Video Reviews of ESL Apps

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am now posting most of my ideas regarding mobile learning over on my Mobile ESL page at Google+. 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.

Review of Sounds: the Pronunciation App for Android/iOS

Review of three Mingoville Apps for Android

Review of IELTS Word Power for Android

I've also been compiling a list of the Best free ESL Apps available in a Google Doc/Presentation. If anyone would like to contribute to it, just let me know and I'll add you as an editor. 

QR Codes in the ESL Classroom

Over 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 it's been recently announced 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.

Among the tools we've used are Posterous Groups as a way for them to share pictures and experiences; Google Docs 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 Voicethread in one of the sessions.

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.

One thing I decided to try on this course was the use of QR Codes 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 QR Droid (my personal favourite), QuickMark BarCode Scanner or  BeeTag QR Reader. On iPhone there is QR Reader, QR Scanner and numerous others. To actually create a QR Code there are various websites, my personal favourite for ease of use is QR Droid. it took my a matter of seconds to create the QR Code below, which contains a link to this blog.
 

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.

However, after reading this excellent article by Kimberley Hogg 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.

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.

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.

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'.

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!

Possible uses in the ESL Classroom 

Here are some ways that I think QR Codes could be used in the classroom:

• 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. 
• Posting up answers to homework
• 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. 
• Embedding links in QR Codes to useful websites for students to visit to improve their English. 
• Posting up calendar events that are taking place in the school. 

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. 

• This Google Document (not sure of the source exactly) provides lots of useful links to sites that can help you with QR Codes
• Tom Barrett's 40 Interesting Ways to Use to QR Codes in the Classroom is not specifically designed for ESL groups but has loads of interesting ways they can be used. 
• This Scoop It page curated by Diane Rees links to lots of articles discussing the use of QR Codes in education. 

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. 

My own language learning via mobile

I 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.

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.

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.

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:

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 Ankidroid Flashcards, Kaka Flashcards and Vocabulary Trainer for Gdocs and after a few weeks decide which one I like best.

For general Russian, I've bought the Byki Russian 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.

For listening I've subscribed to a couple of Russian speaking podcasts, one from the BBC called 'Utro Na BBC', which is not specifically a language learning podcast but the presenter does speak quite slowly so is quite useful for a low-level learner.

For checking vocabulary I've installed ColorDict Dictionary Translate, a free app I tried out recently and was impressed by.

For speaking, well, luckily I have a native speaker at home who can help me with that!

Anyhow, I'll blog regularly on my progress and add any other apps/programs I've found useful in helping me with my Russian.

Review: free ESL dictionary apps for Android phones

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 Oxford and Cambridge 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.

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 dictionary.com and the Free Dictionary.

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:

Free Dictionary org
Dictionary com
Colordict dictionary translate
Advanced English and Thesaurus
The Free Dictionary

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.

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:

Features: does it have pronunciation models? Can you ‘favourite’ words you want to remember? Can you share words with other people? Is there a thesaurus?

Language/usefulness: 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?

Layout: Is it easy to navigate the dictionary and find what you want? Is the layout easy on the eye?

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.

Free Dictionary.org
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.

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.

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.

The Free Dictionary

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.

Advanced English and Thesaurus

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.

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.

Colordict dictionary translate

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.

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 Google dictionary. 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.

Dictionary.com

This is the app of the popular website 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.

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.

Conclusions

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.

Free promo codes for Cambridge's Phonetic Focus app available

The very kind people at Cambridge Online have given me ten free promo codes for their latest iphone/ipod touch/ipad app Phonetics Focus 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).

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 Cambridge website 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.

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:

The first section is the whole phonemic chart, you can click on the symbols and hear the sound.

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. 

However, the next section does give you those words from the poster on individual pages for you to click and hear. 

The last section is a short quiz section where you listen to two similar phonemes and have to choose the correct one.

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.

So, anyhow, add your comments below and the first ten get the promo code to download for free.

Video review of flashcard apps for ipad and iphone

In my previous post 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 Flashcards Deluxe Lite and Flashcards Plus and at the end I also created a short clip about the Quizlet website.

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.

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.