Update: As of February 2013 Vifinition is offline.
Vifinition is a fun site featuring videos that define words. The site matches YouTube videos to words. The videos aren’t explanations of words so much as they are demonstrations of the words in context. For example the video for “bend” shows pictures of bent objects. That video is embedded below.
Applications for Education
Vifinition isn’t a site that I would send students to on their own because the videos do come from YouTube and the site is crowd-sourced so your students could come across material that isn’t suitable for the classroom. Instead, I would use Vifinition as a teacher to locate videos that I could share with my students during a vocabulary lesson.
Vifinition also gave me the idea for a vocabulary lesson in which you have students make videos that demonstrate definitions in context. If you don’t the resources or classroom time for creating videos, you could have students search YouTube, Vimeo, Next Vista, and other video sites for videos that do demonstrate the meaning of their vocabulary terms.