Website evaluation

This week in the Foreign Language Methods class I'm teaching, one of my students mentioned a website she uses to assign homework for vocabulary practice. www.wordchamp.com Here is what I thought.

This website is geared toward all language learners. It would not be appropriate for primary school students, but certainly could be used for secondary students and beyond. It offers activities in many languages. It boasted that people in 119 different countries had looked at Wordchamp in the previous 24 hours.

The primary purpose of Wordchamp is to help students learn vocabulary faster by providing interesting ways to practice outside of the classroom. It also offers an interesting tool that facilitates reading authentic resources online. The web reader tool is available free without signing up at Wordchamp. Registering with Webchamp as a student or teacher is absolutely free.

Wordchamp is useful for the purpose of recalling vocabulary only. The site offers several vocab drill activities. They vary between those that show text, play audio or both. In response students pronounce words, type vocab, or define vocab. The program gives the correct answer when prompted and allows the student to monitor errors. A student can monitor progress and improvement in specific vocab lists. Teachers can do the same for students enrolled in their courses.

Wordchamp is very easy to use. I was quickly able to create a course, upload a vocabulary list and invite my students to join. Once the list was uploaded, my course automatically had several types of flash card activities available to my students. When I uploaded my list, Wordchamp also automatically found audio clips in Spanish and English for most of the words. A big plus is that the students hear native speakers while going through the flashcards. One drawback to using Wordchamp is that because some of the activities make use of the audio clips, some of the words on my list were completely left off of those drills. I have not yet found how to record my own audio for the other words. Apparently one can also create picture flashcards, but I was not able to find the way to do so. I am able to create assignments that require students to complete a certain type of flashcard activity, or read a webpage using the web reader tool.

With the web reader, you may view any web page. While on the page, if you see a word you are not familiar with, simply hold the cursor over the word, and a box pops up with a definition, you can click on the word to hear pronunciation in English or Spanish. You can also choose to add the word to a list to practice later. In the past, I have required my students to read articles from online newspapers of Spanish-speaking countries. The web reader would be a great tool for those activities.

To improve the site, I would add different types of vocab drills. Overall, it is a valuable tool I may use from time to time in my classes. I often require students to show that they’ve made flashcards or vocab foldable lists as homework. I may offer the option of completing assignments on Wordchamp instead.

If you would like to see the simple activity I’ve posted, go to www.wordchamp.com ; sign up with the invitation code 832783411.