Vocab Grabber is a free service offered by the folks at Visual Thesaurus (a fee-based service). Vocab Grabber makes it easy to generate vocabulary lists from any text that you can digitally copy. To use Vocab Grabber simply paste any chunk of text, up to 200,000 characters, into the Vocab Grabber. The Vocab Grabber then sorts, and places in a word cloud, the most frequently used words in that text. Words are also sorted into academic categories like Social Studies, Math, Science, and Literature. Click on any of the words in the word cloud to see the definition displayed on the right side of the screen.

Here’s what Vocab Grabber generated from my blog post about Summer Reading.

If you use a lot of articles from the Internet in your class, you may want to try the Vocab Grabber bookmarklet. By installing this bookmarklet (it’s a simple drag and drop installation) you can generate a vocabulary list from any page on the Internet with just one click.

Applications for Education
I can see Vocab Grabber being a great time-saving tool when it comes to generating vocabulary lists based on reading assignments. Vocab Grabber provides you with a way to quickly pick out which difficult words students may run into in a text. From the results Vocab Grabber provides you can then determine which words your students may need to study in a vocabulary lesson.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Word Ahead Vocabulary Videos
WeboWord – Vocabulary Visualized
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