iPad Tips: Reminder your vocabulary!
Sebah Al-AliReminder is one of iOS’ basic apps; it is meant to help you create basic to-do lists to remind of you of tasks that need to be done. Last semester, one of my students creatively used Reminder, a basic app on all iPads, as a dictionary for all new words she learned that semester. And, it was such a great idea! Watch this video to see how it looks:
Why?
It’s like creating your own dictionary of words but with tons of cool features! Reminder is a basic app that comes installed on all apple devices; this means, all reminders can be synced if your devices are attached to one iTunes account. Also, you can easily utilize the search feature to search for words, in Arabic or English. These words can also be categorized into lists of your choice.
What I also like about it is that each list on the side automatically calculates the number of items (in our case words) that each list contains. This will be a really nice confidence booster at the end of the semester when we remind our students how much they’ve learned and how many new words they’ve added to their lists.
How?
Open the reminder app, and click on add a list on the side. Then name the list “Week 1” or “Adjectives” for example, and give it a color of your choice. Tap done. Now, tap on the list to add words. Tap return to add a new word. You can add whatever you want next to it: part of speech, translation, example, anything. I tell my students to add its part of speech and translation, to make it easier for them to search for a word they can’t remember.
To search for a word, tap the search bar from the side and start typing the word you want; a list of relevant words will appear.
In class?
I found it useful to ask my students to create a list for each unit, or for each topic they need to know these words for, like: “pie chart list” and so on. After assigning the list, I ask them to create the list at home and check it the next day.
This way, the new words can be accessed anytime during class to be used in different activities. They just need to search for a word. Creating these lists also makes it easier for me and them to direct them to a list to study before a certain test.
