In a review of Vocabulary.com on her blog "Portable Teacher," high school English teacher Lee Ann Spillane calls the site "the first tool I've seen that contextualizes vocabulary in ways similar to what we do in class." She writes:
In my classroom, students are in charge of vocabulary learning. We keep academic journals and students have learned to be on the look out for words they want to learn. They cull words from the books they read, from the articles of the week or poems we read together, even from things I or their other teachers say. They create personal dictionaries in the academic journals, much like Linda Reif's do in her students' Readers Writers Notebooks. Students do a variety of things to learn the words: notes, definitions, illustrations, model sentences (culled from the wild world of their reading lives), vocabulary fortunes, etc. I also explicitly teach some words to the whole-class. I model word learning and use language that piques their interest in words in my own talk (and in my own journal), still I tinker.
This year I've tinkered with connections. Giving kids model texts to mentor not only their writing and grammar knowledge but also vocabulary. Stephanie Harvey may say that education is all about "modeling, modeling, modeling" and I'd add that learning and memory depend on "connecting, connecting, connecting." If I can connect a text and weave or layer lessons in reading, writing, grammar and word learning I'm more than halfway to home base.
Vocabulary.com is the first tool I've seen that contextualizes vocabulary in ways similar to what we do in class. The dictionary on the site has thousands or hundreds of thousands of model sentences. AND users can click the model sentence and be taken directly to the article where the word is used in the wild. Articles vary AND users don't only have to depend on Vocabulary.com's feed to pull articles, they can reverse the process. Type a URL link into a command box and ask Vocabulary.com to "grab the vocab." The site pulls words it predicts users will want to learn and provides definitions, synonyms, and model sentences from the article of interest. Voilà! AND--yes, there's more--students can "play" at learning the words grabbed from the article by answering multiple choice questions about the word.
. . . Exactly the work students have been doing on their own in their journals: finding the words, writing them down, noting the definitions, synonyms, antonyms and the model sentence. Students can find and save these at Vocabulary.com and focus their energy on learning the words instead of using up all of their time writing them down.
Read the full text of Spillane's review here. Or check out a quick video overview of the Vocabulary.com features she describes here.