My wife and I are organizing a local spelling bee, and watching our children learn spelling; the process made me think of how children can practice their spelling quickly online.
It seems to me that it would be helpful to have a Web page or a program that would
- accept a list of words from a parent or teacher, and then, for each word,
- look up the audio in some master repository (e.g., at dictionary.com or some such),
- play the audio for the student who is using the program,
- ask the student to spell the word (possibly giving a sample of how the word is used, if the parent or teacher wants to provide that),
- check the student’s spelling against the correct spelling, and
- provide the definition, likely borrowed from the same master repository.
I know there are programs that let parents and teachers create such tests by entering the words and speaking them into the computer, but my sense is that this makes the process considerably more cumbersome, and thus much less likely to get done. I also know there are some sites that provide such quizzes for their own sets of words, but the ones that I’ve seen have only relatively few words included.
Do any of you know of any program, whether free or for pay, that fits this description? If not, then it seems to me that it would be worth writing, and wouldn’t be hard for someone to write. (There might be a need to get clearance from the owners of the audio reference database, but I suspect that this shouldn’t be hard to arrange.)