Crossword puzzles are an effective tool to use in your teaching. You can use them for a variety of educational purposes but most importantly in teaching vocabulary. Crossword puzzles are proved to help students learn new vocabulary items, enhance their spelling skills, and boost their memory and retention rates (check out this study to learn more about the educational importance of crossword puzzles). However, with the advance of technology there appeared a number of great web tools that allow you to easily create and generate crossword puzzles to include in your teaching. You can customize these puzzles according to the learning needs of your students and use them to target specific areas in your curriculum. If you are looking for some good and easy to use web tools to use for creating crossword puzzles, the selection below is a good place to start with. Enjoy
1- Crossword Puzzle Tool from ReadWriteThink
This is a very good web-based tool to generate interactive crossword puzzles to use in class with your students. To start using it, enter your name and select a grade then click on ‘create your own’ tab and provide a title for your puzzle. Next, type in your words (you need at least three) and cues. The preview version allows you to see how your final crossword puzzle will look like. If you want to edit something you click on ‘regenerate’ and when you are done you can print your crossword puzzle and share it with your students.
2- Crossword Labs
Crossword Labs is an excellent web tool that allows you to easily build, print, share and solve crossword puzzles online. The process is very simple: type in your crossword title then enter the word, a space and a clue and there you go. To protect the answer key create a passcode before you generate your crossword puzzles.
3- Puzzlemaker
Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists. To start using it, you need to choose a type of puzzle from the list provided there and follow the instructions provided there.
4- Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker
This one comes with some added features some of which are premium such as saving a puzzle as PDF file. The way it works is simple:’Start each line with an answer word, then type a slash "/" character, then the clue. Press the Enter key after each clue. Your clues can be as long as you want.’
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