During one of last week’s eltchat the subject of student vocabulary notebooks came up and I made the comment that these days students could use their mobile device as a notebook instead of the more traditional paper and pen ones.
Having made the point I was asked a few times what I would use, so this is my answer. The obvious advantage of a mobile device is that a student is unlikely to forget or misplace it as they would the paper version. Given a paper vocabulary notebook allows to you record a word as you like – definition, part of speech, example etc then using a device has to add something more. One example would be the IH app I posted about last year, which utilises a device's camera so you can add a photo of the word.
The other obvious advantage an app can bring is to record sound and thus deal with the pronunciation of the word (something a paper notebook can’t do). Added to that if it builds in some way of practicing the words then it may well help the students. These are two things that app A+ Spelling Test can bring.
This is an app that deals with spelling. As such it loses out to the notebook in terms of being able to record definitions and sentences. However it is easy to use and addresses spelling very nicely.
You simply add a new category of words then add words to the category by typing it then recording the sounds. That’s it. Once the list is created you can then practice the words in four different activities.
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Of course many of the ‘notebook’ apps can do what the other two apps do combined though without the practice. An app such as phatpad would allow a student to record everything they want about the word including the sound but would not have the same ease of practice. Perhaps this is were the suite of apps made by evernote has the advantage - use skitch to write on photos of words, use evernote to keep the photos, write info about the word (assuming it has not been written on the photo). You can also record the words so the pronunciation is stored. Then to practice the student can use peek. An app that works with an evernote book and the magnetic cover of the Ipad. When it’s running you can ‘peek’ at a word by lifting part of the cover. So depending on how the student has recorded the word they can either see the definition and guess the word or vice versa.
There are of course many other options for creating a moblie vocab book - combining internet with app with somethiline quizlet or using imovie to create a pod/vodcast version. However one thing all the notebook have in common, be it paper or device, is that none actually show the students can use the word in a correct situation or context :-).