tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58616422440492702392024-03-13T15:57:09.721-07:00Mobile ESLLearning and teaching ESL using cellphones, tablets and other mobile devices.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-19646570047025354112012-02-18T09:19:00.000-08:002012-02-18T09:19:14.740-08:00Livescribe Pen as a Feedback ToolIn a <a href="https://plus.google.com/109310290306060614500/posts/8uCvpvtVh4B" target="_blank">recent post</a> over on Google Plus, I asked for advice on any tool that would allow me to record and send feedback to students on their spoken English quickly and easily. I was thinking of using some kind of app on my mobile phone but <a href="https://plus.google.com/100313239117651840367/posts" target="_blank">Adrian Greig</a> suggested using a <a href="http://www.livescribe.com/uk/smartpen/echo/" target="_blank">Livescribe pen</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">Basically, the pen allows you to record both handwritten text and audio at the same time using a built in dictaphone/processor on the pen and special dotted paper. It's difficult to summarize here all the things it can do - and there are many - but it's most basic function is to make handwritten notes when listening in a lecture/meeting and then being able to listen back to precise bits of audio later by pressing on the words you wrote at the time that audio was being recorded. It's all incredibly clever...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CpfXY75r0ek/Tz_bDLF3v-I/AAAAAAAAbvw/bjxRA11mi5E/s1600/20120218_165523.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="287" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CpfXY75r0ek/Tz_bDLF3v-I/AAAAAAAAbvw/bjxRA11mi5E/s320/20120218_165523.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Livescribe pen and special notebook</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">To be honest, the dictaphone capabilities are nice but not essential for me, which is good because while the dictaphone is reasonably senstive, it cannot help picking up the scratching sound of the pen at the same time. This means that you have to strain a bit to follow speech because of this annoying scratchy sound in the background. It doesn't make the speech inaudible, it's just an irritating presence whenever you listen. </span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">For me, more important is the fact that I can use the Livescribe to take handwritten notes in class, write a quick command on the paper (e.g. Google Docs, Email) and when I next connect it to the computer, it will automatically send it to whatever service I specified. This is great for being able to send error corrections to a shared Google Docs folder or emailing it to a specific student for review. The file is sent as a PDF, so nice and easy for anyone to open (<a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B1Tlqted5cigMTBjMGVmMTQtZjkyMS00NTlkLTgzNjQtY2NhODlhNGRmNDIw&hl=en_US" target="_blank">here is an example</a> of a couple of test pages I did)</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">I tried it in class last week with one group and it worked well. I could just walk round and make notes as I usually do on students' spoken performance, but then I was able to send those comments to them individually fairly quickly afterwards. Sending pages to individual emails is a bit of a faff, you have to scroll through a list of predetermined names/emails on the small pen screen and then select. This was ok with one small class, but it would become unwieldy with lots of classes/student email addresses to scroll through. Thinking about it now, the best way is to probably transfer the notes to Google docs and then share them with individual students. </span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">I've only tested this once, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it could prove a useful tool in the classroom. I've always felt that I don't provide enough individual feedback to students on their classroom performance, and time has always been my excuse. This might make it a bit easier to share individual comments with them.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The only other thing to be aware of is that you do need to buy special notepads that the pen can recognise and have the special commands built into them. They aren't too expensive - a pack of four A5 notebooks cost £10 - but you do need to go to specialist shops to get them or buy them online. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0pduOwyNm6g/Tz_cvG9L3iI/AAAAAAAAbwA/7BOxlKSGuuU/s1600/20120218_165608.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0pduOwyNm6g/Tz_cvG9L3iI/AAAAAAAAbwA/7BOxlKSGuuU/s320/20120218_165608.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The commands at the bottom of the notepads</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br style="background-color: white;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">If anyone has any questions about the Livescribe, feel free to ask them in the comments below.</span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-29093843012240588462012-01-17T22:33:00.000-08:002012-01-17T22:37:09.094-08:00ESL Video reviews and Getting Started GuideOver the last few weeks I've posted up a few video reviews of ESL apps on my <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/104997838701375582134/104997838701375582134/posts" target="_blank">Google+ page</a>. First up is an excellent flashcard app for Android called <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.acj0.flashcardsbuddyproa&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5hY2owLmZsYXNoY2FyZHNidWRkeXByb2EiXQ.." target="_blank">Flashcard Buddy Pro</a>:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/5MqLEboSvT8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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There is a <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.acj0.flashcardsbuddydemo&feature=related_apps#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEwOSwiY29tLmFjajAuZmxhc2hjYXJkc2J1ZGR5ZGVtbyJd" target="_blank">full demo version</a> available if you want to try it out for a limited time. I also reviewed <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=org.vocab.android.bookshelf&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm9yZy52b2NhYi5hbmRyb2lkLmJvb2tzaGVsZiJd" target="_blank">Karaoke4English</a> (both iOS/Android), an interesting app that combine reading/audio versions of text and vocabulary revision.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/TuN3imdIdCc?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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I also reviewed <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.testsstore.app.peg0&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS50ZXN0c3N0b3JlLmFwcC5wZWcwIl0." target="_blank">Practice English Grammar 1</a> for Android. <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/SEw7uIYcox8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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I also made some suggestions for getting started with mobile learning at the beginning of term:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Suggestions for getting started with Mobile Learning</b></span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">If your school/college/university has wireless, find out how to connect smartphones to it and go through it or print it out for students. This ensures that they are able to connect to the internet during the lesson.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> </span></span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">recommend useful apps to students to install on their smartphones that will help them learn English. You can get suggestions from this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/EnglishApp" target="_blank">facebook page</a></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> . I have also created a <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rFc_wVzARiA0IIzhQRWmPsrJnivL7yl1eE0R6dAKb2I/edit?hl=en_US#slide=id.p" target="_blank">Google presentation</a> with some suggestions for ESL apps</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">. There are also several blogs where you can find out about education apps: <a href="http://appsineducation.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Apps in Education</a>, <a href="http://mobiletechlearning.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Mobile Tech Learning</a>, <a href="http://ieducationappsreview.ning.com/" target="_blank">Education Apps Review</a></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">or <a href="http://www.android4schools.com/" target="_blank">Android 4 Schools</a></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> . These sites are not specifically about ESL, but many of the apps are relevant for ESL students. </span></span></li>
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<li><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(suggested by <a href="http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/rob-lewis/ten-ideas-mobile-learning" target="_blank">Rob Lewis</a>) To get students familiar using their phones in class, get them to note down homework/test dates etc on the calendar on their phones.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">devote a section of a lesson to students looking at their own/each other’s mobile phones, exploring what functions they have (e.g. internet, radio, voice recorder) and discussing how they could be used to improve their English.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> </span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">encourage them to use dictionaries on their smartphones to quickly look up words. <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-free-esl-dictionary-apps-for.html" target="_blank">Here</a> is a blog post I wrote about free dictionary apps for android (though many of them are also available for iphone) </span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">set up a <a href="https://posterous.com/" target="_blank">Posterous blog</a> for them to contribute to as a class. Add their email addresses so they can contribute and then they can send pictures/text directly from their mobile phone. Get them to tell you about their weekends for discussion on Monday morning.</span></span></li>
</ul>
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I hope you enjoy these summary updates. Please circle <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/104997838701375582134/104997838701375582134/posts" target="_blank">my Google+ page</a> if you want these as they are published.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-9271858348058739482011-12-29T10:51:00.000-08:002011-12-29T10:51:03.170-08:00Video Reviews of ESL AppsAs I mentioned in <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2011/12/regular-posting-on-google-plus.html">a previous post</a>, I am now posting most of my ideas regarding mobile learning over on my <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/104997838701375582134/104997838701375582134/posts" target="_blank">Mobile ESL page at Google+</a>. However, I did say that I would update this blog with anything I felt was worth cross-posting. Over the last few weeks I've started to do video reviews of various ESL apps and I've been adding them to my page, but I thought I could also add them here.<br />
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<b>Review of Sounds: the Pronunciation App for Android/iOS</b></div>
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<b>Review of three Mingoville Apps for Android</b></div>
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<b>Review of IELTS Word Power</b> <b>for Android</b></div>
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I've also been compiling a list of the Best free ESL Apps available in a <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rFc_wVzARiA0IIzhQRWmPsrJnivL7yl1eE0R6dAKb2I/edit" target="_blank">Google Doc/Presentation</a>. If anyone would like to contribute to it, just let me know and I'll add you as an editor. </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-61288136548666620562011-12-04T16:02:00.001-08:002011-12-04T16:25:00.491-08:00Regular posting on Google PlusI've decided to temporarily shift over to <a href="https://plus.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Plus</a> to continue my blog posts on mobile learning. I've got plenty I want to write and say about the topic, but I would prefer to write shorter posts and more regularly as this would fit in with my working life.<br />
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When it comes to blogging, I prefer to write more in-depth posts but this is not always possible given my work commitments. So, I have created a brand page on Google Plus for this blog which you can find <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/104997838701375582134/104997838701375582134/posts" target="_blank">here</a>. I've already added a couple of short posts there (reviews of ESL idiom apps) and I'll try to update it on a much more regular basis than I've been able to do here.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FkW7G9xj8kc/TtwPFd1ttqI/AAAAAAAAak4/b5iHeyRr2T8/s1600/mobile+esl+google+plus+page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="377" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FkW7G9xj8kc/TtwPFd1ttqI/AAAAAAAAak4/b5iHeyRr2T8/s640/mobile+esl+google+plus+page.jpg" width="570" /></a></div>
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I chose Google Plus because it does allow longer posts than Twitter and I'd also like to take advantage of things like the Hangouts feature later on to hold informal webinars/discussions on the topic of mobile learning.<br />
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I do have my own Google Plus page, but that's for many other links/thoughts not connected to mobile learning so I wanted to create a dedicated page where I could just focus on that topic. This is very much an experiment, but I'm fascinated to see how well it works.<br />
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I haven't completely abandoned this blog. When I have something more substantial to say and I have the time to sit down and write it, I'll post it here. And I'll also try to compile a summary of my Google Plus posts here every few weeks.<br />
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So please, come on over to <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/104997838701375582134/104997838701375582134/posts" target="_blank">this page</a>, put me in a circle and I'll give regular updates on the use of mobile learning in ESL.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-75825491292649472132011-10-16T03:51:00.000-07:002011-10-16T03:51:49.743-07:00A subtle change in mobile use in the classroom<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.7440939298830926" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I haven't had a chance to blog over the last month or so. The start of term, an online course I was taking and an impending British Council inspection at our centre all conspired against me.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I haven't had much time to try any mobile stuff out in class - however, what I have noticed is a very subtle but noticeable change in the way that teachers and students use their mobile devices for learning. First off, from an, institutional perspective, there seems a lot more tolerance towards students using their phones in class. In fact, we are no longer buying paper dictionaries at school since the management realized that students tend to either use their phones or electronic dictionaries in class. This is very heartening.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, students seem much more at home using these devices in class and there's considerably less frivolous use of them. In the past I felt I had to monitor them a little more to make sure they weren't playing games, sending text messages to friends, but this seems to happen less and less now. Students seem much more responsible in their use of them. They also seem much more aware of what their devices can do. In the past - even those who owned iphones or android phones - were often unaware that you could download apps for them. Now it seems they are very aware of the apps available for them and many of them have found a range of apps - such as dictionaries, note-taking apps - that can help them with their English learning.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This was brought home the other day when I wanted them to record themselves giving a short presentation about their hometown using the voice recorder app on their phone. In the past I've needed to spend time in class helping them find the app, going through how to use it and then send the audio file to themselves so they can upload it to our class website later. This time there was very little guidance needed, one student needed a colleague to help him find the function on the phone, but the rest found it immediately, recorded themselves and uploaded it with little fuss.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And this is nothing to do with any training I might have given students in the past. These are all new students at the school but they’ve adapted very quickly to using their mobile devices in the classroom. And it’s also noticeable just how many of them now have smartphones. Last year, about 60-70% of the class had smartphones, this year I would say it’s closer to 90%. This has made it a lot easier to recommend apps during class. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think smartphones and mobile devices are slowly becoming part of the furniture in the classroom, just as the computer did before it. I think this year will be a great opportunity to see how far I can push students to use their own devices both inside and outside the classroom. </span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-32093239201676053852011-08-14T12:48:00.000-07:002011-08-14T22:37:33.627-07:00The Greatest (and Cheapest) Mobile Gadget - the Post-It Note<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.7781605359632522" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It struck me the other day that while I am somewhat obsessive about technology in the classroom, my favourite mobile device is something decidedly low-tech: the post-it note. While I'm quite happy to go in to my lessons without my mobile phone, my laptop or my tablet, I would never go into my class without a small stack of post-it notes. This blog post is a short hymn of praise to the cheapest and most versatile gadget available. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J8Oc0nbDdFo/TkgkpGd7w2I/AAAAAAAAWtI/k9AdL_1a6z8/s1600/buy-now-post-it-notes-150-p.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J8Oc0nbDdFo/TkgkpGd7w2I/AAAAAAAAWtI/k9AdL_1a6z8/s400/buy-now-post-it-notes-150-p.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How can the post-it note be used in class? Well, here are some of the ways I use them on a daily basis.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>....write my lesson plans on</b>. I'm not a big one for writing lesson plans down these days, but my memory is so flakey that I do need to write down a few notes of the things we need to do in class. A post-it note is perfect for that, and it's doubly useful because I can stick it somewhere I might actually see it, such as on the edge of my computer monitor or smartboard. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>.....group students</b>. Either by writing down numbers on them and then getting them to find the person/people with the same number or by using different colored post-it notes and they have to find the people with the same color. Or combine the two (if you have large groups), where they have to find people with the same color AND number </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>....give feedback during the lesson.</b> When students are engaged in speaking tasks/discussions, if I hear something that needs to be corrected, I will often write it down on a post-it note and then stick it on the desk of the person it applies to. They really appreciate that personal attention and it also doesn't disrupt the conversation they are having. I also use it for noting down mistakes/interesting things heard during monitoring for later discussion/feedback. </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>...Give students choice about whether they want feedback or not</b>. So I will give them a couple of post-it notes, they put either a cross or tick on it, then they choose one of them to stick on the desk and that decides whether they want the teacher to intervene and correct or not when they are speaking in groups. </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to...</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>... Play a variety of warm-up activities</b>. Such as Snowball, when students write some personal information on a post-it note, screw it up and then throw it around the class. They then pick one up, read it out and people have to guess who it is. </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>...Help with pronunciation practice</b>. One common activity I do is to put the stress pattern of the word on one post-it notes, the word on another. Do this with a lot of words, give out the post-it notes randomly then students have to walk round the classroom either saying their word or humming the stress pattern. They have to find their partner in the class. </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>….Help remember names in the first few lessons.</b> Quick and easy way to help remember names, get them to stick them on their chest with a post-it note and gradually remove them as you remember them! </span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I use them to.... </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>…..Check understanding of the lesson/training session</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Sometimes I give students/trainees several colored post-it notes and when giving a presentation or some information to them, they can hold up different colors depending on whether they understand or not (e.g. blue means I understand, green means I don't understand, red means I have a question to ask. </span></span></b></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am looking forward to a paperless future in the classroom, but I don't plan on giving up my post-it notes anytime soon. </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-73428576187506331222011-08-05T12:54:00.000-07:002011-08-05T12:54:50.556-07:00QR Codes in the ESL ClassroomOver the last few weeks I've been training a group of Korean teachers here in the UK as part of a development programme organised by their Ministry of Education. As <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26960/?ref=rss">it's been recently announced</a> that Korean schools will be completely digital by the year 2015 and all textbooks will be replaced by tablets or laptops, I've been exposing them to a variety of different technologies and web 2.0 tools to help them see how they might apply them in their own classroom context.<br />
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Among the tools we've used are <a href="http://posterous.com/groups">Posterous Groups</a> as a way for them to share pictures and experiences; <a href="https://docs.google.com/">Google Docs</a> as a way of sharing materials and handouts; we've also discussed the value of digital storytelling via various web 2.0 tools and they all created a <a href="http://voicethread.com/">Voicethread</a> in one of the sessions.<br />
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In the classroom I've been actively encouraging them to use their mobile devices, either smartphones, tablets or laptops as a means of checking words or as a way of finding information out about the topic we're discussing.<br />
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One thing I decided to try on this course was the use of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code">QR Codes</a> as a form of peripheral learning. These are basically barcodes that can be read by mobile phones and contain embedded information that the phone can decode. It can be a link to a webpage, a chunk of text, an SMS message, a calendar event, pretty much anything you can think of. Most mobile phones have free QR code reader apps available for them. For example on Android, you can download <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=la.droid.qr&feature=search_result">QR Droid</a> (my personal favourite), <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=tw.com.quickmark&feature=search_result">QuickMark BarCode Scanner</a> or <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.connvision.mobileaccessor.android&feature=search_result">BeeTag QR Reader</a>. On iPhone there is <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/qr-reader-for-iphone/id368494609?mt=8">QR Reader</a>, <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/qr-scanner/id377643590?mt=8">QR Scanner</a> and numerous others. To actually create a QR Code there are various websites, my personal favourite for ease of use is <a href="http://qrdroid.com/generate">QR Droid</a>. it took my a matter of seconds to create the QR Code below, which contains a link to this blog.<br />
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<img alt="QrDroid" height="350px" src="http://qr.ai/qxiju" width="350px" /><br />
I'd never really been impressed by the idea of QR Codes, I'd read a lot of things on the web about them but it always seemed quite a complicated procedure to extract a fairly simple piece of information such as a weblink or a calendar event. The old proverb about using a hammer to crack a nut came to mind.<br />
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However, after reading this <a href="http://www.khogg.com/index.php/7-education/2-qr-code-scavenger-hunt-with-esl-students">excellent article by Kimberley Hogg</a> explaining how she used QR Codes to create a direction-based treasure hunt with her ESL students I decided to give them a go. By the way, the advice she gives in her article about how to accustom students to using these codes is really fantastic, I strongly recommend you read the article to find out more.<br />
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I decided against preparing a structured activity with the teachers, instead I decided to just put lots of codes around on the wall with different information embedded in them. For example, some of them were links to instructional You Tube videos about teaching, some linked to our online course documents and others were part of a quiz on Britain I'd created for them. I put ten questions on different QR Codes around the room and they had to use their phone to decode it and find the question. Once they'd done that, they had to find the answer, then send the correct answers to our group blog. Below is one example of what they saw on the wall.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x5QLUGEE-3U/Tjw4e8PCBAI/AAAAAAAAVsA/8BhzmwL7_LQ/s1600/QR+Codes+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="398" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x5QLUGEE-3U/Tjw4e8PCBAI/AAAAAAAAVsA/8BhzmwL7_LQ/s400/QR+Codes+pic.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Most of them were not familiar with QR Codes, so I helped them download the relevant app and then explained how they could read them. On each paper on the wall I included some information about the app they needed to download.<br />
<br />
I wasn't really expecting much interest from the teachers, but I was pleasantly surprised just how many actually downloaded an app and read the codes. In fact, when one of the quiz questions was removed from the wall (by mistake I think), several of them came up to me and asked me to print it out again and put it back up. When I asked them why they liked doing the tasks with the QR Codes, they said things like, 'it's different', 'mysterious', 'a puzzle'.<br />
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And really, that is the appeal of them I think. In the end all I'd created on the wall was a series of normal quiz questions but the QR Codes made the process much more appealing to the teachers. How long the novelty will last is difficult to tell, but it definitely is still a novelty for most students so we might as well exploit that while we can!<br />
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<b>Possible uses in the ESL Classroom </b><br />
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Here are some ways that I think QR Codes could be used in the classroom:<br />
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<ul><li>As I did with my group, posting up questions to answer. These could be language questions on vocabulary/grammar etc, general knowledge questions or discussion questions. Students could be encouraged to create their own QR Code questions as well. </li>
<li>Posting up answers to homework</li>
<li>Creating a treasure or scavenger hunt. Students are sent to one QR Code, they are provided a clue which then takes them to another. The individual or group that finishes first is the winner. This would be particular good for practising things like direction language. </li>
<li>Embedding links in QR Codes to useful websites for students to visit to improve their English. </li>
<li>Posting up calendar events that are taking place in the school. </li>
</ul><div><br />
</div><div>I think there are many other possibilities, these are just a few that spring to mind. In researching about QR Codes, I found a few online resources very helpful. </div><div><br />
</div><div><ul><li><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_pnz1blXnoTT9sHU4cngKMhJBmmgUZMs_0obnn2X-_4/edit?hl=en_US">This Google Document</a> (not sure of the source exactly) provides lots of useful links to sites that can help you with QR Codes</li>
<li>Tom Barrett's <a href="https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_765hsdw5xcr&revision=_latest&start=0&theme=blank&authkey=COX05IsF&cwj=true&pli=1&ndplr=1">40 Interesting Ways to Use to QR Codes in the Classroom</a> is not specifically designed for ESL groups but has loads of interesting ways they can be used. </li>
<li><a href="http://www.scoop.it/t/qr-codes-for-learning">This Scoop It page</a> curated by Diane Rees links to lots of articles discussing the use of QR Codes in education. </li>
</ul></div><div>I plan to use them a lot more in the coming term and get feedback from students as to how interesting/useful they find them. I would love to hear from any ESL teachers who are using them to learn more about how they can be used to enhance language learning. </div><div><br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-26136376278211224902011-07-10T12:18:00.001-07:002011-07-10T12:18:16.602-07:00Google+ in the ESL classroom?<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the last few weeks <a href="https://plus.google.com/109310290306060614500/posts">Google+</a> has got a lot of publicity, the new social network from the search experts which looks to go up against Facebook. As a heavy Google user - I use Gmail, Reader, Documents, Maps, Sites and Calendar on a daily basis - the possibility of a social service that will ultimately integrate all these features is very attractive. I do have a Facebook account - and let's face it, who doesn’t these days - but it’s not something that I use on a regularly basis, I find the endless stream of pokes and virtual gifts and info about people’s exploits on Farmville dull and annoying. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The problem at the moment with Google+ is that it’s difficult to actually get a chance to use it, it’s in limited beta and you need an invite to join. Luckily though I managed to get one and I’ve been trying it out over the last few days. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xgdrO4SJ1_Q/ThnkZsW6AmI/AAAAAAAASE0/oDv85tA87Pg/s1600/my+Google+plus+about+page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="322" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xgdrO4SJ1_Q/ThnkZsW6AmI/AAAAAAAASE0/oDv85tA87Pg/s400/my+Google+plus+about+page.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My 'about' page on Google+</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whenever I look at a new web 2.0 tool these days, my first question is always: how could this be used with my students? Just from a very sketchy, limited use of Google Plus I think that it could offer more to the classroom than either Facebook or Twitter. Both of these tools do have their place, but the limited group functionality on both of them do set limits on their use in education. I’m always looking for tools that will allow me to work just with my group and to protect their and my privacy along the way. Twitter’s default public setting makes that difficult while Facebook seems to require you to share too much of your private life with students to create a group. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, I’m going to look at the features of Google+ that I think could have specific applications to the ESL classroom as well as discuss some of the limitations. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">What Google+ can offer to the classroom</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Circles</b></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Circles is the central feature of Google+. It is a clever filter that allows you to easily put your friends, acquaintances into groups (‘circles’) and then decide what information you choose to share with them. There are certain default groups (friends, family etc) but you can create as many new circles as you want with whatever name you choose. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4ww50vzTMJo/ThntkssHftI/AAAAAAAASFQ/V7Nl1MBXpfU/s1600/Google+plus+circles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="175" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4ww50vzTMJo/ThntkssHftI/AAAAAAAASFQ/V7Nl1MBXpfU/s400/Google+plus+circles.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The page where you organise your circles</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you post something, you can easily choose to share it with an individual, a particular group or group of groups or to make it completely public. Also, when viewing other people’s posts, you can choose to see information just from a particular group. In Google’s language these posts are called your ‘stream’ and you can filter by clicking on the appropriate group on the left.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think the benefits of this for the classroom are obvious. Being able to create a group just for your students and then share documents, information and links just with them is very useful. Even better, you can share on a more global or specific level with your groups. You might want to share a post with all your groups if it’s relevant to all your students - for example, you’ve found a particular link that would be useful to all of them - or you might just want to send a message/post to one group. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, this is not really anything new. <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/04/edmodo-educational-alternative-to.html">In a previous post I talked about Edmodo</a>, a social network designed specifically for education, where you can do exactly the same thing. You can create numerous class groups and then share information with either individuals, groups or everyone.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AciNWeM_KJo/Thnu3bw3tTI/AAAAAAAASFc/WT0LbrgGKzo/s1600/Edmodo+sharing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AciNWeM_KJo/Thnu3bw3tTI/AAAAAAAASFc/WT0LbrgGKzo/s400/Edmodo+sharing.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are other similar online services such as <a href="https://www.schoology.com/home.php">Schoology</a>, <a href="http://www.twiducate.com/">Twiducate</a> and <a href="http://wiggio.com/">Wiggio</a> where I would imagine you can do very similar things. Also, these specific educational networks tend to have better integration of things like document sharing, assignment submission than more generic social networks such as Facebook. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So why might you want to use Google+ rather than these tailor-made services? A couple of reasons spring to mind: </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, it creates a one-stop shop for personal/educational networking. Students can easily flip between their social streams and their educational streams without having to leave a particular website and go log in somewhere else. One of the biggest problems I have with using web 2.0 tools with my students is that they constantly require students to register for different websites, remember their passwords and then remember to go there to check whether anything new is happening. Actually getting students to go to the website you’ve asked them to is often the biggest issue. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, getting them to go to Facebook is less of an issue - when I take them to the computer rooms at our school, their reflex action once they open up the browser is to check their Facebook page. If Google+ gained some traction as a social network, students would be able to go to this one place for both their personal and class interaction. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, whether this mixing of social and educational interaction is something people want is debatable. What I do think people want though is simplicity and if one site allows you to clearly separate and blend (if you want to) your personal and educational connections, I think that would be very attractive. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Hangouts</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a hipsterish name, but basically Hangouts is group video chat. You can invite members of your circles to chat using their webcam and you can have up to ten people in the group. There is also a text chat option available so you can share documents/links etc and a special option to share You Tube videos. I haven’t really had the chance to try this out as I’ve only been on Google+ for a few days and not many people I know have invites but I can see some possibilities for education.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FL15bvBYFtg/Thn1NBUepZI/AAAAAAAASFs/6OloXeZSYNE/s1600/google+hangout+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="353" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FL15bvBYFtg/Thn1NBUepZI/AAAAAAAASFs/6OloXeZSYNE/s400/google+hangout+pic.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My very lonely Hangout</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The fact that it can handle ten people in a chat means that small class discussions/seminars are possible. Students themselves could also use it for discussions if working in groups. Although it hasn’t been implemented yet, I’m pretty sure that at some point there will be a chance to work on a Google Doc while having a video discussion in a Hangout making the process of collaborative work much more interesting. At the moment, I believe that it’s not possible to just view a hangout (i.e. just watch others talking with the option for individuals to temporarily join) but again this should come in the future and would be great for large group webinars/discussions. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Again, none of these features are particularly revolutionary, there are many services such as Adobe Connect, Elluminate, Go to Meeting where you can have group video discussions and online seminars, but they can be expensive and complicated to set up. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where I think Google+ might add an extra dimension is in the integration of all the other Google services such as Search, Maps, Documents, Photos. The possibility of using all these wonderful and familiar free tools within a group video chat is one that as a teacher I would really welcome. </span></div></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Mobile integration</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given the title of the blog, I’m naturally interested to know to what extent Google+ will work on mobile devices. As you might expect, there is an app already available for Google’s own mobile OS, Android, and one coming very soon for the iphone. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The app for Android is very nice, most of the things available on the web are available here, the most obvious omission though being the Hangout function - most phones struggle with one person in video chat let alone ten. In its place they have the unique (to the phone app at least) Huddles, which is a group text chat feature. Rather like Hangouts you can invite individuals or circles to participate in the chat. One limitation is that you can only create a Huddle on phones, it’s not possible for one person to be chatting on his/her phone while others are on their computer. However, I would imagine that is something that will come in the near future. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EYb8_QkuJfw/Thn3DHeVfGI/AAAAAAAASF4/9bJ9ahWaH6I/s1600/screenshot_3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EYb8_QkuJfw/Thn3DHeVfGI/AAAAAAAASF4/9bJ9ahWaH6I/s400/screenshot_3.png" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Android app homescreen</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sharing from your phone to Google+ is incredibly easy, webpages, pictures, notes can be easily posted to your stream. Android has always done sharing so much better than the iphone and this is a perfect example. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Potential issues with Google+</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At such an early stage, it’s very difficult to be overly critical of Google+, it’s still in beta, things are being changed all the time and I’m sure many new features will be implemented in the coming months. However, in terms of widespread adoption in education there are some potential drawbacks. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>The Facebook Factor</b></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enough said really. So many people are committed to their Facebook profile, have built up so many friends and photo albums over quite a long period of time that they may have no interest in joining another social network and may feel resentful if their teacher asks them to. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other possibility is that Facebook may implement features that make it equally compelling for educational purposes. They’ve recently integrated Skype video chat - albeit only one on one - and there may be other features on the way that will make moving to Google+ unnecessary. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Google account issues</b></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I’ve discovered when trying to use Google services with my students, there is a lot of confusion surrounding Google accounts. People naturally assume that to have a Google account means having a Gmail account, but that’s not true. You can have a Google account using any email address, however signing up for Gmail will automatically give you a Google account. You would be surprised how difficult it is to explain this to students!</span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is also the additional problem of Google Apps, the specialized service Google run for businesses and educational establishments. For example, my university use Gmail for their email and we have our own domain name in our email addresses (@sheffield.ac.uk). Along with email, students and staff also get access to other limited Google services such as Calendar, Docs, Reader and Sites, but NOT things like Maps or Photos. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have personally had issues when trying to share things from my personal Google account with my students Google apps accounts. For example I have tried to share Google Docs with them and this seems to cause some issues which mean they can’t access them. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, what is going to happen with all these Universities and Colleges that use Google for their email? Will Google+ be available for students using those email addresses? Are there going to be issues when a student tries to sign up for Google+ using their Google-provided email address? I don’t know if Google have thought these issues through, but they are essential to sort out if they want schools and colleges to use it. </span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Final thoughts...</b></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.5899558407254517" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m impressed by Google+ and I can see a lot of potential there on both a personal and professional level. Just on a personal level I’ve been wanting to get out of Facebook for a while now and this gives me the perfect opportunity. On a professional level I’m very interested to explore how Google+ can be used both for my own development through contact with other teachers but also how it could be used with students to increase their involvement and interaction with the English language and with each other. Over the summer I have a group of teachers coming over from Korea for a teacher training/language development course and I’m going to see if any of them wish to sign up for Google+ and take part in a trial run to see how it might work with students. I’ll let you know how it goes...</span></span></div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-46088230303839698422011-05-30T02:17:00.000-07:002011-05-30T02:18:18.584-07:00My own language learning via mobileI haven't posted for a while, there really hasn't been much chance to integrate mobile learning in my lessons with a succession of holidays and a focus on getting students ready for their end of term exams. And I won't be teaching for a while as we go into a break before the summer school we run at our centre. <br />
<br />
So, I thought I'd try to apply some of these ideas about using mobile devices to my own learning and to see how effective they can be. In previous posts I had mentioned how I'd used various apps/techniques to learn Russian, but it's not something I've kept up regularly (to my shame). But I really do need to learn Russian better. My wife is from Kyrgyzstan and her first language is Russian, and we would really like our six year old son to be bilingual. However, living in England it's very difficult to expose him to Russian on a regular basis and the amount of Russian he can use/understand is gradually diminishing. So, we would like to increase how much is spoken at home to help him with this, but that can only really happen if I learn more Russian and get comfortable using it around the house. <br />
<br />
My Russian is pretty poor, elementary in reading, speaking and listening while my writing is non-existant (and not really a priority for me). I've gone through periods of real enthusiasm for studying the language as well as times when I've completely abandoned it. My ulterior motive in blogging about this now is that I want to shame myself into keeping this up, if I make it public and promise to update my blog about it, maybe I'll not abandon it as I've done before. <br />
<br />
The other reason is I want to get a greater sense of how these mobile tools can be used by my students and to put myself in their position. How easy is it to use mobile devices to learn languages? What apps are the best to use? My initial plan is to use the following devices and apps for my language learning: <br />
<br />
For learning and memorising vocabulary, I plan to use a variety of flashcard apps and switch between them to see which one is most useful. I'll use <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ichi2.anki&feature=search_result">Ankidroid Flashcards</a>, <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kakamukaka.flashcards&feature=search_result">Kaka Flashcards</a> and <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.elibera.android.flashcard&feature=search_result">Vocabulary Trainer for Gdocs</a> and after a few weeks decide which one I like best. <br />
<br />
For general Russian, I've bought the <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.transparent.android.byki.RussianEnglish&feature=search_result">Byki Russian</a> app from the Android Market, this has a variety of features, vocabulary, flashcards, video etc and syncs with a desktop app where you can create vocabulary lists. <br />
<br />
For listening I've subscribed to a couple of Russian speaking podcasts, one from the BBC called <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/best-utro-na-bbc-from-bbcrussian/id303767175">'Utro Na BBC'</a>, which is not specifically a language learning podcast but the presenter does speak quite slowly so is quite useful for a low-level learner. <br />
<br />
For checking vocabulary I've installed <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.socialnmobile.colordict&feature=search_result">ColorDict Dictionary Translate</a>, a free app I tried out recently and was impressed by.<br />
<br />
For speaking, well, luckily I have a native speaker at home who can help me with that!<br />
<br />
Anyhow, I'll blog regularly on my progress and add any other apps/programs I've found useful in helping me with my Russian.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-16156825058642306552011-04-19T04:39:00.000-07:002011-04-19T04:39:28.121-07:00Presentation on mobile learningJust wanted to draw your attention to an excellent presentation on mobile learning given by Neil Ballantyne at the IATEFL Conference in Brighton recently. He gives a great overview of the subject and looks at some specific uses by students.<br />
<br />
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="437" height="347" id="viddler"><param name="movie" value="http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/4276629b" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="flashvars" value="fake=1"/><embed src="http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/4276629b" width="437" height="347" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" flashvars="fake=1" name="viddler" ></embed></object>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-30527355926435111372011-04-18T16:01:00.000-07:002011-04-18T16:01:56.474-07:00Android and Apple: tablets in the ESL classroom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>In <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/07/role-of-ipad-in-esl.html">previous posts</a> I have been very positive about the role that the iPad could play in ESL education. The nature of the tablet form factor and the so-simple-a-child-could-use-it interface makes it a wonderful tool for bringing technology into the classroom and offering many new ways for students to interact with each other and with the language. You only have to <a href="http://www.ipadineducation.co.uk/iPad_in_Education/Welcome.html">look</a> <a href="http://www.iear.org/">around</a> <a href="http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit/26195">the</a> <a href="https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AclS3lrlFkCIZGhuMnZjdjVfNzIxZ2RrNWp0ZDg&hl=en_GB&authkey=CIOQva4N">internet</a> to realise that I’m not the only one that thinks that way. Ipad adoption by schools and teachers is growing daily and the variety of use case scenarios expanding all the time. <br />
<br />
But..and it is a big ‘but’, the iPad is very, very expensive, certainly beyond the reach of many individuals and also beyond the budgets of many schools. Until recently there hasn’t been any significant alternatives, but now we are beginning to see many more tablets come onto the market, particularly ones running Google’s Android operating system. The Android tablets that have been available so far have not been particularly usable, largely because Google hadn’t designed an Operating System that was specifically for tablets, but now they have released one called Honeycomb and we’re beginning to see tablets appear on the market with the new tablet-optimised OS installed on it.<br />
<br />
And I’ve bought one. Probably shouldn’t have but it was just too tempting, particularly as the one I got comes with an integrated keyboard that means it can double as a fairly decent netbook replacement (and finding a way to type effectively on a tablet is one of the biggest hurdles to wider adoption in my view). It’s called the <a href="http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=gHh4q7I8dvWJzhdV">Asus Eee Pad Transformer</a> and is currently only available in the UK - and at the moment without the keyboard that makes it compelling, but that will be available soon. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Reko8FmZo8k/Tayx9PG7nlI/AAAAAAAANFI/kEe3CW8OG74/s1600/2011-04-18+22.40.46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Reko8FmZo8k/Tayx9PG7nlI/AAAAAAAANFI/kEe3CW8OG74/s400/2011-04-18+22.40.46.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My new toy<br />
<br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sAZ2friTzLc/TayxxLuAAaI/AAAAAAAANE8/YKhZPxpwrCU/s1600/2011-04-18+22.40.04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sAZ2friTzLc/TayxxLuAAaI/AAAAAAAANE8/YKhZPxpwrCU/s400/2011-04-18+22.40.04.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My old toy and my new toy</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
So, I thought this might be a chance to do a quick rundown of the pros/cons of using Android tablets in the ESL classroom. Why might teachers/students/schools choose these over the iPad? Can it offer anything that the Apple device doesn’t? Here’s a quick rundown...<br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Good........</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><i>Cost</i></b><br />
<br />
Actually, at the moment there isn’t a huge difference between the price of an iPad and a higher-end Android device. The cheapest version of the iPad 2 is only £399 while I picked up my Asus tablet for £379, so hardly a massive saving there. But - just as with Android mobile phones - a huge range of tablets will be coming onto the market in a variety of shapes/sizes and at a variety of price points. Expect to see this price come down very rapidly. Also, if schools are willing to put up with an older operating system and a little less functionality, they can pick up a basic Android tablet for as low as £120-150 pound. Of course it won’t be as slick as the iPad or as easy to use, but you will still get that basic form factor and also a lot of decent Google apps such as Google Maps and Gmail. The iPad, on the other hand, is unlikely to drop in price any time soon. <br />
<br />
<b><i>A variety of form factors</i></b><br />
<br />
The iPad comes in one size and that’s it. But with Android there are more options in terms of screen size and also the kinds of features/add-ons you can use with it. So, for example, you can get Android tablets with a 7” screen, an 8.9” screen or a larger 10” screen. Some of them come with special pens for drawing/writing with, others have better cameras on the front and the back. <br />
<br />
There are also more options for connecting cards/peripherals to Android tablets. For example many Android tablets come with some kind of memory card slot (such as micro SD or SD) for getting files/images/video on and off the device or they might have a USB port, meaning that you can plug in keyboards, mice or other USB peripherals. This might be particularly handy if students want to transfer images/videos/audio files they’ve recorded with a camera or mobile phone. This is much more difficult on the iPad. I’m constantly running up against the issue of how to get things on or off my iPad and I often give up in frustration. <br />
<br />
<b><i>Flash support</i></b><br />
<br />
Famously, the iPad doesn’t support Flash in its browser. This means that many sites that have Flash elements on their pages just won’t display on the iPad. Now, the iPad does get round this by having a vast number of dedicated apps that can often replace a website, but not for all of them, and many of the ones teachers use with their students still don’t have an app, or they do have an app but it has considerably reduced functionality. Android, on the other hand, has had Flash support for some time now and on most devices you can view Flash sites through the browser. <br />
<br />
To give you a couple of examples of this. I often use a site called <a href="http://voicethread.com/">Voicethread</a> with my students. This site enables students to create interactive slideshows with pictures, text and audio recordings and other students can watch them and add their own comments. It works wonderfully well in the ESL classroom - students can create personalised presentations on their family/country/job and share them with their classmates. However, there is no app for the iPad and you cannot view these slideshows through the iPad browser because they contain Flash (see pic).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7pQ-YlSXX9I/Tay9HlWYmYI/AAAAAAAANGk/vctExqF3Fyo/s1600/photo.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7pQ-YlSXX9I/Tay9HlWYmYI/AAAAAAAANGk/vctExqF3Fyo/s400/photo.PNG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What you see (or don't see) on the iPad</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<br />
Android on the other hand does a pretty good job of displaying them through the browser (see pic below) and while editing is less than perfect, it still is possible. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MwQL_nJVBzM/Tay2Fc2p1vI/AAAAAAAANFs/voJUpgF5BLI/s1600/P20110418225218.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MwQL_nJVBzM/Tay2Fc2p1vI/AAAAAAAANFs/voJUpgF5BLI/s400/P20110418225218.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What you see on the Android tablet</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<br />
Another good example is <a href="http://www.xtranormal.com/">Xtranormal</a>, a popular site used by many teachers with students to create short animated movies. Students can choose the settings, the characters, write the dialogue and then view and shaer what they've created.<br />
<br />
Again, you can’t view the full site on the iPad because of the lack of Flash. There is a mobile app for the iphone, but this is significantly less functional than the desktop version. On my Android tablet, however, I can access the full desktop site and use it exactly as I would on a PC.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x8fOPytuC74/Tay9VyJLCSI/AAAAAAAANGs/8tlbQtZlHAs/s1600/photo+%25282%2529.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x8fOPytuC74/Tay9VyJLCSI/AAAAAAAANGs/8tlbQtZlHAs/s400/photo+%25282%2529.PNG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ipad browser version (notice the Xtranormal sign where the video should be)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0nw9bXVqQiM/Tay2JeGh10I/AAAAAAAANF0/ArxJKH_nvvs/s1600/P20110418230047.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0nw9bXVqQiM/Tay2JeGh10I/AAAAAAAANF0/ArxJKH_nvvs/s400/P20110418230047.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And this is the fuller Android browser version</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
I know that there is a general move away from Flash in websites, but that is going to take quite a long time and at the moment many of the most popular ESL websites still contain a lot of flash elements.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Flexibility</i></b><br />
<br />
Much has been written about the ‘openness’ of Android in comparison with Apple’s operating system (iOS). I’m not that technically minded so I’m not sure whether Android is any more ‘open’ than iOS. However, I always feel that Android tablets/devices offer a lot more flexibility than Apple ones, particularly in sharing information and getting things on and off the device. So, for example, when I write a note or save a picture on the iPad my first instinct is to be able to access it so I can send it to another device, either my phone or my PC. Yet the options are very limited. The iPad doesn’t have any kind of file system and you cannot transfer files/pictures via bluetooth, so you often end up having to email it to yourself or sending it to a third-party option such as Dropbox. It feels very cumbersome in this day and age to have to resort to that. <br />
<br />
Conversely, Android has a wealth of options for getting stuff on and off the device. It has a file system just like on your PC and it’s very easy to move/send your stuff from one place on the device to another. Or to another device. I found this out this week when I was on holiday with my family. My wife had taken some pictures with her phone and we wanted to view them on a tablet. It was much easier to send them across to my Android tablet than it was to my iPad. Given that so much of what we do in class involves the sharing of created content (documents, images, video), it seems that Android wins out over the iPad in this respect. <br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Bad....</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><i>Usability </i></b><br />
<br />
Apple make incredibly slick and user friendly products and this is one of the key reasons for their success. Give a young child or old person the iPad and it will take them at most a few minutes to work out how to use it, even if they've never picked up a tablet before. This simplicity of use is a godsend in the classroom. Nothing can bring a lesson screeching to a halt faster than confusion about how to use a particular piece of technology or software programme. I've had lessons go belly up because students couldn't work out how to register for a site or find a particular setting (for some reason changing the volume on our computers at school is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, God knows why it should be so difficult).<br />
<br />
Android tablet - and smartphones - have a much steeper learning curve. They tend to use menus a lot more than Apple devices and it can be confusing to find what you are looking for at times. With the added flexibility of Android, you do get an unwelcome layer of complexity that could cause confusion for both the teacher and the students in the classroom and could lead to a lot of time wasted on troubleshooting the problems. And just the whole experience on Apple products is so much smoother. Things just work. You press an icon on the iPad and it does what you expect and it does it immediately. Android tends to be a lot less smooth, you might experience lag when swiping between screens or scrolling though the browser, programmes shut down more often without you wanting them too. For a teacher who may feel uncomfortable with technology, the iPad is probably going to be their choice every time.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Fragmentation</i></b><br />
<br />
This is probably the biggest criticism of the Android platform, the fact that so many of its devices are running on different versions of the Operating System. And often manufacturers add their own 'skin' on top of that OS to give it some differentiation from their competitors. What this means first off is that there can be problems of compability. You may want to download a fantastic app you've found for your students, but it may turn out that it won't run on the version of the OS installed on the students' devices. I'm having this problem with my Android tablet. There just haven't been that many apps designed for this new tablet OS and so a lot of them either don't work with it or don't use the screen space effectively. <br />
<br />
Apple on the other hand have a consistent user experience across their devices. If you've used an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will know how to use an iPad. All these devices run the same OS, so the compatability in terms of the apps you download is incredible. <br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Ugly...</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><i>Apps? What apps?</i></b><br />
<br />
And this leads us onto the biggest issue with Android tablets: the lack of apps. The iPad has tens of thousands of apps available for it, many of very high quality and many of them directed towards education and learning. Android tablets have very few available that have been optimised for a larger screen. Yes, you can use all the apps available for the Android smartphones, but they don't always scale very well and some of them just outright don't work. I'm not sure exactly what the figures are, but I know the iPad has somewhere in the region of 60000 apps available for it (and those have been designed specifically for that device) while the new Android tablet OS has somewhere in the region of 30-50. That's a big difference, and while that will definitely change in the coming months, the iPad clearly has a headstart in this respect and certainly is far better equipped for the classroom at the moment. <br />
<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Final thoughts</span></b><br />
<br />
There's no 'winner' here in terms of which tablet schools or individuals should choose for the classroom. In terms of breadth of software and ease of use, the iPad wins hands down. But Android is going to appeal to those people on a tighter budget, and the ability to share content more easily also makes it very attractive. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate in educational institutions over the next couple of years. The good thing though is that now there is more choice and the choice is going to get bigger every day in terms of finding the device that will work for your school or students.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-29223647795364900842011-03-19T13:36:00.000-07:002011-03-19T13:39:44.600-07:00Snapanda: interesting dictionary/camera app for AndroidIn <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-free-esl-dictionary-apps-for.html">my last post</a> I looked at various free dictionaries available for Android, and <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.edulang.snapanda&feature=search_result">Snapanda</a> is an interesting addition to the list while adding a fun twist.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g86EdhOmJgE/TYTpPSFRsCI/AAAAAAAAL48/z9a8LVqpn-0/s1600/screenshot_27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g86EdhOmJgE/TYTpPSFRsCI/AAAAAAAAL48/z9a8LVqpn-0/s400/screenshot_27.png" width="240" /></a></div><br />
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The app allows you to use your phone's camera to focus on a word - say on a menu, poster or any other text you have in front of you - and when you touch that word on the screen, it will recognise it and give you the option to look it up in the dictionary.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-HAY7EWAWcBw/TYTpTS5RKhI/AAAAAAAAL5A/GH7CBfBJ0O8/s1600/screenshot_30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-HAY7EWAWcBw/TYTpTS5RKhI/AAAAAAAAL5A/GH7CBfBJ0O8/s400/screenshot_30.png" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In the picture you can see I touched the word 'issue'. This took me a few goes admittedly. Sometimes it just recognises a letter or nothing at all and certain fonts or background colours seem to cause it problems, but it does work around 70-80% of the time and given that it's still in beta, that's not bad. The accuracy does also seem connected to how well focussed the camera is on the word and also the stillness of your hand when pressing on the word. My shaky middle-aged fingers might be the cause of some of the problems and maybe those of you with a steadier hand might fare better. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The actual dictionary section is fairly rudimentary, but at the same time well laid out and easy to read. It's not too technical and they have some decent examples. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u3og9_oOzY4/TYTpWf6NXUI/AAAAAAAAL5E/ahOlOiHtVAc/s1600/screenshot_31.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u3og9_oOzY4/TYTpWf6NXUI/AAAAAAAAL5E/ahOlOiHtVAc/s400/screenshot_31.png" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You can also click through to find some expressions/idioms related to the word and there's the option to add the word to a personalised word list. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XRKi6oEnhgk/TYTpY6V_UnI/AAAAAAAAL5I/kyHHlow1w60/s1600/screenshot_32.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XRKi6oEnhgk/TYTpY6V_UnI/AAAAAAAAL5I/kyHHlow1w60/s400/screenshot_32.png" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As you can see from the screenshots, the developers have gone for a bright and breezy look, not quite sure what about dictionaries screams 'panda' but what the hell, why not try to make dictionaries a little less dull. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Overall, I think it's a fun app, I would question whether it is actually faster than just typing a word into the dictionary and finding the meaning, but the 'aint this cool?' novelty factor might make English students use it more and learn words when they are on the street, in shops or restaurants. </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-59657653798026479182011-02-27T10:40:00.000-08:002011-02-27T11:51:59.471-08:00Review: free ESL dictionary apps for Android phones<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of days ago a student asked me to recommend a decent dictionary app for his iphone and I realised that I didn’t really know which one would be suitable for him. I know that <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mobisystems.msdict.embedded.wireless.handmark.oxford.dictionaryofenglish.full&feature=search_result">Oxford</a> and <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mobisystems.msdict.embedded.wireless.cambridge.cald.full&feature=search_result">Cambridge</a> have dictionary apps available for different platforms but I don’t know how good they are or which one I’d recommend over another. One big problem in finding this out is that they are normally quite expensive - often in the £10-15 range - and I don’t really want to spend that kind of money several times over comparison testing the different dictionaries. This is particularly true on the iphone/ipad as they don’t really have any kind of trial and refund policy, so once you’ve bought it that’s it. Android is slightly better since you do have a fifteen-minute window in which you can buy, try and then get the money refunded, but it’s not really enough time to really explore the dictionary in depth.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
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<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apart from these dictionaries from well known publishing companies, there are also some free dictionaries you can download. Actually, you don’t really download the dictionary as such since you can’t access the words when you are not online, instead these apps are just a front end for a variety of online dictionaries like </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://dictionary.com/">dictionary.com</a> and <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/">the Free Dictionary</a>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"> </span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><br />
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<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">So, I thought I’d do a quick post reviewing the dictionaries available for Android and then later do another one for iphone/ipad. The ones I’ve chosen to look at are:</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=org.freedictionary&feature=search_result">Free Dictionary org</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dictionary&feature=search_result">Dictionary com</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.socialnmobile.colordict&feature=search_result">Colordict dictionary translate</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mobisystems.msdict.embedded.wireless.wordnet">Advanced English and Thesaurus</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch&feature=search_result">The Free Dictionary</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of these - as some of the names already suggest - are free. I've decided to focus on these dictionaries because, well, they're free. I'm pretty sure the dictionary apps from companies like Longman, Oxford and Cambridge are excellent and have the obvious advantage of being available offline. But they are really expensive, and since many students already own a hard copy of these dictionaries, I would struggle to recommend them. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In reviewing these apps, I focused on what would make them accessible and useful to my esl students. Particularly, I focused on the following things: </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Features</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; white-space: pre-wrap;">does it have pronunciation models? Can you ‘favourite’ words you want to remember? Can you share words with other people? Is there a thesaurus?</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Language/usefulness:</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Are the definitions written in an accessible style with vocabulary that is not too challenging? Is the information relevant to the students (e.g. not a lot of information about the etymology of the word or obscure definitions)? Does it provide example sentences to show how the word is used?</span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Layout</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:</span></b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is it easy to navigate the dictionary and find what you want? Is the layout easy on the eye?</span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I used these over a couple of days and here are my comments below with some pictures to accompany each one so you get a sense of what they look like on the phone. </span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><u>Free Dictionary.org</u></span></b></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In one word: dreadful. I was immediately put off by the fact that if you write a word with a capital letter - which is something that a lot of keyboards do automatically - the dictionary refuses to identify and instead gives you alternative words it thinks you were searching for, a bit like the Google ‘did you mean......?’ correction. Normally the word you want is in that list but it’s an unnecessary extra step that is very annoying when you just want to quickly look up a word. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, the definitions seem to be aggregrated from various dictionaries, notably the Collaborative International Dictionary of English and they are not terribly well laid out or easy to understand. There are example sentences but they are buried within the definitions in the same font and colour and not always easy to find. </span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ypqGUwwi5zs/TWqW7w61HPI/AAAAAAAAL0Q/Qrt6ZT65jRU/s1600/freedictionaryorg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ypqGUwwi5zs/TWqW7w61HPI/AAAAAAAAL0Q/Qrt6ZT65jRU/s400/freedictionaryorg.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">A couple of neat things it does do: you can do a Google image search straight from the dictionary home page, helpful if the word you are looking for is an object of some kind. There is also a quiz option where you are given a random word and four definitions to select from. Nice, but the words are pretty high level and I can’t really see it being relevant for most ESL learners. </span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><u>The Free Dictionary</u> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Very similar name to the previous app but a much better dictionary. The layout is much nicer on the eye, it doesn’t do that irritating thing with the capital letters, and you get some clear example sentences in a different font/colour. You can also filter results by definition, thesaurus and translation and you have the option of viewing information about the word in Wikipedia and other specialist dictionaries such as legal or medical. Definitely one to recommend to students. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rVAqmza0szk/TWqXUwXV8mI/AAAAAAAAL0U/QiwplNwXn2U/s1600/the+free+dictionary.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rVAqmza0szk/TWqXUwXV8mI/AAAAAAAAL0U/QiwplNwXn2U/s400/the+free+dictionary.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><u>Advanced English and Thesaurus</u></b></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, it certainly lives up to its name, you have to be pretty damn advanced to use this dictionary given the language it uses and the way it’s laid out. You can see from the screenshot that it’s decided to use the high-frequency words ‘hypernym’ and ‘hyponym’ (no possible confusion there obviously) to refer to synonyms and related words. It doesn’t exactly make you warm to the dictionary.</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-6b9MMRrk0pA/TWqXoL5LvtI/AAAAAAAAL0Y/H-i7u4wE3Og/s1600/Advanced+English.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-6b9MMRrk0pA/TWqXoL5LvtI/AAAAAAAAL0Y/H-i7u4wE3Og/s400/Advanced+English.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">One huge plus of this dictionary is that you do have the option of downloading all the dictionary entries to your SD card. This means that you don’t need to be online to access the entries and students can use it without potentially incurring costly connection fees. However, this is about the only thing I can recommend about it. It is a dictionary and it is a thesaurus, but it’s not terribly user friendly, the text is quite dense, there aren’t so many example sentences and no option to hear the pronunciation of the word. Again, not one I would recommend. </span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><u>Colordict dictionary translate</u></b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Odd name for the dictionary, but a lot in its favour. Like the Advanced English and Thesaurus, you do have the option to download the dictionary data (I didn’t try this because I’d run out of space on my card) and this is great for when you don’t have internet access and want to access the entries. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not the most intuitive dictionary to use, when you search for a word it doesn’t come up with the definition immediately but instead you get the word to click on and you are then taken to a mobile version of <a href="http://www.google.com/dictionary">Google dictionary</a>. This is not a bad thing by the way, because I really like the simplicity and clarity of Google’s dictionary, but it would be nice if it came up immediately. You also have the option of adding other dictionaries to the list and these will come up when you enter a search term. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0gGy45wW6Q4/TWqYRjTBeiI/AAAAAAAAL0c/ZOPqeda-s3c/s1600/colordict.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0gGy45wW6Q4/TWqYRjTBeiI/AAAAAAAAL0c/ZOPqeda-s3c/s400/colordict.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><u>Dictionary.com</u></b></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the app of the <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/">popular website</a> and the it probably has the most attractive design and layout. On entering the app you immediately get a word of the day, the option to hear the pronunciation and the ability to favourite the word. There is also a button for accessing a thesaurus entry on the word.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZVluaZP4nrg/TWqYwJZgRgI/AAAAAAAAL0g/LMHDUDEdhR4/s1600/dictionary+com+word+of+the+day.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZVluaZP4nrg/TWqYwJZgRgI/AAAAAAAAL0g/LMHDUDEdhR4/s400/dictionary+com+word+of+the+day.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">But I found it a bit disappointing once you start searching for words. Most of the time all you get is a list of definitions but very little information about usage, particularly example sentences. I was expecting a lot more from this because I use their online dictionary frequently, but this is a very watered down version of that. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-rdx_MoWyjO8/TWqY6S9kcOI/AAAAAAAAL0k/UujJbuNP1_I/s1600/dictionary+com.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-rdx_MoWyjO8/TWqY6S9kcOI/AAAAAAAAL0k/UujJbuNP1_I/s400/dictionary+com.png" width="240" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; white-space: normal;"><b><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conclusions</span></b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I had to choose one of these dictionaries for my ESL students to use on a daily basis, it would probably be Colordict Dictionary Translate for its ability to download all the dictionary data and the fact that it can access the very good Google dictionary. I would also recommend The Free Dictionary for it’s comprehensive definition of words. The others I would probably avoid, they either seem designed for native speakers who are willing to wade through dense text, or they are just poorly designed and confusing for the non-native speaker. Next week, I will do something similar for the iphone/ipad. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
<br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></div><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000099;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.14864884526468813" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></div></div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-77608703007332932011-02-16T04:18:00.000-08:002011-02-16T04:18:03.816-08:00How my students are using mobile learning in and out of the classroom<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.22612678888253868" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">devices both inside and outside the classroom. My reasoning is that there are plenty of blogs, presentations and webinars on how you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">could </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">use mobile learning with students, but very few reports or accounts of how people actually </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> use them. Probably something to do with the challenges of introducing mobile learning in the class - the diversity of devices, the financial restrictions, the institutional resistance to them, not to mention teachers themselves and their own lack of certainty about how they can be used. Despite endless reports about how mobile learning is the big, coming thing, I think what is lacking sometimes are actual descriptions of what teachers are doing with mobile devices with their students. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To that end, I wanted to give you one of my periodic updates about how we - me and my students - are using them. So, here we go: </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Posterous</b></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I outlined in a <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2011/01/blogging-from-mobile-one-way-to-use.html">previous post</a>, I’ve been encouraging students to post pictures directly from their mobile phones to our class blog (which you can see <a href="http://pae05.posterous.com/">here</a>). This has proven a rich source of discussion on a Monday morning as we review what kinds of things they’ve been up to over the weekends. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Using their mobile phones as dictaphones</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is probably our most consistent use of mobile phones both in and out of the classroom. I work a lot on speaking and pronunciation with my students, particularly preparation for the speaking section of exams such as IELTS. In class, I often get students to record themselves speaking either in pairs or groups and then get them to listen back, comment etc. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outside the classroom, I also get them to both record themselves and other people to help with their language development. For example, the other day I started a new group and on our class website I got them to create a page of photographs AND an audio recording of themselves so they could introduce themselves to the class. It was a great way for them to get to know each other, but also really useful for me as I had a permanent recording of their speech as a baseline for their general speaking ability and as a way for planning future lessons on areas of pronunciation they have problems with. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>As a reference and research tool</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do quite a lot of dictionary work with my ESL students, getting them to explore words and find out their meaning, usage, grammatical structure, collocations and example sentences. We do have class sets of paper dictionaries to use, but they can only give a partial picture of a word’s usage. It’s great if they could also have access to corpus data, such as the <a href="http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/">British National Corpus</a>, where they can find lots of example sentences of the word in use. During class, I now encourage them to use the school’s wifi to access various collocation and concordance sites on their smartphones and add to their knowledge of words. Again, this is much more preferable than dragging them off to the computer room to spend a short amount of time accessing this information. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With some of my smaller classes I’ve also been handing round my Ipad so they can quickly look up data on these sites. I was a bit reluctant at first because...well, it’s my own device and I’m worried they might break it, but in fact they’ve been very gentle with it! The ease with which they have picked up how to use it - despite most of them never having used one before - and the ease with which they can share and look at the information on the device has given me a real glimpse into how these things could be used in the future. With a class set of tablets (or even just enough for one between a group) the opportunities for impromptu checking of vocabulary, looking up collocations and concordances, editing and contributing to class blogs/sites seem endless. And everything can take place in the classroom and there’s no need to go off to the computer room to do it. It feels so much more organic this way. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As an aside, our school is looking into getting a class set of tablets as a testing ground to see how they could be used in class. These won’t be Ipads - way too expensive to buy 12/13 of these for an experiment - but we plan to get some cheaper Android tablets and hopefully I’ll have a chance to use them with my students and get some feedback from them on the experience. Really looking forward to that. </span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-26391412933353368212011-01-31T12:43:00.000-08:002011-01-31T12:43:53.084-08:00Blogging from a mobile: one way to use Posterous with your ESL group<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TUcd1pA1HtI/AAAAAAAALok/IUc_tD5cyVU/s1600/posterous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TUcd1pA1HtI/AAAAAAAALok/IUc_tD5cyVU/s400/posterous.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://posterous.com/">Posterous</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a really quick way for you and your students to create blog posts or share videos/photos/audio with each other. The beauty of posterous is that you don’t need to go to the website to create the blog post, instead all you have to do is to email your text and/or photo to a designated email address and the website does the rest and creates the blog post for you. It's likely that most students should be able to do this directly from their mobile phones. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The best use I’ve found for it is as a way for my students to quickly send their photos from their mobile phones to a place where they can be seen by everyone in the class. My students often do interesting things at the weekend, travel to different cities, try different cultural experiences here in England and I thought this would be a great Monday morning warmer for students to share their experiences through the pictures they take. For example, one of my students today sent a picture of a international table tennis tournament she went to at the weekend</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TUceHjmlQgI/AAAAAAAALoo/M_BK-DASN9U/s1600/table+tennis+posterous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TUceHjmlQgI/AAAAAAAALoo/M_BK-DASN9U/s400/table+tennis+posterous.jpg" width="321" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other students were curious about this and asked her lots of questions, loads of interesting vocabulary came up (competition, winner, rounds, final/semi-final etc) and it was just a great 10 minutes of spontaneous chat and vocabulary generation at the start of the lesson. Every Monday I try to do this with at least one or two students and it really kicks off the week nicely. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Depending on the pictures, you can do different things. If it’s something unclear/obscure, you can ask the student not to say what it is and where it is and the other students have to guess. Or they can spend a few minutes creating questions they would like to ask the student about their picture. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Setting it up so students can post to the blog is not difficult at all. You just add their email addresses as Contributors in the Settings page and once they have the email of the site (which is usually an email version of the website name), they can send any pictures/text/audio recording via email and in a few minutes it will immediately pop up on the site as its own blog post. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although I use it mainly for photographs, the fact that you can send text, audio and video means that it could be a great way for students to be really creative in documenting their lives and experiences and sharing them with the class via their mobile phones. </span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-44111210252308803092011-01-21T13:34:00.000-08:002011-01-21T13:34:13.736-08:00Cloudbank: sharing words via mobile phones<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recently went to a presentation about an interesting project called <a href="http://cloudbankblog.blogspot.com/p/about.html">CloudBank</a>, which is an Android app developed by the <a href="http://www.brighton.ac.uk/cem/research/groups/itrg/">Interactive Technologies research group</a> at the University of Brighton. It is essentially a crowd-sourced learner’s dictionary for Advanced ESL students. A member of the research group, Dr Lyn Pemberton, explained that it was designed to encourage higher level learners to collect, collate and share new words, expressions, and idioms that they came across.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The app on the phone is linked to a website and a widget. This widget is basically a virtual representation of the mobile app on a webpage that is updated in real time as students upload words to the shared list. This widget can be embedded in webpages the same way a You Tube video can be embedded on a page and I’ve included it below for you to look at. Use the mouse to click on the buttons on the screen to look around the app. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="525" scrolling="no" src="http://itrg.brighton.ac.uk/cloudbank/widget/cbwidget.php" style="border: 0; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding: 0;" width="280"></iframe></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can actually try this out here and now if you have an Android phone. Go to this page and download the app. Because this app is not available on the Android Market, you need to make sure your phone can install non-market applications. To do this, go to Setting > Applications > Unknown Sources and checkmark ‘enable installation of non-market applications’.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On your phone you can then click the ‘Add’ button and add a word/expression using the boxes provided. You then click the save button and - assuming you are connected to the internet via 3G or wireless - it will immediately be uploaded to see on the widget or on a phone. Here is my expression - ticked off - being entered on the phone. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TTn4-ltFh6I/AAAAAAAALjc/KhYwUmpnUNo/s1600/screenshot_19.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TTn4-ltFh6I/AAAAAAAALjc/KhYwUmpnUNo/s400/screenshot_19.png" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TTn4-ltFh6I/AAAAAAAALjc/KhYwUmpnUNo/s1600/screenshot_19.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>There are also some other neat things you can do with the app. You can filter the word list to show either all the words or just the ones you have uploaded. You can favourite particular words and there is a search function that will do a Google search of the word/expression you are currently looking at. You can also upload a photo to accompany the word and do an audio recording of the pronunciation.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-weight: normal; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TTn4BSYRfgI/AAAAAAAALjY/wDZnBjozoXg/s1600/screenshot_16.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TTn4BSYRfgI/AAAAAAAALjY/wDZnBjozoXg/s400/screenshot_16.png" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.17809012765064836" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Applications for the ESL classroom</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I love the idea of a mobile app being linked to an embedded widget and I can see students taking to this very quickly. Imagine being able to embed this widget on your class or school website and then students contributing words outside of class that could then be looked at inside the class as a group. There are some similarities to the British Council’s My Word Book app for the iphone that I discussed in <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/05/snaptic-and-wordbook.html">a previous post</a> but the crucial added element here is the social aspect of sharing your words with others. Although this project is only in its development phase, it would be great if the app and widget could be scaled or personalised to a particular class or school. I use Google Sites to create personalised websites/blogs for all my classes and it would be fantastic to be able to embed the widget on the site for easy access and reference. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this stage there are obvious limitations to the project. Notably, the app can only be run on phones with the Android operating system but I imagine there would be plans to expand this across different platforms so it would run on iphones, Symbian phones, Blackberries etc. If we could get to the stage where this was available on the phones of almost all the students in the class, then I think we have a very powerful mobile learning tool for ESL.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I strongly urge you to go to <a href="http://cloudbankblog.blogspot.com/">the website </a>and take a look and if you have an Android phone, <a href="http://cloudbankblog.blogspot.com/p/cloudbank-app.html">download the app</a> and try it out. Also, talk to your students and if they have an android phone, help them to download it and get them to try it out. Since this project is still in development, they are very open to feedback from users to help them improve it in the future.</span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></span></div></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-27931324860821390122011-01-06T04:50:00.000-08:002011-01-06T04:50:59.120-08:00The Motorola Atrix: a taste of things to come for mobile learning?Of late I've been wondering how much more mobile phones could develop and offer more functionality to the learner. Over the last six months the leap in technology seems to have been incremental at best with only small differences in the raft of devices released. However, the Motorola Atrix - just announced and demonstrated at CES in Las Vegas - has me very excited about how the mobile phone could be the sole device that students could use for their learning. This video gives an overview of how it can interact with various devices to be used as both a full computer and a multimedia device:<br />
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There is a much longer <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/motorola-atrix-4g-hd-multimedia-dock-and-laptop-dock-hands-on/#disqus_thread">demo here on Engadget</a> showing in more detail how it can interact with a monitor and the latop accessory but I couldn't find a way to embed this on the page. However, it is definitely worth watching through to get a real sense how this can be used.<br />
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I love the idea of having one device that can be used for all your computing and multimedia needs. I can see a time in the not too distant future where schools no longer have computers in their classrooms or computer rooms but instead a series of dumb terminals/laptops where students can just dock their phone and have all their content immediately available to them. None of this worrying where that document is or whether they've put that Powerpoint presentation onto their USB stick. Instead, everything is stored on their phone or in the cloud and can be instantly available on a larger screen simply by dropping it into a dock.<br />
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What might this mean in the language classroom? Well, imagine a student want to share some photos/videos they've taken with their phone camera and to talk about them. They no longer have to transfer them over to a computer or upload them to You Tube or anything like that, they could simply show them immediately on a large screen TV/monitor/projector in class. As a teacher you could use your phone to record students' discussions/presentations and have them immediately available for whole class analysis. I'm sure there are many other scenarios that could be imagined..<br />
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This is going to be an exciting year for mobile devices. More and more tablets like the iPad are coming to market and they are going to be much more affordable for students. Mobile phones are going to get more and more powerful to the point where they will be able to do 90-95% of the computing tasks (email, web-browsing, document editing etc) that people do. As teachers we would be foolish to ignore these wonderful devices and how they can be used to create rich and meaningful lessons for our students.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-19179187629043320812010-11-14T02:19:00.000-08:002010-11-14T02:22:32.079-08:00Using Google Docs in the EFL classroom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/google-docs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/google-docs.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This term I made a decision to switch over to <a href="http://docs.google.com/">Google Docs</a> to deal with all the written assignments my students do. Now, if you are not sure what Google Docs is - and don’t worry, you are not alone, Google doesn’t do the best job in the world to promote it - it’s an online document editor that can replace Microsoft Word if you don’t plan on doing anything too fancy such as inserting complex tables or pictures into your document. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-d1N8WPmI/AAAAAAAAAfo/_skosatUYLQ/s1600/blog+pic+of+google+docs+empty+doc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="382" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-d1N8WPmI/AAAAAAAAAfo/_skosatUYLQ/s400/blog+pic+of+google+docs+empty+doc.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The basic interface of the Google Docs word processor (click to enlarge)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s be honest though, much of what we do with word processing software isn’t that complex, often it’s just text and I rarely ask my students to do more than that, most of the time they are just submitting text essays. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, this term I had about fifty students on a higher level EFL/British culture course and they had to submit weekly learning journals and semi-regular essays. On a similar course last year I had so many problems trying to keep track of all their documents via email: often they would send documents but then not name them, or they would paste their text directly into the email and I had to copy/paste over to Word so I could comment and edit. And then I had to remember to email the document back with the comments on. It became a bit of a logistical nightmare. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now with Google Docs all this emailing back and forth is largely unnecessary. All you have to do is to create a doc for each student with their name on it, share it with them via email. They then open up the document in their web browser and then any changes that they (or you) make to that doc will immediately appear on it. All you have to do is open it from your Google Docs account and you can see the changes and comment on them. Easy. Also, Google Docs has a half-decent comments facility, so you can highlight portions of the text and make comments in the margin. Nothing like the sophistication of that on Microsoft Word, but it gets the job done.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-e6ieJY-I/AAAAAAAAAfs/_5qOJ3upDAY/s1600/eg+of+comments+on+docs+page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-e6ieJY-I/AAAAAAAAAfs/_5qOJ3upDAY/s400/eg+of+comments+on+docs+page.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a Google Doc with highlighting and comments (click to enlarge)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The one downside of this - apart from the rather rudimentary editing features it offers - is that the whole process of sharing a document seems to be needlessly complicated, particularly if you are trying to share it with a) someone who doesn’t have a Google account and b) doesn’t know that much about computers. Much as I love Google, they don’t have that whole intuitive UI thing down pat like Apple do, and I spend a lot of time walking my students through how to exactly set up a google account, accept the invitation to the document and then be able to view/edit the document online. It shouldn’t be that complicated. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another thing I’ve found useful with Google Docs is the ability to use it for document storage and folder sharing. I mentioned above that you can share an individual document, but you can also share whole folders. This is particularly useful if a course has a lot of documents (articles/handouts etc) that you want your students to have and you don’t want to constantly keep photocopying the documents or digging them out for absent students. You can just share the whole folder with an individual or group via email invite and then they have access to all the documents. And it doesn’t matter if the document wasn’t created in Google Docs, since you can easily upload Microsoft Word, PDFs, or files of any other format to be stored in the online folder. You automatically get 1GB of free storage and you can increase that by paying a small amount of money every year (I pay about £3 for an extra 20GB).</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-gz8dppLI/AAAAAAAAAfw/OLXVlG1gJJY/s1600/example+of+files+and+folders+in+google+docs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="152" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-gz8dppLI/AAAAAAAAAfw/OLXVlG1gJJY/s400/example+of+files+and+folders+in+google+docs.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Example of folder and different file types in it</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, and Google docs is excellent for creating surveys and questionnaires. Within Google docs there is a section called Google Forms and here you can easily create surveys that can then be either embedded in a webpage or sent as an email. When they are sent as an email, they survey itself is actually in the email so students only have to fill it out and press submit. I’ve found this really useful for getting feedback from students at the end of a chapter/topic/course. </span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-jAm1D9hI/AAAAAAAAAf0/3KNciN_chFs/s1600/eg+of+google+form.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-jAm1D9hI/AAAAAAAAAf0/3KNciN_chFs/s640/eg+of+google+form.jpg" width="512" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Example of student survey</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the results are automatically collated into a spreadsheet for easy access. I know sites such as <a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/">Survey Monkey</a> do something similar, but for me it’s much easier if this can all be done from one place rather than having to use different sites for different things.</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-jUBpGjoI/AAAAAAAAAf4/LwG_wgHEFu0/s1600/eg+of+spreadsheet+from+survey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-jUBpGjoI/AAAAAAAAAf4/LwG_wgHEFu0/s640/eg+of+spreadsheet+from+survey.jpg" width="632" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">survey results collated into spreadsheet</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Using Google Docs on mobile</b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another main reason for switching over to Google Docs is the ability to view and (possibly) edit students’ documents on either my mobile phone or my ipad. I spend quite a bit of time on busses and trams travelling to and from work and I thought I could use that time by checking on students’ work, maybe even responding to what they’ve written. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Google do provide a fairly easy way to view Docs on your mobile device. You can just access them through the mobile web pages google provide. I find this useful if I just want to quickly check if students have submitted their essays or to have a quick skim through of what they have written.</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-yLZ_nIbI/AAAAAAAAAf8/BE7ZYup1d2o/s1600/screenshot_12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-yLZ_nIbI/AAAAAAAAAf8/BE7ZYup1d2o/s640/screenshot_12.png" width="384" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Viewing Google Docs on a mobile phone</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Editing Google Docs is less straightforward or cheap. Google haven't yet enabled editing on mobiles, not even on ipad, but it is supposed to be coming soon. You need to find a third party application to do this, normally part of a larger word processing package like <a href="http://www.quickoffice.com/">Quick Office</a> or <a href="http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/">Documents to Go</a>, both of which are pretty pricey on both mobiles and ipad. In the end I chose Documents to Go as it had better bluetooth keyboard support on the ipad and seemed to handle tables much better (though neither of them handle tables terribly well).</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-1DRxhR5I/AAAAAAAAAgI/OHf-x12RzKU/s1600/screenshot_9.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-1DRxhR5I/AAAAAAAAAgI/OHf-x12RzKU/s640/screenshot_9.png" width="384" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Documents to Go on my Android mobile phone with options</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do actually edit Google docs on my phone, particularly making short comments on students journals and I use them on the ipad to make notes on trainees lessons during CELTA observations. These editing apps are even more limited than the online versions, some very basic formatting is possible (underline, font changes, bullets etc) but no ability to add margin comments or anything like that.</span></span></span></span></span></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-zyL-cOAI/AAAAAAAAAgA/DatGL78jWNg/s1600/photo.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TN-zyL-cOAI/AAAAAAAAAgA/DatGL78jWNg/s640/photo.PNG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Documents to Go on the ipad with formatting options</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">There are certainly other uses of Google Docs. The one obvious use that I haven't really had a chance to experiment with is collaborative document editing. Students could share documents among themselves and work on texts together, or it could be a way to encourage peer correction among students. There is a chat facility that enables you to talk with your collaborator while editing the document.</span></div></div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Overall, I’ve found using Google Docs has really streamlined my (e)paper trail. At times last year with email it felt no better than having the students hand in work on paper and then constantly keeping track of where I’d physically left them. With Docs I always know exactly where everything is. It certainly can’t completely replace a dedicated offline editing programme like Microsoft Word - the functionality is still too limited, especially when it comes to inserting things like tables - but if you are working mainly with text, then it can do a pretty damn good job.</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div></div></div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8457351259421557" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div></div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-50924423545729635082010-10-07T23:16:00.000-07:002010-10-07T23:16:51.331-07:00Free promo codes for Cambridge's Phonetic Focus app available<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The very kind people at Cambridge Online have given me ten free promo codes for their latest iphone/ipod touch/ipad app <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/phonetics-focus/id393109855?mt=8">Phonetics Focus</a> to give away. These are only for the US itunes store (unfortunately) so you’ll have to have an account there to take advantage of it. I’ll do it like this: the first ten people to comment on this blog post will get one of the promo codes so you can download the app for free (retail price in the UK is £1.19, so I’m assuming it’s about $2 in the US store).</span></div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; white-space: normal;"><br />
</span></div></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="text-align: left;">I don’t have a US account so I actually had to buy the app myself (!) but I didn’t mind. The app is based on the <a href="http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/">Cambridge website</a> of the same name and is a website that I have been recommending to my students for months now to help them with their English pronunciation. There’s loads of great games and activities to do on the website, versions of hangman, matching, mazes, pelmanism.</div></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6wf-PfvrI/AAAAAAAAAck/wCmLf2cszNE/s1600/phon+focus+webpage+homepage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6wf-PfvrI/AAAAAAAAAck/wCmLf2cszNE/s320/phon+focus+webpage+homepage.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6xBBcpFXI/AAAAAAAAAco/0Qsc19Um2eQ/s1600/phonetic+focus+website+maze.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6xBBcpFXI/AAAAAAAAAco/0Qsc19Um2eQ/s320/phonetic+focus+website+maze.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The iphone/ipod touch app is a pared down version of what’s on the website, but it’s still the best ESL/EFL pronunciation app out there. There are four sections in the app: </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6xQO9Y_WI/AAAAAAAAAcs/tt_r7qR9dcs/s1600/menu.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6xQO9Y_WI/AAAAAAAAAcs/tt_r7qR9dcs/s400/menu.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.8419538419693708" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first section is the whole phonemic chart, you can click on the symbols and hear the sound.</span></div><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6x0CxkZNI/AAAAAAAAAc0/K-qv8B0pSQw/s1600/the+sounds.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6x0CxkZNI/AAAAAAAAAc0/K-qv8B0pSQw/s400/the+sounds.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second section is simply an illustrated poster of the phonemic chart, showing the sound, a word containing it and a picture of the word. It’s a shame that there’s no interactive element here, it would have been useful to be able to click the words and hear them. The one useful thing you can do here is take a snapshot of certain parts of the poster using the camera icon on the page. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6yjQ9RXwI/AAAAAAAAAc4/fzWwSptWPSo/s1600/poster.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6yjQ9RXwI/AAAAAAAAAc4/fzWwSptWPSo/s400/poster.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, the next section does give you those words from the poster on individual pages for you to click and hear. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6ywU3pElI/AAAAAAAAAc8/ao1XSe2L4bY/s1600/poster+words.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6ywU3pElI/AAAAAAAAAc8/ao1XSe2L4bY/s400/poster+words.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The last section is a short quiz section where you listen to two similar phonemes and have to choose the correct one. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6y_JXYxzI/AAAAAAAAAdA/Jtq_fRDqpNg/s1600/quiz.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TK6y_JXYxzI/AAAAAAAAAdA/Jtq_fRDqpNg/s400/quiz.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The app isn’t as fully featured as the website (which is a shame) but it’s still one of the best EFL/ESL apps out there. I haven’t been impressed by the quality of ESL apps on the market, it’s mainly unexciting vocab list/quiz apps so it’s encouraging to see companies like Cambridge begin to release stuff which is a bit slicker and a bit more involved. Hope to see it continue. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, anyhow, add your comments below and the first ten get the promo code to download for free.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-35324377417004208382010-10-01T03:05:00.000-07:002010-10-01T03:05:04.591-07:00Video review of flashcard apps for ipad and iphoneIn my <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/09/vocabulary-flashcard-apps-on-android.html">previous post</a> I had a look at some of the flashcard apps available for the Android platform to help ESL students revise vocabulary. I've also now done a shortish video review of a couple of similar apps available for the ipad and iphone. The review itself was done on the ipad as I don't actually own an iphone but these apps are or will be available on both devices. I looked at <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flashcards-deluxe-lite/id307842418?mt=8">Flashcards Deluxe Lite</a> and <a href="http://ads-sg.com/2010/08/flashcards-plus-1-0-released/">Flashcards Plus</a> and at the end I also created a short clip about the <a href="http://www.quizlet.com/">Quizlet</a> website.<br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0rrxv2R14NY?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0rrxv2R14NY?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-68815286472084142352010-09-16T15:41:00.000-07:002010-09-16T15:41:48.704-07:00Vocabulary flashcard apps on Android<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most people trying to learn a language have probably used flashcards to help them remember vocabulary. Either a stack of cards in their pocket that they pull out and check on a regular basis or they might do things like sticking post-it notes around the house to indicate different objects. I’m trying to learn Russian myself at the moment so I’ve been looking into some of the apps available on the Android platform that might help me remember new words more easily. The great thing about having it on your phone is that you’ve always got it with you so it’s an easy way to revise when you’re stuck waiting around somewhere or when you’re on a bus or train. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you are a teacher, it might be a good way to encourage students to study the vocabulary they’ve learnt in class or you can create vocabulary lists that they can then import into their flashcard apps on their phones or mobile devices. Below I take a look at a few and make some comments on their usefulness for students.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vocabulary Trainer for Gdocs</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the one I’m currently using for two reasons: firstly, it’s free (easily the most important in my view, I don’t really see the point of paying for such a simple app) and secondly it integrates with Google docs, something I’m an avid use of. So, the first thing I had to do was create a spreadsheet in Google docs with the words I want to learn in two columns like this.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKYLTvElcI/AAAAAAAAAb8/j8wpcwuk5ks/s1600/Google+Russian+English+spreadsheet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKYLTvElcI/AAAAAAAAAb8/j8wpcwuk5ks/s1600/Google+Russian+English+spreadsheet.jpg" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You then give the app permission to import this and then it can create flashcards based on the columns. When you want to revise the vocabulary, you can then use the settings to decide how you want to see the cards (Eng-Rus, Rus-Eng) and whether they will show the other side of the card automatically after a specific number of seconds or manually when you swipe the screen. So you will see something like this:</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKV2GXvo3I/AAAAAAAAAbk/--zDTO-noR0/s1600/screenshot_1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKV2GXvo3I/AAAAAAAAAbk/--zDTO-noR0/s400/screenshot_1.png" width="240" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></span><div><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVzoBHMbI/AAAAAAAAAbc/MIUtLF74p-g/s1600/screenshot_3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVzoBHMbI/AAAAAAAAAbc/MIUtLF74p-g/s400/screenshot_3.png" width="240" /></a></div><div><br />
</div><div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You will see on the side with the English word there is the option to have the pronunciation, which is not much use to me but would be wonderful for ESL learners. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I like this app, it’s relatively simple to use, you can tweak it for your own personal needs and it’s free. The downside to it is that you cannot create flashcards on the phone itself, they have to be done in Google and then imported, so if you don’t use Google then it’s not terribly useful. However, if students do have a google account, you could easily create a word list and then share it with them via google and then they could download it for themselves. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">StudyDroid</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This was another free app to download, I’ve only played with it a little but it does seem a little easier to use than the one above and you are not tied into Google to use it. However, you do need to set up an account on their <a href="http://www.studydroid.com/index.php">website</a> and you can then sync between your phone and your word lists. This is what the website page looks like where you create your word lists.</span></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKZ8-G6-SI/AAAAAAAAAcE/k6XcHl-gyRs/s1600/studydroid+webpage+create+lists.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="496" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKZ8-G6-SI/AAAAAAAAAcE/k6XcHl-gyRs/s640/studydroid+webpage+create+lists.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once you’ve downloaded them, you can then view your flashcards on the phone.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVwDzm_4I/AAAAAAAAAbQ/Tf_ugYMKD54/s1600/screenshot_5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVwDzm_4I/AAAAAAAAAbQ/Tf_ugYMKD54/s400/screenshot_5.png" width="240" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can see there is a ‘known’ button on the page. When you feel you know the word/translation, you can press this and it will keep a record of the percentage of the list that you ‘know’ and display it. You can also choose to hide or show the ‘known’ words. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of things l like about this app is that you can add to your word list on the phone itself and you don’t need to do everything on the computer (though as far as I can see you can only initially create a list on the website). The other thing is that you can share your lists with others and download lists from other people. On the studydroid website there is a section where you can search through people’s lists and find something interesting or relevant for you. So, for example, I wanted to find some Russian word lists and found these:</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKbE9l5EzI/AAAAAAAAAcM/EgY6sto01Fk/s1600/search+page+on+studydroid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="500" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKbE9l5EzI/AAAAAAAAAcM/EgY6sto01Fk/s640/search+page+on+studydroid.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did a similar search for English lists and there were naturally more, but not that extensive and the search engine doesn’t enable you to really filter your search. It does rely on a community of studydroid users that may or may not exist into the future. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I might persist with StudyDroid and see how it compares over time with the Vocabulary Trainer. I like the fact that you can modify your lists on the fly and the ‘known’ button adds that element of progress to your vocabulary retention. I am just concerned about being tied into their website and wondering what happens if they go out of business. At least with the Vocabulary Trainer I know that Google are always going to be there.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; white-space: normal;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.09691723668947816" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kaka flashcards</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like StudyDroid, I haven’t had this on my phone for long and - despite its unpromising name - it does have a lot going for it. Most notably, it can link up with the website <a href="http://www.quizlet.com/">Quizlet</a>, which is a repository for a huge bank of vocabulary lists. If you are not familiar with Quizlet, it’s a website where you can upload and download flashcards, take quizzes and share lists with friends. Certainly a site worth recommending to your students. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKbv6RDdVI/AAAAAAAAAcU/UoNsjHr5j5s/s1600/Quizlet+page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="598" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKbv6RDdVI/AAAAAAAAAcU/UoNsjHr5j5s/s640/Quizlet+page.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kaka Flashcards gives you access to all their lists through a search function and you can download them onto your phone. Similar to the other applications you can then test yourself by viewing one side of the card and then tapping to see the other. There doesn’t seem to be the extensive tweaking available for this as there is for the other two, but I suppose the access to the Quizlet database does make up for this. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVxwkCfjI/AAAAAAAAAb0/Jdj7UqqQqfA/screenshot_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TJKVxwkCfjI/AAAAAAAAAb0/Jdj7UqqQqfA/screenshot_6.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other good thing about this app is that you can actually create lists on the phone itself and you don’t have to go to the website to do that. While this app is not the most visually appealing, the link to the Quizlet website means that teachers and students can share lists and find loads of useful vocabulary items to put on their phone. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are numerous other flashcard apps available on the Android Market, I just selected three to look at. If you go to a site like <a href="http://www.appbrain.com/">AppBrain</a>, you can search for flashcards and get a very long list of applications that can be used in one way or another for language learning. Many of them come pre-packed with vocab lists and can be downloaded for specific languages (e.g. French-English, Greek-English etc). The great thing about the Android Market is that you can buy an app, try it out and as long as you uninstall it within 24 hours, you get a refund. This means you can try out paid apps without worrying that you might be wasting your money. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think teachers could really exploit these apps to encourage students to review and remember vocabulary from the lesson. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create class lists and make them available on sites like Quizlet for students to download. Even better, get the students themselves to create them and share them amongst themselves. And although I’ve only looked at Android apps today (largely because that’s the only phone I’ve got), there also apps for the iphone/ipad that can access sites such as Quizlet. Anything that encourages students to engage with vocabulary has to be a good thing.</span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-54427081920060412862010-08-16T14:05:00.000-07:002010-08-16T14:05:15.335-07:00Apps on the ipad for ESL teachers and students<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.0642101289704442" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve been using the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000490441">Kindle app</a> on the ipad since I bought the device and it’s now become my primary means of consuming books. To start with, there is a huge selection of books to choose from, you can buy them directly from the device, you can get samples of any book to see whether you want to purchase it and you can sync the books across multiple devices. So, for example, I sometimes read books on my Android phone and I can stop reading at a page in a book on my ipad and when I go to read it on my phone, it will be bookmarked at exactly the same page. Very, very cool. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One thing that they added in the latest version of the app is a dictionary look-up option. So, you can touch on a word in a book and it will bring up a definition of it at the bottom of the page. If you then want more information about the word, you can click on ‘full definition’ and it will pull up the word’s entry in the New Oxford American Dictionary. You’ve also got the option to do a Wikipedia or Google Search on the word. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmlTUnqBYI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/D8rth0qVxwQ/s1600/kindle+pic.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmlTUnqBYI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/D8rth0qVxwQ/s400/kindle+pic.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I began to think that this would be very useful for ESL students when reading books to be able to look up words and check their meaning. There’s also the option to annotate words/sentences on the page, so students can write their own notes about words or content that interest them. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And while I was looking at the Kindle I wondered what kinds of ESL books are actually on offer for the device both for teachers and students. Not much at the moment to be honest, but I think that's because so many ESL books are heavily formatted with pictures, diagrams and tables and those are the most difficult books to digitize. But there are some available on the market, a few grammar reference and exercise books, some teacher resource books (e.g. from the Cambridge series). But at least the ones that are available are slightly or in some cases quite significantly cheaper than their hard copy equivalent. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another app I downloaded that I thought could be very useful in the classroom is <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iannotate-pdf/id363998953?mt=8">iAnnotate</a>, a PDF reader for the ipad that gives you the option to highlight, underline or make notes on the document. I think this was one of the initial concerns about the use of the ipad in education, whether it could adequately cope with the daily academic needs of students (textbooks, extensive notetaking) but I think there are enough apps out now to suggest it can. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmmRGziltI/AAAAAAAAAaY/AgK-vXE6s9w/s1600/photo.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmmRGziltI/AAAAAAAAAaY/AgK-vXE6s9w/s400/photo.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a little expensive (about £5) but it is very easy to transfer PDFs from PC to ipad and annotating the documents is easy. Certainly for the students at my school this would be a very useful app as they have to read quite a lot of articles in their various academic skills classes. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One more app I thought might be useful in the classroom is <a href="http://www.mobilemouse.com/">Mobile Mouse</a>, an app that lets you control your computer’s screen via the ipad. This means that from a distance you can open and close programs, surf the web, open and type Word documents and you can use the multi-touch on the ipad screen to zoom in and out. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmma1E6hvI/AAAAAAAAAag/aKssMwhhmy4/s1600/mobile+mouse+pic.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TGmma1E6hvI/AAAAAAAAAag/aKssMwhhmy4/s400/mobile+mouse+pic.PNG" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think this would be a useful tool for adding things to the smartboard while moving around the room and students could do the same. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So yes, there are lots of apps out there that could easily be used in the classroom and I’ll give some of them a go in the next couple of months.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-82299437001721245292010-08-15T11:30:00.000-07:002010-08-15T11:30:17.548-07:00Mobile learning plans for the new term<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.11911120265722275" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wow, I’ve just realized that it’s been over a month since I’ve written anything here. I haven’t given up on the blog by the way - and I’m talking to that dedicated band of approx 0-3 people who read my posts semi-regularly - it’s just that I’ve been working on an intensive course training Korean teachers over the last month and I just haven’t had time to update it. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And to be honest, I didn’t have that much to say. Most of my posts are based on hands-on experience of using technology with my students, but this just wasn’t possible with the group I was working with over the summer so it really would have been posting for the sake of posting. Doing a course with little or no tech integration was interesting in itself, it wasn’t in any way better for being stripped of technology but it did help me remember the importance of using classroom tools (technology, paper, whiteboards, any kind of equipment) only when necessary. This course didn’t need technology, it wouldn’t help the students learn any better, so I didn’t use it. You see, people always assume us techheads try to crowbar it in even when it doesn’t belong, but that’s not always true....</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But now I’m on a break and I’ve started to think towards the new academic year and what areas of technology I’d like to focus on to see what’s going to help my students learn more effectively. By the way, this does sound rather unnatural, a list of arbitrary tech things I’d like to try out in class, sounds like the crowbarring thing I said I didn’t do in the previous paragraph. But it’s not. This is just a small part of my overall plans for the new term, I have lots of non-tech goals for my teaching as well, I just don’t share them through a blog. So these are things I have actually thought about...</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Mobile learning<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Last term I was only able to run a voluntary group throughout my school with students who were interested in learning through their mobiles. This amounted to daily text messages with a word of the day, some IM chat and creating social networking groups where they could share links/photos etc. It was ok, but the numbers dwindled as the novelty wore off, and the lack of direct contact with the students made it seem a little artificial. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This term I would like to experiment with mobile learning with my own students and see if that makes any kind of difference to the experience. I think if the content is linked to what they are studying, it’s more likely that using their phones will seem a natural part of the course and not a random process. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it will still have to be a purely voluntary thing. The school doesn’t fund any of this so students will have to bear the cost of text messages and data usage themselves and if they don’t have unlimited data/text contracts, I can’t force them to take part in this. This is still one of the biggest hurdles to implementing effective mobile programs, the difference between the devices and plans that all the students have got, but I’m working on the assumption that in a few years’ time all students will probably have unlimited data/text plans, so this is just advance preparation for that. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Using the ipad in the classroom</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/07/role-of-ipad-in-esl.html">previous post</a> I blogged about the ipad and how I saw it’s use in the ESL classroom. I’ve had the device for about a month now and my view hasn’t changed, in fact it’s probably been strengthened. I read somewhere that the ipad won’t necessarily replace computers but it will replace paper, and I’m beginning to see the truth in this. It’s a perfect device for reading on and for sharing information through various applications. It’s an amazing device for reading books and articles, browsing the web and many of the apps are designed to create the feeling that you are reading a newspaper or magazine. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.flipboard.com/">Flipboard</a>, for example, takes all your Facebook and Twitter feeds and turns it into an attractive magazine format, while <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id384224429?mt=8">Discover</a> takes Wikipedia entries and does the same. The <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000490441">Amazon Kindle </a>app lets you buy and read books and you can annotate them and even share those annotations with others. Of course many of these things can be done on either a desktop or laptop computer, but the form factor and the ease of use makes it a much easier device to integrate in the classroom. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are also numerous brainstorming apps for the ipad, and I can see how these could become a great way for students to collaborate with each other when discussing topics or working on projects. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a teacher I can think of numerous other uses for it in the classroom. Actually the other day I used it for the first time in class, the teacher group I was training did some micro-teaching and I wandered round the class watching them and making notes on my ipad in google docs. I then pulled that document up at the end of the lesson on the smartboard for discussion. It was a much quicker and better way of sharing than making notes by hand and then photocopying for all the teachers in the class. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now of course there is the (minor) stumbling block that none of my students are likely to have ipads next term. Still, I don’t see that as being a huge issue, my plan is to lend out my own ipad to one student every so often and get them to experience the same lesson the others are doing but solely through the device. So, for example, while the other students get a reading text on paper, that one student gets it on the ipad. When I ask students to brainstorm ideas, that students can use the ipad while the others jot them down on paper. I can then observe the differences between their experiences and also get direct feedback from the students themselves about how easy or difficult it was to use. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, I’ll keep you updated on all this, I’ll be trying these things out from the end of September and I’ll blog on how it all went.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-68965353007856739842010-07-09T04:17:00.000-07:002010-07-09T04:17:03.335-07:00The role of the ipad in ESL<div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ok, I caved. I wasn’t planning to buy an ipad, but after looking at one in a store and debating internally for about...ooh...four or five seconds, I handed over the money and walked out with the cheapest 16GB wifi version.</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TDa5psL0MdI/AAAAAAAAATE/JTzaKq7E7Pk/s1600/IMAG0091.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TDa5psL0MdI/AAAAAAAAATE/JTzaKq7E7Pk/s400/IMAG0091.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">my ipad...apologies for the quality, taken with my cameraphone</span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>First impressions</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a gorgeous piece of tech, heavier than you think it will be but the screen is perfectly sized for watching videos, browsing the internet and reading ebooks when lying on the sofa or your bed. It does get a little weighty in your hands after a while and you find yourself having to adjust your hands and position to get comfortable again. I also found that my hand naturally covers the speaker on the right hand side when watching video and can mute it, so I have to move a little to uncover it. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is clearly pitched between a laptop and a smartphone and it does seem to occupy that niche very well. Many people say it is just a large ipod touch, but I would question that ‘just’. Yes, it is a large ipod touch, but that isn’t a bad thing at all. The added size and the tablet form factor makes it inherently more social than a laptop or smartphone. When I got home with the ipad - and gotten over the slightly embarrassed explanation of why I’d bought it given the number of similar gadgets in our house - my wife and son immediately wanted to get their hands on it and it felt very natural just to pass it around and share as you would a newspaper or a photo. Reading ebooks on it was very comfortable, it was great to sit down on the sofa with my son and read him the Winnie the Pooh book while he followed along and looked at the pictures. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are some obvious drawbacks, the lack of flash in the browser and the lack of multi-tasking being just two, but I think they are non-issues. Multi-tasking will come in the autumn with an OS update and most sites that require flash are likely to have a custom-made app for the ipad sooner or later. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A bigger issue for me is text input. The onscreen keyboard just isn’t that comfortable for extensive text input, and in fact it is far more awkward than the iphone because it’s so large. You can’t grip it in two hands and type with your thumbs like on the iphone because it’s just too wide and it doesn’t feel natural to lay it down on a flat surface to try to type like on a full-sized keyboard. You end up holding it in one hand and then tapping on the keyboard with another, but this is really slow. I wouldn’t want to write a long email or conduct an IM conversation with anyone using this technique. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The best way is to use some kind of external keyboard and Apple has released a keyboard and dock combo for it (for £55!), but this naturally limits its portability. I did have an old fold-up Stowaway bluetooth keyboard lying around and it paired and worked perfectly (see pic below), but the problem is then that you need something to prop the ipad up so you can see it. I might need to buy a cover with an integrated stand, but again this all just adds to the cost and bulk of the device. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TDcADtHBJbI/AAAAAAAAATY/eljIrJf5HBc/s1600/IMAG0095.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TDcADtHBJbI/AAAAAAAAATY/eljIrJf5HBc/s400/IMAG0095.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the ipad paired with a bluetooth keyboard</span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Overall though, it really is a lustworthy piece of tech and this is coming from someone who is NOT a particularly big Apple fan. I don’t own an iphone, preferring Android as a smartphone OS and I’ve never owned a Mac (either desktop or laptop). </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>How it could be used in (and out) of the ESL classroom.</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I first heard and read about the ipad, I was dismissive about its usefulness in ESL. But having used one now for a couple of days, I can see that it could be a wonderful tool in the classroom. Why? </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Ease of use</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Firstly, it is not a complicated device to use as anyone who owns an iphone, ipod touch or ipad will testify. In many ways this is better for the teachers than the students as it’s often the teachers who are most freaked out by tech in the classroom. It’s very unlikely that teachers will need much technical support after a little initial training with the device and the likelihood of it breaking down in class are fairly minimal. Also, it’s instant on, there’s no wait for it to boot up and the battery life is outstanding, you can easily get 10-11 hours of intensive use out of it from one charge. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>It’s naturally collaborative</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As mentioned above, the size and form factor of the ipad makes it perfect for collaboration. Just as it’s easy for a student to show their partner a page from their notebook, it’s just as easy for a student to show something on the ipad screen. This is also helped by the wide viewing angle it has. Smartphones are great, but the screens are small and there’s a limit to what can be displayed on it. Laptops - even the smaller netbooks - are more cumbersome to move around and they naturally create a barrier between one student and another (though they do have the advantage of a keyboard). If we think about a communicative classroom where we want students to talk and share with each other, move around and interact with each other, the ipad seems perfect for that. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>There’s an app for that...</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite those damn adverts, the popularity of the iphone, ipod touch and ipad means that almost any computer or web tool that you might want to use with your students is available on the device. When I think of the kinds of things that I take my students into the computer room for, I can almost always find an ipad app that can replicate that function. Creating blogs, wikis, podcasts, various forms of social networking, you tube videos, news sites, all of these things can be done directly on the ipad. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>No more ‘we’re going to the computer room today’</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the barriers to full integration of technology in the (ESL) classroom is the classroom/computer lab distinction. Somehow, going to the computer lab is seen as something separate from what goes on in the classroom, there are teachers who ‘use’ the computer room and those who don’t. In this way, computers and technology become this scary other that naturally makes a lot of teachers nervous. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ipad might be a way of bringing the computer lab to the classroom and making the use of technology less scary for teachers. Rather than the teachers taking the class to the computer room, a class set of ipads or similar tablet-like computers could be distributed in the classroom and I think this will make this technology feel more integrated. </span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">-------------------------------------------------------------------------</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are just my initial thoughts after a couple of days with the ipad. My opinion of it might change over time of course, but I do see them as natural complement to mobile phones as learning tools. I think that mobile phones work best outside the classroom as a means of autonomous learning on the part of the students while the ipad will function well inside the classroom as a natural replacement for textbooks or computers. And I can see many ways that students will be able to combine both of them to provide meaningful and interesting classroom activities. For example, students might go out and take pictures/video of their family/house/workplace etc, upload them to the internet to a place like Facebook or Picasa and then in class show them and discuss them with their peers using the ipad. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Obviously a major barrier is going to be the cost of these things. I bought the cheapest version here in the UK and it cost £429 while the most expensive version with wifi and 3G is a whopping £699. Even a class set of these is going to be beyond most institutions. And to be honest, Apple are not particularly great at providing discounts for bulk purchases of these things for education. But the hope is that over time (just as with smartphones and laptops), other companies will come along and provide similar products at a lower price point. There have already been several tablets released running the Android OS and the number is bound to increase over time. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for all your students to have smartphones in class, but this is becoming more and more a reality as the cost of them comes down.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5861642244049270239.post-22838309359349442342010-06-30T02:46:00.000-07:002010-06-30T02:46:43.914-07:00ESL apps for Android phones In <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/05/snaptic-and-wordbook.html">previous</a> <a href="http://mobileesl.blogspot.com/2010/03/byki-language-learning-apps-for-iphone.html">posts</a> I've reviewed apps available on the iphone for language learning, so today I thought I'd take a look at some available for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_devices">Android phones</a> . Actually, all of these come from the British Council, who really seem to be investing a lot of resources into creating mobile apps for ESL learners.<br />
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First up is <a href="http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/games/wordshake">Wordshake</a>, basically a <a href="http://www.fun-with-words.com/play_boggle.html">Boggle</a> variant. You are given a four by four grid of random letters and then you've got two minutes to make as many words as possible using those letters. The smallest word must have at least three letter and - unlike Boggle - the letters don't need to be next to each other. You score more points the longer the word is, and at the end it shows you a list of all the words you came up with. There is also the option to submit your score online and also to go to the British Council site to play a multi-player version of it, but I couldn't work out how to do that.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TCsG3Imd4fI/AAAAAAAAARg/2LKOTRzxORk/s1600/Wordshake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TCsG3Imd4fI/AAAAAAAAARg/2LKOTRzxORk/s400/Wordshake.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As a vocabulary game it's fun, but I'm not sure to what extent this is a dedicated language learning app and there are hundreds of other similar word games and word searches on the market that do something very similar. Ok for a few goes but not something you are likely to come back to very often. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Perhaps a more ESL focussed app is <a href="http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/games/elementary-podcasts-app">Learn English</a>, a regular radio show podcast for elementary level students available for both iphone/ipod touch and Android. Based around a radio show with Tess and Ravi, the show has various sections, features, dialogues and at the end an explicit language focus where the presenter discusses some language points that have come up in the show. While the podcast is playing, you can follow along with the transcript or answer multiple choice questions about the show (couldn't actually check the answers on my phone, not sure if that's a bug with the app or with my phone). There are also links to Tess and Ravi's Facebook and Twitter pages where listeners can post comments and respond to what they've heard. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TCsL9tVk44I/AAAAAAAAARo/e7vVd5SYqSA/s1600/elementary-podcasts-iphone-screenshot-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LYkluY60HUo/TCsL9tVk44I/AAAAAAAAARo/e7vVd5SYqSA/s400/elementary-podcasts-iphone-screenshot-1.jpg" width="266" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I like this a lot, it seems to be very much aimed at teenagers with its content and social networking features but I also think adult learners could benefit from listening as well. Having the transcript to read along with adds a nice safety net feature for those students who panic when they don't understand what they are listening to. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You could argue that the podcasts lack a little authenticity and they do sound a bit like the kinds of listenings you get in coursebooks, but it is for elementary learners. It's easy to forget what it's like being a lower level language learner (I'm still struggling with the basics of Russian and suffer this on a daily basis) and the need for material that is around or just above their level of listening to allow them to be successful. Yes, it would be fantastic if students could always listen to 'real' material, but I know from my own experiences of trying to learn a second language that authentic material can be incredibly overwhelming and demotivating at times . </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So yeah, definitely one to recommend to your students. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The British Council have created another game-like app for Android called <a href="http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/games/johnny-grammars-quizmaster">Johnny Grammar's Quizmaster</a>. I downloaded it a while back and tried it out, good fun but I remember the time available to answer the questions was ridiculously short and even I was struggling to answer most of the questions in time. I tried to download it again to test it out and see if anything had changed with it but it now doesn't seem to work on my phone. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Anyhow, I'm pleased to see the British Council pushing out these kinds of resources for mobile phones and doing it across more than one platform. It would be great to see them releasing these apps on Nokia phones (Symbian) as this would give a lot more students in developing countries the chance to experience them.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11292401080382470371noreply@blogger.com4