We are pleased to announce that the World Technology Network (WTN) has named the Visual Thesaurus the winner of the 2010 World Technology Award for education. The honor, bestowed by the WTN at its World Technology Summit in New York City, recognizes the innovative contributions that the Visual Thesaurus and its parent company Thinkmap, Inc. have made in the educational field.
"It is a tremendous honor to receive this award," said Marc Tinkler, chief technology officer for Thinkmap, who accepted the accolade on behalf of the Visual Thesaurus at the WTN awards gala on December 1. "Since introducing the Visual Thesaurus into the education marketplace in 2004, we have strived to make it the best possible classroom tool for promoting literacy, expanding vocabulary, and above all, making learning fun."
In recent years, the Visual Thesaurus has consistently made innovative strides in education technology, developing such resources as VocabGrabber, which intelligently extracts vocabulary from any text, and the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee, an addictive game that uses sophisticated data analysis to adapt to a player's skill level. Thinkmap is continuing to work on new vocabulary-building features, so stay tuned for further developments.
Past winners of the World Technology Award in the education category include Richard Baraniuk of Connexions / Rice University, Jim Slotta of the University of Toronto, Cristian Cox of Chile's Ministry of Education, and Robert Tinker of the Concord Consortium. Past winners in other categories have included Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web), Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook), and former Vice President Al Gore. Distinguished company indeed!
