Mobile Assisted Language Learning - English TeachingApps (1)

This is the first in a series of posts on MALL (mobile assisted language learning) apps currently available via GooglePlay.

The infographic was created as one of the appendices for a recent assignment on my MA in Educational Technology & TESOL and shows a general overview of Android Apps for English language learning.  The second post in this series will feature the top 7 and also explain why they're definitely worth recommending to students and the third will highlight some of the design and pedagogical problems in other apps.

(view infographic in higher quality here)

 

To see this infographic full-sized/better quality, please click: here

Despite all the hype surrounding the use of mobile language learning apps (dominating the discussions at many global ELT conferences these days) in a recent study by Busuu and the I.E. Business School, they disclose that only 2% of the global language learners they polled currently consider mlearning as an efficient way to study.  In part it may only be because we're simply at the start of a trend, but it is also possible that this is due to the fact that a great deal of the apps produced today for "anytime, anywhere" learning (Geddes, 2004 cited in Kukulska-Hulme & Shield, 2008) aren't actually pedagogically sound, aren't convenient to use and aren't well designed. 

What do you think?

Is the problem the cost?
Is the problem size?
Is the problem usability?

Is it something else?

Let me/us know your thoughts!

Foxy Voxy: #mlearning meets motivation in language teaching

In a rant, several weeks back I emphasized my thoughts on how I really, simply, can't see how mobile phones and language learning/teaching are ever going to lie in a bed together...  partly because of the size of the tool itself, issues related to internet access on the go, but also, most importantly to be quite frank, my main suspicion is that, like Thornbury's suspicion of products developed for IWBs, is all we're gonna wind up with is a rehash of tired and out-dated methodologies spiced up for diamond-sharp-screen-technologies (gap-fill, random-name-that-photo anyone?) but these materials won't be personalized nor learner-centered, and undoubtedly won't be an interactive learning tool and sure as heck, won't be motivational.

I sure do love being proved wrong.

Folks, it looks like a fox has slipped into the henhouse with something really rather innovative.

At first contact, when they emailed, I scoffed and almost reached for the mark-as-spam button.

Oh, here we go, I thought,  I mean just how many emails do I really have to receive each week with someone wanting to be promoted on my blog?  But this email was very different.   It didn't congratulate me  and tell me how much they just love my blog but instead I got a long, professionallly laid out  list of solid reasons why their product was worth taking a look at.  

I clicked through.

I emailed back.

We Skyped.

I put it to the student-test.

Unanamious votes all round:  they said "cool" "guile" "very cool".    They asked "can we download it in German?"  I told them not yet.  But I hope soon.

The company who've created this incredibly simple concept of sending out a 3 minute SMS/email/app with a lead in in the students' own L1 is called Voxy, headed up by Paul Gollash (who lists in his claim to fame, working within Richard Branson's venture capital wing). 

His killer team includes Manuel Morales - in charge of community outreach; Gregg Carey (co-founder) and Ed Menendez who are developing the product; Laura Martinez (journalist and blogger) their Editorial Director - she currenlty creates the daily streaks.  

Linguist Jane Sedlar and language coordinator Sandra Rubio keep them on andragogical track... and their secret weapon?

Rudy Menendez who comes in with a background in creating addictive games.

  

The language learning tool came out of a simple wish to make language learning more interesting, they ask:

Why is language learning so un-interesting? Languages are, after all, empirically exciting, useful, and empowering to all of us. Does studying it have to suck? We don't think so.

Voxy was first conceived over cold beers at a Yakatori bar in the East Village of New York and the business plan was written shortly afterwards while in San Sebastian, on the northern coast of Spain. It grew out of a fascination for evolving media (including magazines, newspapers, digital and social), and a passion for language learning in an increasingly global community. At Voxy's core is a fervent belief that there is better way to learn a new language.

Voxy raised a seed round of capital from a group of angel investors with experience building successful businesses in the for-profit education space, and a history of creating powerful consumer brands.

Software in the back records what the students are interested in, what stories they tend to click on and flashcard games based on the lexis that the students have chosen themselves goes into a personalized bank.

Voxy is a young company, founded in Feb 2010 but has already been written up in the New York Times,  CNN money and TechCrunch. In the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield (video), Gollash quotes Chomsky saying that 98% of language teaching is just about keeping the students interested and they've met that challenge head on by creating an application which adapts seamlessly into adult life, converting relevant, topical content and turned this into a game.

Voxy uses an incremental approach, important in minimizing cognitive load.  Language is also offered in chunks - no grammar-based curriculum here although there is grammar: highlighted in context. (Hear my gasp!)

New material is presented at a level of difficulty  just beyond the students' current ability.

Students receive points based on how often they log in and play these streaks, the words they accumulate and the games they play.






Want to get involved?

As I mentioned earlier, Voxy is a young company and very eager to get real feedback from teachers and students.  The website is completely free (the i-phone app will cost a dollar) so if you happen to be a teacher reading my blog, based in the US or in Central or South America or Spain - basically anywhere where you have Spanish speaking students learning English then why not head on over to the Voxy website, mess around a bit  and then if you like, show it to your students.

If you'd like to ask questions or send in your thoughts, contact the very friendly Manuel Morales: manuel (at) voxy (dot) com.


Useful resources: 

• Language learners and computer games, Graham Stanley and Kyle Muwer (presentation)
  
• Digital Games Based Learning, Mark Prensky
• Games as learning machines, James Gee
• Assessment of games based learning by Rowin
  Going to the MALL: Mobile Assisted Language Learning, George M. Chinnery
• Using mobile phones in education by Patricia Thornton and Chris Houser
• English language teachers connect to mobile learning by Nik Peachey 
• How students use their mobile phones by David Reed 
• No Future? The English Language Teaching Coursebook in the Digital Age
• Texting: 10 resources by Shelly Terrell 
• Good sources for finding educational iphone / iPad apps by Paul Sweeney
• the #mlearning stream on twitter

and if you thought I was kidding when I said I am mostly suspicious of mobile technologies... do please have a thorough look at David Reed's blog on mobile ESL, he reviews products there and talks about the use of the phone in the classroom.  Well-written posts but as far as I can tell, personally, really can't figure how these apps he reviews are supposedly thinking outside the cage...   watch out ELT.

Best,
Karenne
education

Mobile Phones + English Language Learning - ya what?

Today, while waiting for my S-bahn to arrive to take me to classes out of the city centre, I observed a young man sporting a heavy backpack, carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a small, sleek, black device in the other, running to catch his train.

He didn't make it.   

Not because of the coffee, the phone or even the extra weight on his back but because he was wearing jeans which fell halfway down his bum and well, having no hands free... well, you know what I mean, don't you?  

I feel the same way about Crocs, the Noughties answer to things which really should never be worn on the feet, at any cost, at all, for any other reason than to garden.  They are big, fat, plastic slipper things - yes, indeedy-do, that's exactly what they are.

Perhaps if I had never read Gladwell's Tipping Point, I would have spent the rest of my life in the dark, never quite understanding how the dumbest of concepts ever manage to find their way to becoming popular... but I did read it...  and having read Lindstrom's Buyology  as well, I can tell ya, for a fact that people do what other people do and that's just what people do.

(It's a survival of the species thing).

Getting to be the first though is the trick to making big money in this world, so if that's your dream, then you'll probably have to design the next pair of Crocs before anyone else in the whole wide world would ever wear them or you'll have to create a music device and then attach dangly, tangly white earphones to them (why on god's green earth hasn't someone invented the no-wire-necessary headphones yet???) or you'll have to convince a Rap Star to put on jeans which come up to just below the waist.

Don't do these things though if you don't want to lose money.  Because to be honest, let's face it, not  everyone who dreams up smart ideas wins big. Lots try, lots blow out lots of smoke however lots, months later, years later, lots have heads that roll due to lots of losses incurred in lots of research, development, marketing and production.

Which happens to bring me, really quite nicely, to M-language-learning.

Ya what?

Lots of stuff 'bout that's being bandied about on the 'net recently.

Some back story first though.   Being a bit of a tech nerd, I was the proud holder of one of the first SmartPhones, a Windows powered HTC-Qtek,  a wonderful Taiwanese machine way before its time - pre-dating the i-phone by quite a number of years.   So sometime back in 2005 or 2006,  in class with my one of my students ("a CEO" who wanted to increase his vocabulary) we came up with the grand plan of auto-messages delivered daily: Word-of-the-Day by SMS.

The first problem we ran into... in our mind's eye, of course, we didn't actually follow-through because this was all fictional situational language practice for him, was that due to the absolute lack of market saturation of SmartPhones at that time (he had a BlackBerry) it would be impossible to monetize but rather a lot of work to set up.

Then good old Steve Jobs brought out the admittedly gorgeous i-phone and the whole wide world went berserk for all things Apple (I'm not a fan of 'closed' company workings meself). On top of that, Jobs, rather cleverly set the whole thing up so that necessary apps to make the thing cooler would cost.  

And the world began to see a shift towards monetization from the internet...

And the first people who got on that particular train made lots and lots of  moooooola....

Today, if you watch the ELT twitterverse and read through upcoming conference presentation schedules for the next six months then you'll begin, like me, to notice a bit of a trend forming...  mobile phones are suddenly becoming "hot" learning tools - despite the low level saturation amongst teachers themselves - and these devices are being touted about as the very next big thing in language learning...

You'd be forgiven for thinking that probably one of the ELT publishers or one of the big-name  institutional chains is busy developing an app, you really would.

But, um,  

but uh-hum,

before we go a bit too hastily into that good night, could we take a deep breath and take a little rational peek into what the greater majority of people in the world who own phones (who can afford these things and the access to the 'net) actually use them for, which is:

General phones

• Talking to friends
• Talking to family
• Talking to colleagues
• Playing games

SmartPhones

• Talking to friends
• Talking to family
• Talking to colleagues
• Playing games
• Talking to friends on social networks
• Talking to family on social networks
• Receiving and answering work 
• Receiving and answering personal emails
• Checking calendar and tasks
• Jotting down quick notes (and even recording new ideas for blogs)
• Quickly checking on news headlines
• Find locations on maps quickly
  
• Checking for random information (secretive fact verifying in pub-quizzes)
• Listening to music
• Catching up on the plethora of podcasts you wish you hadn't downloaded
• Watching short TED videos

Internet access is on the rise, it is... but...

where, why, how...how often, what for....

see the thing is, really, the phone is principally a communicative device.  I don't know a single person who has learned a language on one or even wants to... I really don't.  It's just not... motivational.

The phone has successfully made its way into entertainment but as anyone who tried to make the SecondLife or Gaming crossover (or even TV) into real education or language training will tell you the mix between inane, brain-numbing, relaxing entertainment and education for educational sake does not seem to ever reach a tipping point. 

Sometimes people actually want to go about their lives:  downtime is downtime, travel time is travel time and they don't actually want their devices to take over their entire lives...

Sometimes those who have time on their hands (literally) seem to forget this...

 

Sometimes, like my friend with his pants slipping half down his legs, some of us are actually just too much in a rush juggling gazillions of activities and the very last thing on our minds in the conjugation of verbs.  The prospect of sitting on a sofa learning a language with it makes zero sense so until someone stands up and says hey! I learned my Maori and Finnish on my phone and this is how I did it... then I'll be a critical thinker and wonder where the dollar bills are and who's looking for them.

So,

yea...

nope...

just another fad...

Am I wrong?

What do you think?

Do you think other than students checking out Wikipedia and their online dictionaries that there's any kind of possibility and real future in Mobile Language Learning?

Tell me why you think this, am looking forward to sharing your thoughts and experiences...


Useful links related to this posting: 
Previous posts on using Smartphones in the language classroom 

MILLEE: (Indian project)
Text2Teach (Philipines project)
Nokia's program in China
Learning with Apple
Education Apps for the I-phone

Best, Karenne
education



(p.s I downgraded on the Smartphone, last year, by the way - to the LG Prada... and I no longer access the 'net with mine - sometimes life just really has to quiet, filled with inane tasks like watching people catch trains). :)))
p.p.s As I've mentioned elsewhere I do see a future in tablets, net-books and other portable devices just not with small, primarily used to communicate with loved ones, devices that you carry around in your pocket).

Powerpointing My Office

It goes without saying that any good beginner level (and many elementary) coursebook has a picture appropriately labeled to tell the students what everything is.   If it's aimed at general learners, it'll be the kitchen or the bathroom or perhaps all the rooms in a house.  If it's aimed at Business English students or ESP learners, it'll be common instruments they probably come into contact frequently.

But here's the thing... why use someone else's picture when your students actually live in houses, work in offices or manufacture on site?

My tech-tip to bypass the coursebook or rather personalize it, if you wish, is this:

1. Ask students to take photographs of the room they need to describe or refer to in common speech. In the example above, we've used an office.  By the way, these were taken with Torsten's mobile phone.

2. Get your students to load the pictures up into a Powerpoint document.

3. Ask them to now work in groups to share each others best guesses at what things are before checking their dictionaries (online/on the phone/in hard copy).  

If you're working individually, as I am in this case (not many beginner level students in Germany!), talk through the items together, ensuring that the student does most of the work, using words he's already come in contact with before and look up others together, rather than you giving him all the answers.  

4. Ensure that your student(s) do all the labeling themselves.  

5. If you're working on an online platform with students, you can also jpeg the slides and upload them into a common album.

Why is this such an amazing resource?

Aside from the fact it's a very personal photograph and therefore has a real and immediate relationship to the learner and his needs, you can use these pictures/Powerpoint slides, repetitively, to

• practice articles
• practice this and that, these and those
• practice prepositions
• discuss functions of items
• review vocabulary

What other things could you get your own language learners taking pictures of and labeling?  What other language functions can these pictures help practice?

Have you ever tried anything like this?   How did it go?   Do you think that the pfaffing involved is setting something like this up is prohibitory (it took us about 10 minutes to go around the building snapping pictures... about 5 minutes to load the pictures from his phone into Powerpoint but then I needed to teach him how to make boxes and label, that was about another 10 minutes - I'd refused to give the instructions in German) - we did this about a month ago and his feedback was that he knows the words because he 'sees' them whenever he looks at things in the office now.

Useful links related to this posting: 

• Powerpointing me
• Powerpointing grammar
• Powerpoint and metaphors
• Creating Cross Cultural Guides

Best,
Karenne
education

A smart way to use your phone in ELT classrooms: TechTip #12

Whenever I see freelance language teachers still luggin' around great big CD players from in-company site to in-company class... I always pause and wonder why.

Because these days, in your pockets, you've got all the audio power you need.

If you've got a smartphone or actually any phone with an mp3 player, or even just an i-pod, all you need to bring audio to the classroom is a pair of speakers.

Here's a video of me using my previous phone and a €10 set of speakers.

I confess I did think about re-shooting this video - now that've got a swishier set of butterfly speakers with powerful enough audio for a large room of 2o students and a rather flashier phone... but Katrin did let me film her face and did such a lovely job of starring in this vid... so I decided to load this one up after all.

The video even shows you the little bit of "faffing-about" that so many teachers complain of when it comes to teaching with technology - I left this in so that you can get a feel on how it really doesn't interrupt our class.

To put audio tracks on to your phone, simply insert your CD in your computer, upload into either Windows Media Player or I-tunes, then download the tracks you want on to your phone's memory card, in the same way that you do with music!

What are some of the other ways we can use our smartphone devices to teach English?

Or better yet, what are some of the ways our students can maximize their jogging, commuter time, walking to the canteen time.. etc, to learn English with their very clever machines?

Best,
Karenne

Useful links:

• More tech tips from Kalinago English
• More ideas on using smartphones - with them off, by Lindsay Clandfield
• Cell phones are their lives - Chwa EeLoon
  

• Smartphone Meetings (downloadable lesson plan)
  

• Don't teach your kids
• Collaboration in social networking

• Gapfillers
• Breaking News
• iBizRadio

Smart Phones Meeting (EFL Business English Lesson)

These days, at least over here in Europe, smart phones are about as commonplace as, er... um, desks.

So let's use them to teach with...



Lesson objective:
Practice the language of arranging meetings

Procedure (1):

You can easily dogme this lesson - simply ask your students to brainstorm a list of meetings and appointments they regularly and irregularly have with their colleagues and in their personal lives.

• Get them to write these down in their notebooks or stick up on the board.

• Ask them to drag out their computers-in-their-back-pockets a.k.a phones and encourage them to organize meetings with each other. Provide a time frame to work within, e.g within the next 2 - 8 weeks.

• Work on their grammatical weaknesses, supply alternative phrases, correct the common errors.

Procedure (2):

For students who feel more comfortable with a worksheet, download these:

Smart Phone Meetings (students)

Smart Phone Meetings (teachers)

Who's this lesson for?

Employed adults with smartphones or BlackBerry devices.
Elementary (with some vocabulary explanations) to Advanced.
Best with Pre-Intermediate.

Timing

25 - 40 minutes. Longer if you do the extension exercise.

When to use this lesson:

• to support a textbook unit on telephoning or meetings
• as a review of expressions for arranging meetings
• to focus on prepositions of time (on, at, in)
• to practice using ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd..)
• to work on the future structures (will, be going to, future continuous etc.)

after the first time of presenting this lesson, you can also

• follow up weekly/ whenever you need quick ice-breaker or a 5 minute filler

Have fun!

Best,
Karenne

p.s. before you dash off - have you got any other great ideas for using smartphones in class? The other day we google'd and wikipedia'd (we were looking up Farah Fawcett's age) and this was loads of fun too - would love to know how you've been using them too...