Using Google slides for vocabulary study

Has anyone ever used Google slides for their vocabulary notebooks? The only person I know who did so was me when I was studying Czech, but I’m sure I’m not alone. A Google slide can contain pretty much anything about a target word:

• pictures, diagrams, maps
• links to other slides
• links to other sites, e.g. SkELL for authentic sentences and collocates as well as frequency info
• direct links to an online dictionary with definitions and pronunciation: the word is part of the URL, e.g.[https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/struggle]
• a screenshot of a concordance, which I find especially useful when it shows how the word is used in one text, but as far as I know, this is only possible in VersaText, my own program, and only for English.
• multi-dimensional information such as hypernyms / antonyms / meronyms – an authentic example sentence containing your target word and one of these paradigmatic relatives is particularly telling
• any syntagmatic information such as collocation and colligation, grammar patterns and word templates
• where you first came across the target word
• your own uses of the word – accumulated over time

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This slideshow has a few examples from my ever-expanding a slide show, which I would watch to revise my word notes. This often me prompted me to link a previously studied word to a new one. And as we all know, the relationships between words is crucial to understanding, choosing and using them. Relationships between people are also crucial, which makes the shareability (no, it’s not a nonce word) of Google slides a godsend to anyone studying with a study buddy or when a student wants to show their teacher their efforts.

This is about studying vocabulary, not teaching it. As teachers, we can offer our students ways of studying vocabulary, but they have to do the work. One slide a day is quite a commitment when you fill it with all the features listed above. It is better to add new word data to existing slides. In fact, we are constantly and subconsciously adding to our dossiers on words when we are listening, watching and reading. One word a day may seem a tortoisly (yes, that’s a nonce word) slow march towards developing vocabulary breadth (size). And it would be if size were the only gain. However, to create a slide, the student engages in a lot of language and in the process, develops vocabulary depth. The tortoise always wins.

You can see now that the picture shows a turtle (the aquatic relative of the landlubber tortoise) at some considerable depth.

I haven’t studied Czech for quite a while as it wasn’t much use in Uzbekistan where I was training for the BC and then for an American university for most of the last four years. But I’m back in Czechia now and I was chatting on Messenger with an ex last night and I met a new word: pokochat se. To fall in love. When I explored SkELL’s word sketch, the objects of pokochat se are such things as views, waterfalls, photos, nature. We were chatting about a concert. It’s time to re-open my Google slides.