Thoughts On Teaching

Want to study a few vocabulary words? Want something like that for your students?

You’ll need an RSS feed of your vocabulary words (Tom put together a quick intro to RSS that might be helpful). Rolling your own RSS feed of vocab words offers you the most control over what words you use, but carries the biggest work load. If some of us want to work on turning vocab lists into feeds, we could likely have several lists created in short order. But that will take some time. Want it now?

Another way involves using whatever words crop up in a Word-of-the-Day or Words-of-the-Week RSS feed. These often have cool words that high school students could benefit from. But the quick turnover means that there’s very few words to study at a time and no archive (I’m sure there’s a way to save up the items from a daily feed into a big comprehensive feed). And the words in those types of lists can be obscure and not terribly useful. Choose wisely.

Either way, combine that feed with Grazr, a way to include information on your page in a slightly interactive way, and you’ve got a type of flash card system similar to The Amazing Flash Card Machine.

Study these vocabulary words again to see what I mean.

Move On

You’ve made your decision and now your vocab words are in an RSS feed. Type that RSS feed address into the “Currently Displaying” textbox over at Grazr and “See how it looks.” Once you “Get the code,” it’s just a cut and paste routine, really. Put that code into the sidebar of your site somewhere and you’ve got a little study area for students. Clicking on a word reveals the definition. Even though it’s a brief movement that doesn’t require much thought, that interactivity is a wonderful thing to help students learn.

UPDATE: I just found out this afternoon that Grazr apparently doesn’t work in IE or Opera Safari on a Mac. Is it working on PCs?

# Vocabulary Via RSS: In a stack of papers called Technology. Comment feed. Both comments and trackback are closed.

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