Teachers often email us saying that while they love Membean they need to convince their colleague/principal/administrator why Membean should be adopted in their school. There are so many reasons why Membean is a better way to learn vocabulary, but it’s hard to convey all of them via an email. Hence this blog post.
The best way to convince yourself that Membean is an awesome way to learn words is to try Membean Personal for yourself — it’s free. Use Membean for just 10 minutes, and if we can’t convince you that your students will learn more words faster, then the rest of this post won’t help.
Membean compared to Workbooks
Any online tool is going to outperform books in many areas. Electronic content is easily changed, accessible from multiple places, reusable, portable and preferred by students. Membean goes way beyond your traditional e-learning websites and apps. We’ve replaced the dead-tree workbooks in a lot of schools this year. Here are some reasons to prefer Membean over a book….
- Strongly Differentiated. Students are calibrated and learning is tailored to suit each individual’s forgetting patterns, experience, abilities, etc. Try doing that with a book.
- Multi-modal. Membean is audio enabled to help struggling readers. Videos and visually rich pictures allow a student to engage in multiple ways. The more ways a student can encode information, the longer it’s remembered.
- Self Paced. Okay, learning is simply hard work. In many classes the top students sometimes get a little too comfortable. With books, every students learns the exact same words in the exact same way. If they’re learning all the same stuff as the other kids, they don’t have to work very hard. With Membean every student does a lot of work – there’s no getting out of it. We’ve got plenty of challenges for even the most precocious students!
- Prevents Cheating. We often hear from teachers that cheating is rampant on homework assignments. Sites like these have answers to commonly used workbooks and used by many students. With Membean, since each student answers different questions, collaborative cheating isn’t possible.
- Teacher insights and analytics. You only need to look at your teacher dashboard to see clearly which students are spending too little or too much time, missing too many questions, moving through words too quickly, scoring poorly, or missing too many questions.
- Saves Time. No more grading of assessments. Many of our teachers use Membean across 5-6 classes of 30 students each. It takes 10 seconds to administer assessments and no prep-work!
- Intelligent repetition arrests forgetting. Membean’s memory engine reinforces words through several different types of questions which are repeated at just the right time. Missed questions result in revisiting the word pages.
- Affordable. Our goal is to be used by every school we can have the privilege of talking to. Membean is comparable to, and in many cases cheaper than, vocab workbooks. And, you don’t have to buy any Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Test Generators, Answer Keys, or other booklets.
We get it. Kids don’t love learning just because they can do it on a computer. It has to be fun, thought-provoking, hand-holding, interactive, and rewarding.
Here is what one English Department Chair wrote to us:
We have used two other vocabulary programs in the past, most recently the Sadlier-Oxford series of vocabulary books. While this curriculum is very challenging for students, we never felt that it really helped students to actually learn and apply what they were learning. The thing I love the most about Membean is that it reinforces student learning so much that students actually begin to use the words they are learning.
Most of our students have loved the program. We switched from a traditional vocabulary book, and our students complained about the book a LOT. In addition, we found that many students were figuring out how to cheat with the books. This year, we have had a lot of positive feedback from students about how they enjoy working on the program and learning new words…and I’m constantly hearing students use the words — correctly, I might add — in their classroom discussions.
Timothy Green, Prestonwood Christian Academy
Try Membean in your classroom
We offer free pilot programs that are quick to set up and give you the full Membean experience with your students. You’ll get a feel for the teacher analytics and your students will make invaluable progress toward competent and exceptional vocabulary. Contact us to get your class set up.
