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.

How my students are using mobile learning in and out of the classroom

devices both inside and outside the classroom. My reasoning is that there are plenty of blogs, presentations and webinars on how you could use mobile learning with students, but very few reports or accounts of how people actually do 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.

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:

Posterous

As I outlined in a previous post, I’ve been encouraging students to post pictures directly from their mobile phones to our class blog (which you can see here). 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.

Using their mobile phones as dictaphones

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.

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.

As a reference and research tool

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 British National Corpus, 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.

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.

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.

Blogging from a mobile: one way to use Posterous with your ESL group

Posterous 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cloudbank: sharing words via mobile phones

I recently went to a presentation about an interesting project called CloudBank, which is an Android app developed by the Interactive Technologies research group 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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

Applications for the ESL classroom

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 previous post 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.

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.

I strongly urge you to go to the website and take a look and if you have an Android phone, download the app 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.