Just 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.
Showing posts with label British Council. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Council. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
ESL apps for Android phones
In previous posts I've reviewed apps available on the iphone for language learning, so today I thought I'd take a look at some available for Android phones . 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.
First up is Wordshake, basically a Boggle 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.
First up is Wordshake, basically a Boggle 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.
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.
Perhaps a more ESL focussed app is Learn English, 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.
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.
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 .
So yeah, definitely one to recommend to your students.
The British Council have created another game-like app for Android called Johnny Grammar's Quizmaster. 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.
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.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Snaptic and Wordbook
In a previous post I mentioned how students could create their own personalised vocabulary lists by combining online note-taking apps and web dictionaries. Well, I've actually now started this with my students and have encouraged as many of them as possible to add and edit the entries as often and as much as they like. I did a few to begin with, but it's now encouraging to see that some of my students are starting to take initiative and add some of their own. Very pleased to see that. For ease of editing, I set up an account with snaptic, simply because it's very quick and easy to use, and you can use hashtags to create labels. Basically, I set up an account and then gave the username/password to all my students and now they are free to edit as they wish.
You can see from the screenshot that it's also possible to upload pictures, particularly good for clarifying exactly what certain objects, animals or types of food are. I've also helped several of them find and download the accompanying mobile phone app. On Android and iPhone it's called 3Banana, and students can sync their phone notes with their online ones and vice versa. On the phone it's also possible to directly upload a photo as a note, which is great if they see something new and interesting and want to share it with their classmates.
At the moment, I've told three of my classes about this and a smattering of other students, but I would love to get more involved. I find the idea of a huge, shared, student-created dictionary/vocab list a wonderful one. Anyhow, I'll update in a few weeks time and tell you whether this took off or not.
Connected to this, the British Council have just released an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called My Wordbook, which is very much aiming at exactly the thing I mentioned above - a personalized student-generated vocab list. It's a very polished app, and there's a lot to like about it. For each word you can attach a picture, definition, additional notes; you can also record the pronunciation as well as have the program create random quizzes based on your word list. It's all very well organised, user-friendly and a good all-in-one place for students to record vocabulary.
A few things that would be useful to add to later versions - firstly the ability to share your words with friends, classmates and other learners. Secondly, it would be great if these apps could draw on corpus data (like the British National Corpus) or import definitions from online dictionaries to generate example sentences. Also, I hope that this will become available on other platforms as well so that more students can have access to it. Overall though, I think it's a great app that encourages learner autonomy but also takes a lot of the pain out of recording vocabulary.
You can see from the screenshot that it's also possible to upload pictures, particularly good for clarifying exactly what certain objects, animals or types of food are. I've also helped several of them find and download the accompanying mobile phone app. On Android and iPhone it's called 3Banana, and students can sync their phone notes with their online ones and vice versa. On the phone it's also possible to directly upload a photo as a note, which is great if they see something new and interesting and want to share it with their classmates.
At the moment, I've told three of my classes about this and a smattering of other students, but I would love to get more involved. I find the idea of a huge, shared, student-created dictionary/vocab list a wonderful one. Anyhow, I'll update in a few weeks time and tell you whether this took off or not.
Connected to this, the British Council have just released an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called My Wordbook, which is very much aiming at exactly the thing I mentioned above - a personalized student-generated vocab list. It's a very polished app, and there's a lot to like about it. For each word you can attach a picture, definition, additional notes; you can also record the pronunciation as well as have the program create random quizzes based on your word list. It's all very well organised, user-friendly and a good all-in-one place for students to record vocabulary.
A few things that would be useful to add to later versions - firstly the ability to share your words with friends, classmates and other learners. Secondly, it would be great if these apps could draw on corpus data (like the British National Corpus) or import definitions from online dictionaries to generate example sentences. Also, I hope that this will become available on other platforms as well so that more students can have access to it. Overall though, I think it's a great app that encourages learner autonomy but also takes a lot of the pain out of recording vocabulary.
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