I've been playing with ways to leverage the available jQuery elements in Canvas and when I came across the pop-up dialogs, it seemed like a great way to create a simple vocabulary study sheet. The purpose of this is different than using a quiz. A quiz tells the student when they are correct and no matter how you configure it, it can give the student the perception that they are being assessed by the teacher. For this I want students to be able to self-assess and choose which words they want to study. This also doesn't put any pressure on the student by seeing how many they got right or wrong. This is simply the digital equivalent of flash cards.
In order to help teachers easily create their own interactive vocabulary lists, I've make a Google Spreadsheet that can produce the necessary html code to make the vocabulary pop-up dialogs. I've added functions to the spreadsheet to import definitions from Merriam-Webster's website just to generate quick definitions for my examples but it may suffice for some vocabulary lists.
