Our guest blog this week is by David who has written about the app and website Dictionary.com
I use the Dictionary.com app in English. It's a downloadable dictionary that the girls have on their ipads and can access even when offline. They like the way it is laid out and it has lots of useful features: a word for the day, a word blog which has some interesting posts about language, and even a 'trending words' section which records which words have been looked up!
Having this on the ipads means the girls are far more proactive about looking up words they don't know or checking spelling and it certainly saves time. It is also very useful as an aid for expanding vocabulary - there is a thesaurus section and a synonym button which gives examples of similar words used in context. I recently used it with Year 8 to encourage them to think about broadening their vocabulary and avoiding those awful words like 'nice' and 'good'!