We recently spoke with Francisco Abeyta, the Education Technology Coordinator at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, CT. The school introduced Visual Thesaurus to its 250 students last October. Francisco tells us how it's working out.

VT: How does Visual Thesaurus fit in your classroom?

Francisco: In one of our high school-level reading classes, students have laptops that connect to the internet. The teacher has a laptop that connects to an LCD projector. The students have their books open, and their laptops open to the Visual Thesaurus. When they come to a word that they don't understand they'll enter it in the Visual Thesaurus. When the teacher wants to go over some of the language, she'll project the entry from her laptop.

When Sharon Simeon isn't teaching special ed at a Flint, Michigan, elementary school, she's working on her second masters at a local university. We asked her how Visual Thesaurus helps her in -- both -- of her classrooms.

Gina Peebles teaches English at the Continuous Learning Center in Camden, South Carolina. It's an alternative school for problem students expelled from the district's junior high and high schools. Gina's a "core academic" teacher, the only English instructor at the school. She works with fifty students and teaches many different levels, often in the same classroom. Gina has to get creative to get through to these challenging students. So she puts technology - and the Visual Thesaurus - to work in her classroom in innovative ways. She explains how.

If you have a website -- whether you're a blogger, mom-and-pop or 800-pound orangutan - you think about "user experience." That, of course, is obvious. But ever try to find a phone number on a company's website? How many clicks did it take? Well, maybe not so obvious.