Tech Edge, Mobile Learning In The Classroom - Episode 05, Vocabulary, Words & Dictionaries - Part 1

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03/14/2016 Added

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Technology Information: Vocabulary, Words & Dictionaries - Part 1

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[00:00:00.238]Coming up on Mobile Learning in the Classroom,
[00:00:02.979]Vocabulary, Words and Dictionaries, Part One.
[00:00:08.069](upbeat music)
[00:00:20.573]Hi my name is Guy Trainin
[00:00:22.417]and this is Mobile Learning in the Classroom from Techedge.
[00:00:25.098]And today, I want to talk about everything about vocabulary,
[00:00:28.210]words, dictionaries, any way we can learn words.
[00:00:31.312]So when we think about vocabulary and learning new words,
[00:00:34.009]there are a few ways we can get them.
[00:00:35.559]Most of the words we learn, we actually learn from reading
[00:00:38.274]and listening to different sources.
[00:00:40.014]And reading is the primary source to get a lot
[00:00:42.800]of what we call "incidental learning."
[00:00:44.751]So learning while we're doing something else,
[00:00:46.459]we're learning some other material.
[00:00:48.433]And this is a really important component,
[00:00:50.307]but what we can do is use digital devices
[00:00:53.335]to really improve our learning and to make sure
[00:00:55.498]that we actually capture all of those new words.
[00:00:58.457]And so when we learn new words,
[00:00:59.802]we can learn them from context, while we're reading,
[00:01:01.924]we can learn the meaning of a new word by using morphology,
[00:01:05.583]the way words change over time, and their families.
[00:01:09.388]So the connection between words
[00:01:12.420]like "national", and "international", and "internationally".
[00:01:15.880]They're all related to each other,
[00:01:17.204]and if you understand the components,
[00:01:18.619]you can actually understand a new words that comes your way.
[00:01:21.904]And it is about making semantic connections,
[00:01:24.387]the connections between words and of course,
[00:01:26.989]the spelling and the sound of the word.
[00:01:28.905]So there are lets of ways to learn new vocabulary
[00:01:31.529]and to make sure that we remember it.
[00:01:33.060]And we know that to learn new vocabularies,
[00:01:34.663]we also need to see words
[00:01:36.316]lots of times in different contexts.
[00:01:38.460]The estimate is around seven times,
[00:01:40.567]but obviously depending on how often you see that word,
[00:01:43.469]that can can take a little bit longer
[00:01:45.105]or a little bit shorter time,
[00:01:47.228]and so we need all of that interaction around words.
[00:01:51.349]And today, we'll talk about some tools
[00:01:53.243]that we can use to do that.
[00:01:54.832]And the first tool is the tool I've talked about before
[00:01:57.306]and that is Dictionary.com.
[00:01:58.907]So if you go to Dictionary.com
[00:02:00.533]and you want a definition of a word,
[00:02:02.252]let's try a simple word, the word "run".
[00:02:06.351]You type it in, you get the word,
[00:02:09.673]you immediately get multiple definitions.
[00:02:12.956]And I used the word "run" mostly
[00:02:15.094]because we know this word actually has lots of definitions
[00:02:21.176]and lots of ways to be used.
[00:02:22.848]And the beautiful thing about Dictionary.com
[00:02:26.028]is it gives you this long list of potential,
[00:02:29.409]and you can actually open, and you can say
[00:02:31.171]that there are over 50 different definitions
[00:02:33.576]of the word "run" from running,
[00:02:36.283]running water, to having the runs, to going for a run,
[00:02:40.169]to running for office, lots of different ways.
[00:02:44.047]And they're all there, very short, very understandable.
[00:02:46.752]And another feature that I love, and again,
[00:02:48.481]this is available on the iPads as well as it is
[00:02:52.090]on a Chromebook or on your laptop,
[00:02:55.932]the minute you're inside your browser,
[00:02:57.906]is that one more thing you can do
[00:02:59.553]is you can actually hear what it sounds like.
[00:03:01.911]Run.
[00:03:02.801]And in simple words like this, it's not a big deal,
[00:03:05.866]but if you're having a more complicated word
[00:03:08.781]that you're not sure how to say, and we've all had that,
[00:03:11.846]you can actually listen to it
[00:03:14.039]and you know a lot more about it.
[00:03:16.499]And the other thing you can do is go to "word origin"
[00:03:19.576]and it locates it on the map
[00:03:21.364]and it tells you when, from about when it came.
[00:03:24.905]And we're going to talk about etymology
[00:03:26.367]and the way we think about where words came from,
[00:03:30.482]and how that can help learning
[00:03:33.039]in our Part Two of this series,
[00:03:35.139]but know that it is available here.
[00:03:37.053]The other piece that I love
[00:03:38.237]is you can easily switch over to a thesaurus.
[00:03:41.220]So we can take a word like "run" and do the same thing
[00:03:44.309]but now we're getting alternate words.
[00:03:46.552]And this is great when you're thinking
[00:03:48.676]about expanding vocabularies or when kids or ourselves
[00:03:52.100]are writing and we want words to replace mundane
[00:03:55.198]everyday words with a more sophisticated,
[00:03:58.658]or more appropriate, more specific words,
[00:04:00.875]this is a great way to do it.
[00:04:02.351]And you can see that when you're running it
[00:04:04.289]on the thesaurus, you have kind of color coded
[00:04:09.119]the words that are closest in meaning to the word "run",
[00:04:12.729]and then they get farther and farther away.
[00:04:15.479]And you can also look at these meters
[00:04:18.544]where you can determine how long you want these words to be
[00:04:22.572]or how complex do you want them to be.
[00:04:25.196]So you can have different ways to select these words
[00:04:29.156]and kind of sort through them.
[00:04:31.141]And it's a really fast way, I have this bookmarked
[00:04:35.053]in my Chrome, and that's the place I go to
[00:04:39.756]when I just need a quick definition,
[00:04:44.537]or especially, when I'm writing and I want a quick word
[00:04:47.754]to replace another word.
[00:04:48.833]So that's an easy one.
[00:04:50.576]The second way to do that easily is to simply
[00:04:53.288]do a search on Google.
[00:04:54.564]So if you just look for the word "run" in Google,
[00:04:59.486]what you will get immediately is a definition.
[00:05:02.067]And here, I got the etymology for "run",
[00:05:06.440]which is something we'll discuss.
[00:05:07.601]But if you just go to "run"
[00:05:10.235]you get some hits that will be close.
[00:05:13.922]So there is a way to do this on Google.
[00:05:15.578]I prefer Dictionary.com because it's designed
[00:05:17.559]especially for that, and you don't get anything else
[00:05:20.089]messing with it.
[00:05:21.075]The second thing is you can actually
[00:05:22.584]down and load into Chrome,
[00:05:24.869]the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as an app.
[00:05:28.700]And so what you do is you go to your,
[00:05:32.161]just let me go here to My Store, to my apps.
[00:05:37.384]I go to my apps, I go to the second page of my apps.
[00:05:40.064]I've got the Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
[00:05:42.209]and we can do the same thing as we did before.
[00:05:45.229]Let's use a new word like "look".
[00:05:52.924]And what you saw immediately
[00:05:54.364]is on a Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
[00:05:58.183]you get immediately, suggestions which ease up the search,
[00:06:04.545]especially for sophisticated words,
[00:06:07.041]and you can see that there's a simple definition,
[00:06:09.756]and I love that.
[00:06:10.592]There's a full definition
[00:06:11.753]with multiple definitions available.
[00:06:14.680]So you can see that "look" has seven
[00:06:16.860]different definitions here and has a transitive verb,
[00:06:21.225]and then a few more as an intransitive verb.
[00:06:24.233]So you can see that this can get complicated
[00:06:26.712]but I love that feature of simple definition.
[00:06:28.871]So you can go to that first,
[00:06:29.902]if it fits, great, if not, you go to the more sophisticated.
[00:06:33.164]And you can see also, lots of sentence examples.
[00:06:36.335]What I love about Merriam-Webster vis-a-vis Dictionary.com
[00:06:39.887]is that the look is much cleaner,
[00:06:41.871]you get a lot less ads.
[00:06:43.670]So students can use it without being confused
[00:06:45.633]and not knowing exactly where things are.
[00:06:48.953]The other features that I love is the ability to cite.
[00:06:51.484]It tells you exactly how to cite the source
[00:06:53.678]so you can click on that and it says cite it this way,
[00:06:57.279]you can see that on the screen.
[00:06:58.858]And you can also mark the word as a favorite word
[00:07:02.434]or even use social media to share it.
[00:07:04.672]Obviously "look" is not that special
[00:07:06.855]so we don't necessarily use that at that moment in time.
[00:07:11.614]But you can see that there is some discussion
[00:07:14.423]of synonyms and all that.
[00:07:15.608]Lots of features on Merriam-Webster,
[00:07:17.877]really good dictionary.
[00:07:19.177]I really like the way it plays up on the Chromebook
[00:07:22.231]and inside, anybody else using the Chrome app.
[00:07:28.265]So that's the second one.
[00:07:31.122]The other one I wanted to mention,
[00:07:32.847]if you're working inside a Chromebook or with Chrome,
[00:07:36.311]what I love about working inside drives,
[00:07:38.762]so Drive is obviously, one of the best things
[00:07:41.106]about using Chrome, and if you have a document open,
[00:07:45.064]what you can do is you can activate the Research bar
[00:07:47.730]on the right hand side,
[00:07:49.288]and that allows you to actually pull up a dictionary.
[00:07:52.231]So you can search a dictionary,
[00:07:54.048]and in the dictionary, we'll look for the word "fun".
[00:07:58.657]I'm using simple words, but you know
[00:08:00.882]that this is just an example.
[00:08:02.712]I actually do know what these words mean.
[00:08:05.478]So you're looking for the word "fun"
[00:08:07.399]and you get a definition for the noun,
[00:08:11.939]for the adjective, and you can see
[00:08:13.136]these are short definition and they allow you
[00:08:15.209]to do this quick search as you're looking
[00:08:17.600]through your document or as you're searching for a word,
[00:08:20.851]and this is just an example.
[00:08:22.220]And the way to activate that is to go to your Tools,
[00:08:25.169]activate Research, there is a keyboard shortcut,
[00:08:27.806]but I find that drop down menu's a lot easier with that.
[00:08:31.299]And so I just click on that, and again,
[00:08:33.468]you can have multiple kinds of research,
[00:08:35.474]but in this case, we're talking about
[00:08:37.176]finding out what words mean,
[00:08:38.504]and dictionary is probably the best way to do that
[00:08:42.696]inside your document, if you're working in Google Drive.
[00:08:49.126]So it's very, very easy.
[00:08:51.077]There is another app in Chrome,
[00:08:56.082]and that app is called Dictionary Instant.
[00:08:58.484]And Dictionary Instant is for short, quick definitions.
[00:09:05.380]Again, it's just one more option if you have a problem
[00:09:08.386]with the other options.
[00:09:10.291]What I do like about all of these options
[00:09:12.287]is they don't require students to log in.
[00:09:14.503]They don't require you to have any data available there.
[00:09:17.649]So you are safe to use that without compromising
[00:09:21.691]any student privacy, which I know is a concern.
[00:09:24.326]And you can do a search here, "psychosis".
[00:09:32.094]It gives you spellings, and now again,
[00:09:36.325]same thing, you can listen to it.
[00:09:38.495]Psychosis.
[00:09:41.352]And you can get a short definition.
[00:09:44.845]And you can again, share it, like it,
[00:09:47.213]and all of these features, and you can cite.
[00:09:50.070]So again, that option to cite,
[00:09:51.952]and exactly how you cite in different formats.
[00:09:54.666]So on the Part One of the show,
[00:09:58.766]on Vocabulary, Words and Dictionaries,
[00:10:00.843]we talked about lots of dictionaries that you can use
[00:10:02.886]inside your Chrome or on your iPad.
[00:10:06.044]And next time, we'll talk about other ways,
[00:10:08.865]we can talk about etymology and semantic connections.
[00:10:12.429]And I'll see you next time
[00:10:13.730]on Mobile Learning in the Classroom.
[00:10:16.504](upbeat music)

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Tech Edge, Mobile Learning In The Classroom - Episode 05, Vocabulary, Words & Dictionaries - Part 1

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