Vifinition - Videos Defining Words

Vifinition is a fun site featuring videos that define words. The site matches YouTube videos to words. The videos aren't explanations of words so much as they are demonstrations of the words in context. For example the video for "bend" shows pictures of bent objects. That video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
Vifinition isn't a site that I would send students to on their own because the videos do come from YouTube and the site is crowd-sourced so your students could come across material that isn't suitable for the classroom. Instead, I would use Vifinition as a teacher to locate videos that I could share with my students during a vocabulary lesson.

Vifinition also gave me the idea for a vocabulary lesson in which you have students make videos that demonstrate definitions in context. If you don't the resources or classroom time for creating videos, you could have students search YouTube, Vimeo, Next Vista, and other video sites for videos that do demonstrate the meaning of their vocabulary terms.

Words of the World - The Origins of Words

Words of the World is another great series of videos from the University of Nottingham (they also brought us the Periodic Table of Videos and Foodskey - The Science of Food). Words of the World is a collection of videos featuring historians and linguists explaining the origins of and history of the use of words in the English language. The videos attempt to put the words into a somewhat modern context. For example this video about the word guerrilla makes reference to Che Guevara. The sample I've embedded below explains the history of the word California.


Applications for Education
Words of the World could be an instructive model for your own lesson combining history and language arts. Have your students pick a word or two that they think is common and research it. Then have them create their own short videos in which they explain the history of those words. You might even have them research the dialect of the areas in which they live. For example, where I live we have Streaked Mountain. Most people would pronounce that as streaked yet everyone around here pronounces it as streak - ed. I'm not sure why that is the case, but I would love to find out.

Vocabulary.com - Extensive Lists of Vocabulary Practice Activities

I've written about a lot of vocabulary development websites in the past (here are seven good ones) so I was kind of surprised when I realized that I have never written about Vocabulary.com. Vocabulary.com offers hundreds of vocabulary practice lists and activities for students in elementary school through graduate school. In all there are more than 40,000 questions available through Vocabulary.com

When you sign up for Vocabulary.com you will be given an assessment quiz in order to give you suggested lists with which to start your practice. After completing the assessment you can use the practice lists suggested by Vocabulary.com or choose your own lists from the huge gallery of practice activities.

Vocabulary.com keeps tracks of your progress for you and, if you care for this sort of thing, gives you a virtual achievement badge.

Applications for Education
The Vocabulary.com activities that I tried reminded me very much of the SAT. The activities were a mix of fill in the blank and analogy activities. Students using Vocabulary.com receive instant feedback on each question that they attempt. Overall, Vocabulary.com could be a good site for students to use in preparation for the SAT.