Can+e+learning+enhance+children's+vocabulary?+(Professional+Inquiry)

 Can e learning tools enhance children's vocabulary ?
For the past few months this has been the focus of an inquiry that myself and my students have been researching together.

Why did we start this enquiry? Writing samples and reading lessons provided me with data that demonstrated that __all__ the children in my class could benefit from a focused approach in teaching vocabulary through innovative methods (my 'traditional' approaches obviously weren't having the results the children needed to enhance their vocabulary).

Who is involved Although all the students could benefit from this inquiry, I decided to begin with my top reading group as I felt that their reading comprehension would really benefit from an 'e learning' approach in this area. However, it was my intention to tutor these children in a range of tools first, so that when they became adept at using them, they could then in turn become the peer tutors for other groups of children. This has been working extremely well. Almost every child has been 'tutored' on how to use the range of vocabulary e learning tools.

Has it made any improvement to the children's vocabulary? Well, it's early days to make a definitive statement as to whether it has definitely made a considerable improvement to the children's use of vocabulary, but what I can definitely say is that my students are far more engaged in using the e learning tools, in comparison to the 'traditional' tools of vocabulary. For example, during reading sessions, the students are exceptionally keen to locate unfamiliar vocabulary, so they can use the e learning tools to find definitions, rather than 'ignoring' unfamiliar vocabulary, which was a recurrent practice prior to this inquiry. As an added bonus, the children have also combined the e learning tools with their knowledge of ICT applications to create vocabulary teaching/learning tools that can be used in the classroom on a daily basis.

=Below you will see a selection of some of the resources that were created by the children to offer alternative vocabulary options for commonly used 'boring' words.= These resources were created by researching 'boring' words using online thesaurus tools such as;

http://www.visuwords.com/ http://www.lexipedia.com/

Once the children had sourced a large bank of words that could be used as synonyms or more descriptive alternatives for the 'boring' word, the children then used wordle.com to create these posters that we have displayed on the walls of our classroom. These posters provide eye catching tools that provide rich vocabulary options for literacy learning. Professional Inquiry Page