The friendly and fun way to broaden vocabulary!!

I think that the game is fun and many students immediately engaged. Zynga tried to beef up the educational aspect and so there is a teacher dashboard, additional lesson plans that can be used, power vocabulary words ( high-value academic words as identified by WestEd) that, when a student uses it, he or she earns bonus points, and a dictionary that shares the meaning of the vocabulary word. I think that as a supplementary vocabulary resource Words with Friends Edu is a great resource. Still, if I wanted to really focus on vocabulary development (of all students), this would not be the app I would choose. The choice of words learned is student-driven (rather than by an algorithm based on how people learn vocabulary and what vocabulary is most useful to learn) and student controlled. Yes, this potentially will engage students even further ("I am learning the words that I pick") but as a teaching technique, learning random words based off which 7 letter tiles a student receives and then uses isn't sound. Yes, student vocabulary increased but students with limited vocabulary learned the least number of new words.

As teaching tool I can not envision using Words With Friends in my classroom. While it does give good practice in word building I think the offline game of Boggle or Scrabble would be a much better use of time. I find that the actual words that are accepted is very forgiving. The acceptable list of 2 and 3 letter "words" such as AA lead to students just trying any combinations once they figure that out (It happened to me by accident)