If you're a teacher using Vocabulary.com, a great way to bump up your students' word learning is to take Vocabulary.com schoolwide. Class-to-class competition will create a word learning culture within your school, and your students' Words Mastered numbers will climb. Here's how one teacher made that happen within her school.

Teachers are busy. We have meetings and conferences and grading and planning and duties and assemblies and, oh yeah, teaching! I knew that if I wanted Vocabulary.com to take off schoolwide (especially in time for the Vocabulary Bowl kicking off next week), I would have to make teachers aware that it was a no-prep, easy-to-use program. Below are the three points I emphasized in presenting the program to my colleagues. By communicating them clearly, I was able to get Vocabulary.com off and running in my school.

1. Signing up is fast

When I told teachers about Vocabulary.com at a department staff meeting, I couldn't stress this point enough. Create your educator account, fill out a basic profile, and voila, you're done! You don't even have to spend your valuable planning period registering each student individually — simply put your class link (it will be generated for you when you sign up) on the board and give students a week to go there. When they visit the link they will automatically be registered.

2. Putting it to use is simple

Are your colleagues skeptical about your "no-prep" guarantee? I don't blame them. There are a ton of programs out there that laud themselves as "easy to use" until you realize that they require daily upkeep on the teacher's end…Vocabulary.com is NOT one of them. 

Educators can customize their experience unit to unit or even week to week, depending on their time. Here are three examples of how the game's timing can adjust to your schedule and not the other way around. 
  • Having a super busy week? Tell students this is a free week: they can choose any list they want and master ten words by Friday.
  • Have a free 10 minutes? Search Vocabulary.com's arsenal of premade lists for one that fits your current unit. Click on the "Copy This List" icon to the right and the list will automatically be added to your personal file of lists. From there, click "Assign This List" to generate a link so students can easily access it.
  • Have a free 20 minutes? Create your own list depending on what you're studying that week. Simply click on "Vocabulary Lists" and then "Start New List."  Either type or copy and paste your words into the white box and Vocabulary.com will create a list with definitions. You can go through and customize the entries with your own notes and pre-generated sentences.

3. Making it count is rewarding

The key to promoting Vocabulary.com as a schoolwide initiative is making sure that the program is continually used. Few things are more frustrating to a teacher than taking the time to join a project only to have it fizzle out into nothing more than "that thing we tried that one time." 

  • Use Weekly Check-ins. Don't intimidate your colleagues with the goal of checking Words Mastered each day. Instead, see if you can all agree on one day a week to log in and check on your class's number of words mastered.
  • Promote it Through the School. Do you have daily announcements? Try featuring the top three classes there once a week. Tie in your administrators by having them stop by and personally congratulate the weekly winning class. Get the art students involved by creating a bulletin board in the main hallway where each class can be featured in a bar graph.  Once a week have a different teacher spend a few minutes updating the board to reflect each class's growth.
  • Add an Incentive. We're all familiar with reward ideas such as a pizza party for the class with the most words mastered each month or quarter. If you're trying to get teachers in your school to join in, why not offer an incentive for the teacher of the winning class? Maybe your administration can offer to sub for one period so that teacher can get an extra planning period, or offer free lunch or coffee. There's nothing wrong with rewarding teachers for creating a more engaging classroom!

And with the Vocabulary Bowl starting up next week, now is a perfect time to get your colleagues on board.