Contextual Help Helps Learning - Apple Dictionary to the Rescue

First of all, an admission: if there's an easy way to do something I like it.

Sorry, did I say "easy"? I meant "efficient."

This comes from growing up on a dairy farm. Anyone who grew up on a farm knows what I'm talking about. Especially a dairy farm. But I digress from one form of shovelling to another...

Every time I need a quick look-up for a spelling, synonym, or definition, I've been using "F12" and launching my handy dictionary widget. I was reasonably unhappy with this work-flow. But what else was I to do? I didn't know any other solution. One of the biggest problems I found with this approach, apart from too many keystrokes, was that I really like beginning to type a word and seeing all the words that begin the same way. Good for scrabble, and good for when you really have no idea how a word is spelt.

"Chihuahua" anybody?

So, it came as quite an epiphany when in my recent copy of the Journal for Research on Technology in Education there was a study on supporting reading with an electronic pop-up dictionary. In brief, it shows that "The pop-up dictionary reading was shown to be a statistically effective method for improving student test scores. The results suggest pop-up dictionaries may provide a helpful intervention for increasing middle-level learners’ reading comprehension."

Who knew dictionaries were good for students?

This jogged my memory about Mac's built-it spell-checker, and thus its dictionary. A simple right-click (control-click) on any word, in almost any application, will bring up a selection of actions, one of which is the dictionary.

Dictionary may be one of our most under-utilized exceptional educational built-in Mac apps. (When I say "our", I probably mean "I". I'm always the last to know.) The Dictionary application provides you with a built-in dictionary, thesaurus, Apple search, and Wikipedia search. A couple of neat features are that nearly every word in a definition is hyperlinked to its own definition, and, most happily for me, typing in your suspected spelling will provide a live updating of all the words with that beginning.

Teachers, start your dictionaries!

Ayt leezt i whill.