help teachers everywhere come up with fun activities for their students. The interactive components are designed to capture their attention and make language exercises fun and intuitive. Although the application is built for smart boards, it can still be just as easily used with a mouse and keyboard on your computer.