Reviews & Comments of VocabBoost chrome extension
From February 8th, 2021 to February 25th, 2021, 67% user give 5-star rating, 33% user give 2-star rating. for VocabBoost chrome extension.
Reviews of vocabboost:
As an ESL instructor, I'm always looking for more tools that my students can use to help with their learning. This tool is very easy to use and is quite accessible. I find that the fill-in-the-blank/cloze answers are great for students who also want to practice their inference skills, and the availability of drag-and-drop answers is also helpful. As the other review mentions, the words selected sometimes feel a bit arbitrary, but I'm willing to overlook that for the ease of practice and accessibility this will offer to my students.
This extension works technology-wise, but isn't helpful for actually learning a language. The idea is to create an immediate fill-in-the-blank test based on some text that you chose yourself. But so what? Let's say I highlight a sentence like this: "I will go to the mall to buy a new pair of jeans." You don't get to chose which word will get blanked out - the extention might blank out "I", which isn't exciting for anyone who isn't a total beginner in a language. Also, in this example, there are other words that would make perfect sense here, instead of "I": we, you, etc... correctly guessing "I" in this sentence doesn't give you anything. It doesn't help reinforce any grammatical concepts (since English doesn't have lots of verb conjugations) or anything else. The idea of using fill-in-the-blanks is good one, but you can do that in Anki by creating cloze deletion sentences (Google it). Yes, it will take you 2 extra seconds to copy/paste something into Anki, but you get to chose what gets blanked out (based on your level and what you actually need to learn/repeat).
This extension is awesome! I just highlight the text that I want to practice and right-click to "make a test", and BOOM I have a beautiful fill-in-the-blank practice quiz that I can type my answers into, or even click "show options" and drag-and-drop words from the pre-made word bank. It's nice to see my correct answers in green, and the wrong ones in read. This is awesome practice for learning a language or using it to quiz myself on texts for comprehension! From a busy college student: Thanks, Vocabboost!