By Rachel Smith
This presentation focused on using free, web-based technology to help kinesthetic learners study and review their vocabulary words. With minimal instructor effort, students can participate in a variety of vocabulary review activities designed to keep their hands moving and their neurons dancing.

How do you learn best? Visit the VARK website to see.

Teaching to different learning styles:  

• Houghton Mifflin's site is helpful
• This blog from Prepmasters was interesting 
• Bryn Mawr's "Differences in Learning Styles" is pretty thorough, although there are some broken links

Information from the Presentation

1. Standup Imagery: Using www.ditto.com, have students locate images on the internet that relate to their vocab. words. They should locate six synonyms and two things that do not relate to their words. As they present to the class using http://www.thumbstacks.com/index.php to create an online presentation, every time the class does not find an image that does not relate to the word, the class should stand up.

2. Interview: Find as many synonyms online as you can online using www.thesaurus.com and write them down on a sheet of paper. Then, find their match [Idea: assign them math problems and answers and have them find their appropriate partners (1+1=2); make a taco (lettuce + cheese, etc.) ]and then interview each other. One student is the reporter and the other is being interviewed as “the word.” It is up to the interviewer to ask questions of the interviewee to guess what word their person is. There is a timer, and everyone has three minutes then they switch roles/partners. 

3. Artistic Musical Chairs: Draw definition of word using http://www.kiddonet.com/kiddonet/anfypaint/ (old school) http://www.imaginationcubed.com/LaunchPage (social networking) or http://www.sketchr.net/draw/  (advanced program) & then move around classroom to music. When music stops, they stop & write down the word. 

4. Hot potatoes software: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
1. multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises
2. post online & have kids do them

5. Reader’s Theater: Using Dfilm, http://www.dfilm.com/live/home.html students script a conversation that illustrates the definition of the word. They then move to a computer across the room, sit down, and watch the video. They write down what they think the word for that video is. Then, they move to another computer to watch another video and guess another word. At the end of the activity, they share their words with the authors of the videos. Here's a sample movie for the word "savor"  :  http://www.dvolver.com/live/movies-66950
6. Word Race: Split the class into teams. To learn word meanings, share a vocabulary word with your students. Then, instruct them to look up the word's meaning on http://www.merriam-webster.com/. Whichever team runs to the board and correctly (and clearly) writes that word's definition (or a synonym) wins a point!
7. Quia: Matching games, hangman, pop-ups, and challenge boards are just a few of the activity types you can create as a subscriber. Quia activities are customized, which means you can create activities based on your own materials -- vocabulary words, concepts, equations, even pictures and audio clips.  30 day free trial, $49/year after that. http://www.quia.com/servlets/quia.web.QuiaWebManager
8. Wiki round robin: Give students five words each, and assign them a time to write a story on a class vocabulary wiki. They must utilize those five words in the story, but are free to take the story in any direction as long as it makes sense and may change the story as long as they do not change another vocabulary word. Stagger the time that students are on the wiki so that their entries do not overlap. Great site to use: http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K
   This site will help you learn how to use a wiki: http://www.teachersfirst.com/content/wiki/wikiideas1.cfm