When learning a foreign language a tedious task is learning and training new vocabulary. You can do this by means of rote memorization or you might want to build up your own word bank in a more creative way. Some might use a web-based flash cards builder and tester, such as Quizlet or Ediscio. The advantage of these two web-applications is that you can add images to your flash cards, so that you can better memorize new words. Annotate these images or generate a question that relates to your personal experience (the answer contains the new word), and you’re on the right lines.

If you want to be even more creative, you might want to make a video containing images, text and audio data related to your new vocabulary. With Animoto creating such short videos using photos, footage and sound is a breeze. They have a relatively wide photo collection to choose from, but you might need some other images. Whether you use the Google advanced search for images (I put a how-to-screencast on an earlier blog post), Flickr’s or Yahoo‘s advanced search or Compfight there are millions of photos on the Web you can reuse and sometimes modify. A comprehensive list containing images in public domain or under creative commons license you can find on Larry Ferlazzo blog. An interesting website is Sprixi (unfortunately, it’s been down lately for updating and filtering reasons); not only that it will find free images on various platforms, but you’ll automatically have the author attribution integrated, so that you’ll spare some work.

Let’s say you want to make a video containing the word family around the concept ‘flower’.

1. Search with Compfight, for instance, for the photos you need. Save them on your local disk (if you want to publish your  video, don’t forget to save the photo credits, too, and later to add the author attribution).

2. Now you are ready to make your video. Set an account on Animoto (if you’re an educator see Animoto for Education). Upload images, add sound  and Animoto will do the rest.

3. When you’re ready you can download (active function for educator accounts), export your video to YouTube, share it on Facebook or Twitter or embed it in  your blog, wiki, etc.

Here is a video I created in minutes.

Try our video maker at Animoto.

What do you think? Does making videos help learning and/or retaining vocabulary?