Here I am, a full day late to the pub -- which is now empty. It's OK, I'll order a glass of champagne, And now a toast to 1) spousal unit's recent MRI: brain looks good, nothing left of the meningioma that was removed a couple of years back 2) managed to have a final quiz AND a party in class last night and decided a whole bunch of things to make the class better next year. First of all, I have to make them read my hubski-inspired blog Write Better Dammit early in the course and give them a quiz on it on the second week. Also after much debate with my co-teacher, I am going to make them buy a dictionary and teach them how to use it. Co-teacher is against it - she says they can look words up on their phones. Yeah, right -- really? Then why are there so many spelling mistakes? I'll have to write a blog on that during my Ramadan blogathon or sooner. 3) and a toast to the weather which will briefly be as high as 55 today.
I like the dictionary idea. Not because it will cut down on spelling mistakes -- anyone who is making spelling mistakes in the 21st century doesn't care about spelling, period. Sorry. A dictionary won't help. If you change something else, make spelling an emphasis of your class (which is a sad waste of time when you only have so many weeks to teach poetry and plays and beauty), then perhaps. Rather, the percent of your students who actually do look up words on their phones would benefit from looking them up in a dictionary instead. When you flip through a dictionary, your eyes wander. I will never forget the word 'epigone', because it's one of the "edge" words in the OSPD Scrabble dictionary. Every time you open a dictionary you learn an extra word or two, by nature. Hell, make them play Scrabble. Seriously.
Looking up words on the on-line dictionaries mostly give you the word you are looking up. The spelling mistakes are all compound words, hyphenated words, homonyms and words that spelling checkers mostly don't catch -- I know these are improving. As you say, dictionaries give a whole lot more. They have to write well because they are all doing research proposals that will give each of them $15K for their internships. That doubles what they would get otherwise. Their proposals are turned down if they are badly written, so cash motivates.