The 9th annual vocabulary video challenge hosted by The New York Times Learning Network is underway. The challenge asks middle school and high school students to create fifteen second videos about any of the nearly 2400 words on The New York Times Learning Network’s Word of the Day list (link opens a PDF). In their videos students need to properly pronounce their chosen words then provide definitions of their chosen words. 

The New York Times Learning Network provides this one page guide (link opens a PDF) for teachers to share with students who want to participate in the vocabulary challenge. 

Videos created for the vocabulary challenge have to be uploaded to YouTube and the link to the video has to be included in the submission form found on the Vocabulary Challenge website. This is a time to review the privacy and sharing options available in YouTube. Here’s my overview of settings to know when uploading to YouTube. And here’s a little tutorial on creating a custom thumbnail for YouTube videos. 

Take a look at this compilation of last year’s challenge-winning videos to get some inspiration for this year’s video contest.

Applications for Education


Even if your students don’t enter their videos into the contest, creating vocabulary videos can be a great learning activity for students. The tools that I’d use for making videos for this contest include ChatterPix, Adobe Spark, and WeVideo. Here’s my overview of how kids can use ChatterPix to create short videos.