appedELT

At the IH teacher’s conference last we launched the ‘my words’ app. The app aims to be a ‘mobile’ vocabulary notebook for students. It is available for both android and apple. Since I work for IH it would be remiss of me not to give it a quick mention on this blog along with suggesting a couple of activities you can do with it.

One of the things I like about the app is that it has the potential to store vocabulary in a number of ways. I have spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to encourage students to do more than simply write down the word off the board and then the translation of the word.  In this app you can store the word in a number of ways. First of all you get to choose the language you want it to work in (though the app itself is in English). Having done that you can enter a lot of information about the word.

So if you like translation, you can have that but you can also have audio so you can say the word and listen back to how it's said and you can add images. Most teachers know that to 'know a word' means that knowing a lot of information about it and the app helps a student collect that. As you can see here (note i was playing with the categories hence the gender inclusion).

The app is by no means perfect and hopefully in future versions things like the search function will have greater useability which would allow for more scope for activities but for a first go, I think it does start to bring the vocabulary notebook to the generation. 

I imagine that many school might recoil in horror at their student getting their phones out to record vocabulary but actually the app can be a good starting point for phone / tablet use in class.  Afterall the app doesnt have to about the words covered in class. When I was piloting the app, I took it with me on trips to record words I came across in a day. This kind of activity makes the basis for a lesson. `Ok your homework is to record ten words over the weekend'.  Then over the weekend the student takes ten picture of words and follows that up by completing all the details about the word.  Alternatively students swap devices and use the search button to  test the owner on vocabulary or to compare their lists on the same topic.  In fact just because it is an app, it doesn't stop you doing all the activties you would usually do with vocabulary notebooks and vocabulary lists. Afterall  the one thing it doesn't do is make sure the students have learned the word they have stored :-)