About John Edelson and VocabularySpellingCity

Hi, I’m the founder and president of VocabularySpellingCity.  Around the office, they sometimes call me the Mayor. Here’s the news:  We have expanded to where we are now LearningCity!

LearningCity is a family of three super cool edtech products to elementary schools. All three align to our mission of improving reading and literacy skills. VocabularySpellingCity and WritingCity are both literacy products. Science4Us  also builds STEM and science skills and interest in the vital early education years while also building literacy and math skills.

All these products use game-like approaches to engage students and a variety of tools to improve teacher productivity.

For those of you that have followed us since our SpellingCity days, or who are still using our free spelling practice and automation services, I’d advise you tolook at what our Premium Membership offers.  It takes the  fun convenient SpellingCity framework and applies it scientifically to the critical needs in building reading comprehension of vocabulary retention. Here’s some info on that product evolution.  I’d like to call out the novel technology that we created for helping students see the sounds that correspond to letters and letter combinations (patent 10,387,543).

About Me – John Edelson 

I made video games for the Playstation for years including being the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum.  One day, I decided to focus on educational software and games which I’ve been doing for almost 15 years. The Mayor loves to visit schools and hear directly from teachers and students I also spent two years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon in West Africa. And I worked in Silicon Valley at legendary tech companies such as SGI and The 3DO Company. Feels like a galaxy far far away. I have three hobby blogs. In one, I highlight my collection of vintage educational technology like film strip projectors and mimeograph machines. I also collect playing card jokers . The third blog  discusses my ambitions to earn a black belt by the time that I turned 50 (which I did) and my efforts to stay fit since then across various sports. I think education should be much much much better than it is today and that technology and improved funding and management are huge parts of getting there.  And I have degrees from Yale and Harvard. And I’m a pretty good listener so if you have something to share with me, give me a try.  You can reach me by commenting below, emailing “mayor@…”, or via my Twitter feed @VSpellCityMayor OK, now more formally: Seeing how students write is one of the best indicators of their literacy skills. John Edelson is the president and founder of Vkidz Inc which includes VocabularySpellingCity, Science4Us (K-2nd Science, CODiE & BESSIE Winner),  and WritingCity, a complete elementary writing program with detailed lesson plans based on the Writers Workshop approach . He serves on the Advisory Board for the Florida Atlantic University School of Education. He has a long involvement in interactive software, games, and simulations, starting with his years at Silicon Graphics in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At The 3DO Company in the early and mid ’90s, he was involved in the generational video game transition from 2D sprite graphics to games with real-time 3D photorealistic graphics and physics engines.

Mr. Edelson was the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum. He was the turn-around manager at Argonaut – a 100-person diversified games and technology company in London. He managed it for two years, improving quality, growth, and profitability. He spun-out and joined ARC, a new company in the semiconductor intellectual property industry. Mr. Edelson, as Senior Vice President of ARC, helped the company grow from 10 to 300 people. He consulted to Vcom3D, an educational software company for the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as Time2Read, an educational software company providing standards-based online programs to elementary school systems. Mr. Edelson has previous professional experience at MID and Price Waterhouse Consulting.

John Edelson has a BA cum laude from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He served in the Peace Corps in West Africa for two years. As the proud father of three children, Mr. Edelson has a deep interest in improving education through technology. Oh,  for you academics and  learning scientists out there, I’m very proud to say that Danny Edelson of BSCS, xNational Geographic, and xProfessor at Northwestern, is my brother.

VocabularySpellingCity – What is it?

Games on VocabularySpellingCity.

VocabularySpellingCity is a supplementary language arts program for building reading comprehension through vocabulary retention and building foundational literacy skills. It is compatible with most published curriculum or for schools that are building their own.

One of our touch points is the following insight into today’s educational challenges.

Seventy percent of reading comprehension problems are due to vocabulary weakness.  Most schools and districts are only beginning to deal with building an effective vocabulary-building program. Many are still hoping that if the kids read enough, they’ll absorb vocabulary through exposure, context clues, and word roots and suffix knowledge (NOTE, this isn’t generally effective).  Other schools work with explicit instruction but are stuck on the weekly word list routine where students learn the words for Friday but have forgotten them by Monday (both research and common sense converge in saying that this weekly cycle is not effective).  VocabularySpellingCity’s mission is to help schools and districts build an effective vocabulary-building strategy and support it with effective training and powerful game-based learning tools.

Our History: VocabularySpellingCity started as SpellingCity, an extremely clever architecture and technology tour de force, which conveniently automated the weekly spelling test.  Teachers and parents loved the convenience, students loved the empowerment and games.

SpellingCity built a word bank of nearly 50,000 and provided human-written and spoken sentences for each word. SpellingCity built needed capabilities for handling multiple meaning words, sound-alike words, heteronyms (same spelling, different pronunciation and meaning, ie I fish for bass while playing the bass), capitonyms (same spelling except for capitalization ie I may march in May or March), and so on. With these capabilities and both a free and premium membership,  SpellingCity went viral around the country and world.

The Premium Membership – available for districts, schools, teachers, or parents – automated grading and record-keeping and provided the best games plus the vocabulary, phonics, and writing materials. SpellingCity broadened its technology base including pictures for many words and providing an automated sound by sound breakdown for each word with each sound correlated with

the right letter combinations. The learning activities including activities for phonological awareness (hearing initial and ending sounds, recognizing spoken words). SpellingCity continued to grow and usage was spread into the primary grades and across the web, Chromebooks, and tablets via the apps.   After a few years, SpellingCity started searching for how to have the most impact on education by studying what the real challenges and questions were.

Vocabulary Retention Enables Through Spaced Practice

Vocabulary quickly emerged as a huge problem in education and so we focused on building programs for vocabulary-building and renamed ourselves VocabularySpellingCity.  By 2016, we realized that the conventional weekly word list was largely ineffective at accumulating vocabulary. Students would memorize the words for the test on Friday but would tend to forget them by the week. In reviewing the research, we learned that a key to building vocabulary was 12-15 multimedia (hearing, reading, writing) contacts with a word over a four week period.  Other research-based insights included having a vocabulary program integrated with the general curriculum and focusing on the strategic academic words, not just the impressive-sounding or even general vocabulary.

VocabularySpellingCity Today – Today, we are very focused on helping schools and districts realize their goals for improving reading comprehension, writing skills, and vocabulary. We use technology to:

 

• 

  
  

  Dillard Student Engaged in Word Study

  Engage and empower students.  VocabularySpellingCity empowers students to do their own formative assessment which is dramatically emnpowering and engaging.  It’s hard for students to figure out if they have mastered a list of words and are ready for a vocabulary or spelling test. With VocabularySpellingCity, they can figure through the always-available practice tests whether they’ve achieved mastery or not, the can tell if they still have more progress to make.

• Build literacy skills in an integrated holistic fashion with a focus on vocabulary-building and sound-letter correspondence.  Having trouble with a word? Let’s study its meaning, sounds, or try to write a sentence with it. Students learn how words are used in context.
  • Save teachers lots of time. Classroom time and homework (grading and recording and printing) time.VocabularySpellingCity is a powerful tool for building literacy skills. It enables teachers to deliver their curriculum in a manner that allows for differentiation. Without our site, it’s nearly impossible for a single teacher to successfully teach three different sets of word lists (approaching-, at-, or above-grade level), as the major reading series (Treasures, Reading Street, Reading Wonders) prescribe. And while the idea of teaching with individualized lists, using the method employed by Words Their Way seems great, it requires a massive amount of work by a teacher every week.  But with VocabularySpellingCity’s Review Lists feature, creating individualized word lists for each student is simple. Students can then study the words that they need additional practice with through a rotation at a literacy center equipped with Chromebooks, PCs, iPads, or Android tablets.

Have anything you want to say to the Mayor?  Just click on comments and leave me a message.

The Mayor loves to visit schools and to hear directly from teachers and educators.

 

Film strip were a breakthrough technology!

 

 

English: I'm Sorry!

 The English Language is Impossible

The English language is hard partially because of some ambiguities in key terms that are used daily. There are words that are just confusing.

Worst of all in my opinion is the word “sorry”.

I’m Sorry

The phrase “I’m sorry” can mean dramatically different things that are easily confused. 

At a funeral, I might say “I’m sorry” to express sympathy or empathy for the person’s loss. But it’s not an apology or admission of guilt. I’m not suggesting that I caused the death.

If I bump into someone on a crowded bus and say “I’m sorry”, it is a sort of apology or at least a recognition that I take some responsibility for the minor mishap. At least, I acknowledge that I regret that this happened even if I’m not assuming responsibility.

However, there’s also the true expression of regret and guilt as in when I ate all the cookies when Mom had said I was only allowed to have one. Busted by Mom, I’ve been shamed and am apologizing to my hungry and cookie-less siblings with “I’m sorry”.  This was an actual admission of guilt, blame, and regret. To this day, I feel guilty about pigging all the freshly-baked cookies that one time!

Back to Education

How is a teacher supposed to get her elementary school students to understand these nuances of meaning when such a critical word has such a range of frequently confused meanings?

I think the answer is to model precise use of language and then to start asking your students to do the same. If a student uses “I”m sorry” in a confusing way, a teacher can ask saying: “Are you just expressing sympathy for an unfortunate situation or are you accepting blame, stating regret,  and resolving to try not to repeat it?”  Of course, in the context of an elementary classroom, that would be harsh and not fully appropriate but I think you see the idea.

Real World Modelling of Being Precise with Words

As a more realistic example, a teacher could say to her students, once an ambiguous word is used: “I’m sorry that English is so hard to understand.”  Then, the teacher could ask the class if they felt the teacher was:

A: Saying it is regrettable that English is so hard
B:  Taking responsibility personally for having created the complexities in English
C: Both of the above

Like many multiple choice class questions, this can be discussed and then people can either vote either by a hand count or having three places in the room to go to be vote and be counted (this is more engaging for many young students and helps avoid having them sit still for too long a time).

Modelling Speaking Precisely

Personally, I could avoid saying that “I”m sorry English is so hard to understand” since it’s ambiguous if I’m taking responsibility or not for the regrettable peculiarities of English (Perhaps as mayor of VocabularySpellingCity I do have some complicity). 

Instead, I should say: “It’s a shame that English is so hard to understand.” This way it’s clear that I’m expressing sympathy for the teachers and students’ heavy burdens without suggesting that I have any guilt or complicity in it.  But in addition to speaking precisely, it’s better pedagogy to explain to everyone why we are choosing the words that we do.

 

Can "School" be more than a noun?

 In the VocabularySpellingCity offices, we have some exciting discussions. For instance, must the word “school” always be a noun?

What sort of bus? A SCHOOL bus!

I was in strong disagreement with an experienced English teacher (note, I have no such credentials). She argued “school” could only be used as a noun.

I spoke with some confidence: “What about school days, school bus, school boy, school books? What sorts of books would these be? They are school books. See, school can also be an adjective. Lets open up Merriam Webster and I’ll show you….”

Then, to my amazement: “Wow!….Merriam Webster lists school as a noun and a verb but not as an adjective!  OK, lets try another dictionary…”  The same thing!  I was stupified, stumped, flummoxed, and dumbfounded.

The first two dictionaries that I pulled up online both listed school only as a noun or a verb, (ie “Would you like to be schooled in the use of dictionaries?”). Neither of these first two dictionaries acknowledged the use of school as an adjective.

Dictionary.com 2nd Meaning

Finally, I found Dictionary.com which mentions three uses of the word “school”: noun, verb, and adjective!  While this seemed obvious to me, I was now aware that there was room for disagreement.

What to make of Merriam Webster? What do they think about the school bus?Merriam lists school bus as a noun. It seem that they consider these words – school days, school bus, school boy, school books – to be all open form compound word. An open form compound word?  Mostly, people think of compound words as being two words joined together with no spaces or hyphens between which makes them “closed form”. Examples include butterfly, shoehorn, and windmill.

Open form compound words are compound words that are not joined together like “closed form” compound words but have a space in them.   Some examples of compound words with a space in them: post office, real estate, fire engine, and light bulb.

Numbers, by the way,  are a really arbitrary combination of compound word types.  There’s seventeen (closed form). And twenty-three (hyphenated).  And three hundred (open form) but that is not my topic for today, let’s return to the question of:

When is a word a compound word and when is it just an adjective with a noun?

I like this definition of a compound word: When two words  form a new word with a new meaning. I think the functional part of this is the idea of a new meaning. For instance,  a business office is to me, just a type of office. Adjective. Noun.

School Desk, a type of desk?

But a post office is not really a type of office at all, it’s a type of retail outlet so it’s clearly a compound word and not an adjective noun combination.

Real estate. I would agree that real when used with estate forms a new meaning that is different than thinking of real as an adjective.  So it too is a compound word, not just an adjective in front of a noun.

But there are gray areas.  Is a green box just a box that is green? Yes. What about a weak box? A mail box? A strong box?

So, back to school:

Is a school bus just a type of bus?  IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
Is a school book just a type of book?  IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
What about a school desk, is it a type of desk?   IMHO yes. So adjective noun.
Is school work just a type of work?  IMHO maybe.
Is a school house just a type of house? IMHO NO, it’s not a house at all. It’s a compound word definitely.
School day? A type of day? Maybe.

School Desk, a type of desk?

So there’s some clear cases of school being used as an adjective such as with bus or book. There’s some compound words made with the word school such as school house. And there are some gray areas where I’m not sure and I’d have to consult greater authorities.  But, if Merriam Webster is unwilling to acknowledge that school could ever be used as an adjective then I (the Mayor of VocabularySpellingCity) am getting a little unsure of who this greater authority will be.  Maybe my mom or brothers, all of whom seem to know grammar so much better than me. I mean I.

Now, does any of this matter? Obviously, progressive education has de-emphasized naming parts of speech.  But in our gut, we all know that this sort of linguistic question being given its due is really the height of education and civilization.

Author Update – March 2018 – Noun Adjuncts

A few people have contacted me since this article was published and they have schooled me on the concept of “nouns being used as adjectives.” This is a well-known part of English which somehow, I had never learned. And I quote Wikipedia’s article on ‘noun adjuncts’: “In grammar, a noun adjunct or attributive noun or noun  modifier is an optional noun that modifies another noun; it is a noun functioning as a  modifier.”  As I read about this, I’ve learned that dictionaries and other authorities do not agree on the gray area which covers when:

• a noun is only a noun but can be used as a modifier as a noun adjunct
• a noun might have transitioned into also being considered an adjective because of frequent use as a modifier
• a modifier (either adjective or noun adjunct) used in combination with a noun blends together and becomes a compound word

So my school story turns out to be an illustration of this mysterious area of grammar. Thoughts?  By the way, many thanks to both GrammarGirl (Mignon Fogerty is one my heroes because of the consistently high quality of her writing @GrammarGirl  ) and Mary Norris (Confessions of a Comma Queen @MaryNorrisTNY) both of whom helped me understand.

April 2018 – I had some deep discussions with some educators and curriculum folk this week and I realized that I have never really gotten to the bottom of some basic student and teacher confusions. So I’ll try to spell out my question here as a step to answering it.

School is an example of a word with a single meaning  but which can be used in multiple ways.  School means the same thing whether we are using it as a noun, verb, or adjective.  In contrast, a word like scale is a genuine multiple meaning word.  To scale a mountain is quite different than the scale that we measure our weight on and both the first two meanings are distinct from the skin of the fish or the key to proportion on a map.  The latter example, scale, is a true multiple meaning word or homonym. But what do we call words like school that can be used in multiple ways albeit always with the same meaning?

Examples of homonyms used in sentences:

• I left my phone on the left side of the room.
• The baseball pitcher asked for a pitcher of water.
• The committee chair sat in the center chair.
• The crane flew above the construction crane.
• While they are at the play, I’m going to play with the dog.
• She will park the car so we can walk in the park.