WordCards: Four Ways to Practice a Word List in MiniLesson

WordCards is a new item type for MiniLesson. You give it a list of words with their definitions or translations, and students work through the list one word at a time, in whichever of four practice modes you choose.

Where this came from

Poodll already has a standalone WordCards activity, and its practice modes are built specifically for drilling individual words - including a small onscreen keyboard, useful on mobile or for typing characters (accents, non-Latin scripts) that aren’t on a student’s physical keyboard. We wanted that style of practice available as one item inside a MiniLesson sequence, alongside your reading, listening and speaking items, rather than as a separate activity. So we brought the four practice modes into MiniLesson as a single item type.

What it does

• Word list entry, one word per line: dog | A common pet. - term and definition/translation separated by a pipe. Same format as Scatter and Space Game, so it should already feel familiar.
• An intro screen of flip cards - the word on the front, its definition on the back - so students can review the list before being tested on it. You can skip this screen with the “Hide start page” setting if you’d rather go straight into practice.
• Four practice types, chosen from a dropdown on the item form:
  • Listen and type - hear the word, type it.
  • Listen and choose - hear the word, pick it from a set of options.
  • Type the word - see the definition, type the matching word.
  • Choose the word - see the definition, pick the matching word from a set of options.
• A built-in onscreen keyboard for the typing modes, sized for mobile and useful for characters your students may not have on their own keyboard.
• Optional images and audio per word, matched by line number rather than by the word itself - upload 1.mp3 and 1.png for the word on line 1, 2.mp3 for line 2, and so on. Uploaded audio is used if present; otherwise MiniLesson generates it with your chosen TTS voice.
• Number badges on the choose modes - each option is labelled 1 to 5, and pressing the matching number key selects it, so a student practicing on a laptop doesn’t need to reach for the mouse for every word.
• A results summary at the end, styled the same way as MiniLesson’s Listening Gap Fill results screen.

Adding a WordCards item

From the “Add new item” picker, choose WordCards. Enter your word list in the text area - one word | definition pair per line - then set a practice type, a TTS voice, and optionally upload images or audio named by line number.

Students first see the flip-card review screen (unless you’ve hidden it), then work through the list in the practice mode you chose.

Why it’s useful

If you’ve been building vocabulary practice by hand with Scatter, Multichoice, or Gap Fill items, WordCards covers a lot of that ground in one item, with keyboard support that those don’t have. Pair it with the MiniLesson AI Generate template and you can go from a keyword list to a full flip-card-plus-practice item without typing out the definitions yourself.