Technology Center: mobile learning

Showing posts with label mobile learning. Show all posts

Mobile Learning in ELT: Survey 2013

In 2010, after buying my first iPad I decided to do some research into how teachers were using mobile devices in their classrooms and their teaching. At this stage ‘smart’ phones were already starting to make an impact and tablet devices were just coming onto the market. The research results from this first survey were published in the Guardian Online under the title ‘English language teachers connect to mobile learning’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/teachers-mobile-learning and the complete results and report can be downloaded from: http://technogogy.org.uk/mobile_survey.pdf

I followed this research up in 2011 using the same survey questions in an attempt to see how things had advanced with the intervening period and the results from that survey were published in May 2011 on the DELTA Publishing blog under the title ‘mLearing and ELT: Are We Mobile Ready?’ http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development/mlearing-and-elt-are-we-mobile-ready

One of the main observations from this survey was that many teachers were in fact ready and willing to embrace mobile learning and mobile devices, but that publishers seemed to be more reluctantly lagging behind.

Over the last 18 months since publishing the 2011 survey results, mobile learning seems to have made its way into the main stream of discourse surround the implementation of educational technology in our schools and universities, so I have decided once again, thanks to the support of the Bell Educational Services Teacher Training department, to launch a more extensive survey building on the original one to try to discover the extent to which the ‘talk’ about mobile learning has had any genuine impact and realisation in our schools and classrooms over the past three to four years.

Whether you use technology, mobile learning or avoid it please find time to answer these 20 questions and share your ideas, opinions and reflections and I will once again publish the results for all to share.

Mobile Learning in ELT 2013 Survey

Many thanks for your help and participation.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Wise Quotes with EFL ESL Students

I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.

You can search for quotes by keyword, look at quotes of the day, browse quotes by topic or just click for a random quote.

That isn't all, iWise is compatible with Twitter and allows you to re-tweet quotes or subscribe to and follow tweet feeds from your favourite sources of wisdom.

If you decide to search by topic etc, it even pulls in tweets from Twitter too.

So how about some quote activities with our EFL ESL students?

Here are some suggestions:

Get students to find a random quote and translate it into their own language or find a parallel quote in their own L1.
Collect 8 - 10 quotes on a similar topic and get students to discus them and see which ones they prefer / most agree with.
Get 8 - 10 quotes and cut them in half to create a matching activity. Get your students to match the two halves of each quote.
Get you students to match the quotes to the writer of the quote.
Give your students a list of 6 - 8 topics and ask them to find their favourite quote on each topic, then compare them in class and discus / have a class vote on which is the best (students should try to convince others in the class that theirs is the best quote)
Get two+ quotes on the same topic. Print them up and put them around the class get the students to stand by the one they most like / agree with and discus why.
Choose 2 -3 people and get your students to find their best quotes, then compare that quotes and try to decide which of the people is the wisest.
Give the first part of some quotes to your students and see if your students can write an ending to it.
Find some quotes about someone and see if the students can guess who they are about.
Use a single quote at the start of each lesson to lead in to the theme of the lesson.
Use a single quote at the start of each lesson as a warmer and ask students if they agree / disagree with the quote. They could give it marks out of ten too. Keep a league of favourite quotes.

Why do I like it?

It's free and really simple (but also quite complex)
Some amazing features that really take advantage some Web 2.0 technology
Lots of fast and varied ways to access the quotes
There are loads of quotes from a real range of sources
There is an iPhone ap which can enable you to get all this information via your iPhone or iPod Touch so great for mobile learners

What I'm not so sure about

The site is so dynamic that you can see then loose quotes pretty quickly if you are just browsing.
Some quotes can be a little abstract!
The site is free, but the ap isn't, but it is very cheap (59p in UK). Here's a video showing how you can use it.

NB: I have bought the ap, but haven't tried it yet so this is NOT and endorsement of the ap.

I hope you enjoy iWise and the ideas here. Please leave a comment if you have any other favourite quote sites or suggestions for how you have used quotes with students.

Here you can find more online reading activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Goolge Maps for Directions

Love them or hate them, you have to admit that Google does offer us all manner of useful free tools. One of my favourites is Google Maps, especially useful on my odd trips to London (when I never seem to be able to remember my A-Z!)

So, I've been thinking about how we could use this 'real world' tool to help our EFL students and to develop their abilities to give and understand directions. It's actually quite simple to use. You just go to http://maps.google.co.uk/ or http://maps.google.com/ Click on 'Get Directions' and then enter your start point and destination. Click the Google logo below for a quick video tutorial that shows some of the features.

Click for flash video tutorial (1.4 Mb)

So how can we use this with students?

Choose a location and destination and get Google Maps to create your directions, then print up a map of London with the two destinations on and ask your students to mark the route on the map.
A variation on this would be to have the map printed with the route on and cut up the directions and ask your students to put them in the correct order
Print up a route map and directions and edit out some of the key words, then get your students to write in the missing words.
Give your students a map showing only the start point and read out directions for them to follow. They have to listen and tell you what the destination is.
Print out close ups of each stage of the journey and use them as flash cards. Get your students to match each step of the journey to the correct flashcard.
Print out a route map and ask students to write their own directions for the map (You could give two groups different destinations then get them to exchange directions to see if the other group can use their directions to find the correct destination.)
To download an example set of directions + route map and blank map to print up and use for these activities click here: Example materials >> (500k pdf)
To print up maps and directions for yourself just click on the Google maps 'Print' icon.

What I like about it

Google maps is free and really simple to use
If you have an i-pod touch or an i-phone, there is a fantastic Google Maps widget which you can install (great for mobile learning)
Gives good clear instructions and easy to print maps (just use the 'Print' icon)
A really useful 'real world' tool
You can use it live if you have a computer room or data projector / interactive whiteboard in class, or just print up materials for use off line.

What I'm not so sure about

The detail of the maps for some developing countries is pretty sparse

Hope you find this tool useful and if you have suggestions for other activities I'd love o hear them.

Best

Nik

Creating multimedia stories

I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!

Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.

Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.
Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two versions

Silent with better image quality (2.1 Mb wmv)
Lower quality one with music (500k wmv)

I know there are a lot of online Web 2.0 ap that do all of this too, but for those of us with slower, unreliable or more expensive connections, it's nice to have a bit of software that can do the job for us without using any bandwidth at all (apart from downloading it of course).

You should be able to download Photo Story 3 from here.
It's a 5 Mb download, so that shouldn't take too long even over a dial up connection.

How to use this with students
You can use it to create multimedia materials for your students, whether is for use in class or to take home for homework. Here's some things you can do:

Create some narratives for them to view
Create narratives which illustrate grammar points
Create a series of pictures and words which illustrate different sounds from the Phonemic alphabet

Having software like this that can produce a professional looking end product can be really motivating for students and really help them to push themselves to produce accurate polished work. Here's some things you can get your students to do:
It's ideal for presenting the results of project work.

Get the students to take photographs and upload them to tell their own stories to the class
What they do each day
What they did at the weekend / on holiday
Stories about their family
Get some pictures from Flickr and get the students to order them and create a story around them.

What I liked about it

It's free
Easy to use and quick to learn
Really liked some of the filter effects
Liked the way you can easily create a wide range of background musics
File sizes were quite reasonable and exports pretty easily for a number of different devices

What I wasn't so keen on

It's a shame that it's so limited in the the formats that it exports to (mainly different sizes of wmv) , but I guess there are plenty of converters you could use if you wanted to change it for an i-pod or something like that.
I also thought that a bit more control over how the text was placed over the images would have been really handy.
There's no version for MAC of course, but if you have a MAC you won't need this as you get lots of nice stuff that does all this for you ready installed when you buy it.

Photo Story 3 isn't a revolutionary piece of software by any means, but I'm sure it can be used to really engage your students in some enjoyable learning.

Hope it works for you

Best

Nik

Making quizzes for i-pod

With the growth in interest in mobile learning and the ubiquitous nature of the i-pod among our younger (and increasingly older) students this piece of software looks like a really useful tool we can use to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The software I’m referring to is I-Quiz Maker. You can download I-Quiz Maker for free at:
http://www.iquizmaker.com/

Once you’ve installed it you can make quizzes using either True / False question types or Multiple Choice questions. The quizzes a very simple to make and you can make as many questions as you like and as many quizzes, as you like.

This demo tutorial shows you how to create the quiz

This looks like a really useful tool to:

help revise and develop your students vocabulary. You can write a vocabulary quiz and up- date it each week with new words that your students have learned
get the students to create quizzes for each other and share them
set up revision exercises

Although there is a bit of work involved in creating the quizzes, once you made them you’ll be able to keep them and use them again with other students.

Once you have finished creating your quiz you can then export it to your desktop and it can be uploaded to the I-pod through I-Tunes. The only catch here is that you and / or your students will need to buy the I-Quiz game for your I-pod. It is really cheap though (less than 1 US dollar / 79 p in the UK) and it does come with some ready-made quizzes.

What I like about it

You can set the quizzes so that students get a maximum number of questions in each game and so that they loose after a specific number of wrong answers. This should make it more competitive.
The game will randomise the questions so you could input 50 questions and they would get 10 or 20 random questions each game.
It’s very easy to use and is just simple point and click
You can update quizzes so that they grow as your students’ knowledge grows
There's a version for PC and for MAC!

What I’m not so sure about

Students will need an i-pod, they can’t just run the quiz on their computer or i-Tunes
The game is only compatible with Fifth generation i-pods (This may become an advantage as more people trade up to more modern versions and the older ones become available more cheaply second hand) which isn’t much help for students with older i-pods.
I couldn’t get the user manual to download so there wasn’t much documentation to help me learn how to use the software
I think there may have been one more question type, but I couldn’t get the button for it to work ??
Students will have to buy the I-Quiz game (though as I said it’s quite cheap) and that means setting up an i-tunes account.

On the whole though, despite the above drawbacks, if you have a classroom full of students who carry i-pods about then this could be just the thing for you.

Let me know how it goes

Best

Nik

Creating a mobile phone website

With the growth in interest in mobile and handheld learning, I thought I’d investigate one of the many new Web 2.0 type start ups that are offering free (at the moment at least) services for setting up websites and web based communities to be accessed on mobile phones and other mobile devices.

The one I’ve started with is a service called Winksite. On the home page of their website the company claims that, “Winksite makes it easy to publish mobile websites and communities that can be viewed worldwide on any phone.” So I thought I would try to set up my own site as an extension of this blog.

What’s good about it
I was actually quite impressed at just how easy it is and at the number of features on offer. Once you have registered, Winksite offers users the opportunity to set up as many as 5 websites for mobile devices. Each site can have a range of features that you can select and edit from a fairly easy to use web based interface. Some of the possible features for your mobile website include:

Announcements
Blog entries
Journal entries
Field reports
Profile information
User surveys
Chat rooms
Forums
Feed syndication
Plus a few others

I spent about an hour on Winksite, by which time I had;

set up my mobile site
added my profile
personalised the look of the site
created a couple of surveys
added chat and a forum
posted a blog entry and an announcement.

Once you’ve created your site there is also a tool that allows you to import email addresses from your address book to send out invitations to join, so you can quite easily get people onto your site and publisise it to your friends.

The sites that Winksite creates comply to all the established standards for mobile site, so that’s great too and also means that the site can be accessed through other mobile devices. I use an Opera browser on my Nintendo DS Lite as a kind of wireless palmtop as I roam around the house and garden, so to be able to access the site on that for me is really a great bonus.

Here’s a movie showing what my site should look like on a mobile phone.
Winksite demo
Here’s another movie showing how to create your own site
Tutorial movie 1
An this movie shows how you edit and change the site
Tutorial movie 2
You can try the live site on your PC
Interact with the live Winksite

The Featured books section is also interesting as it provides a way to access books on your phone, page by page and chapter by chapter, as they are written. This also enables you to interact with the writer as the book is written and discuss various elements through the forums and surveys.

What’s not so good about it
From the Winksite homepage you can also have a look around at the other sites that are being created. This isn’t so impressive, as it seems that lots of people are interested in finding out how this works etc, but it’s hard to find any sites that have more than one or two members signed up, and not many have much content added. That isn’t a criticism of the tool though, I think it’s just that the audience / market for mobile web content is still quite new and there is obviously huge potential here. The makers have also tried to steer you towards the best content by adding an Editor's choice section, as well as having a regular Featured site.

Unless you have a good contract with your phone provider that gives you plenty of web access included, accessing the site could be expensive. Having said this the pages the site produce are all pretty lite and should load pretty quickly, so comparatively, this won't be such an expensive site to access.

How to use it with my students
This is a difficult one. If you have students who come to class regularly, are they really going to want to use a mobile phone based web community to interact with their teacher and the other students from the class? I think probably not. There is also the problem that some students may well not have phones that are capable of browsing websites.

If however you have distance or online classes then I could see the possible potential of using a tool like this in conjunction with other web based materials to support students and make it easier for students to work together and keep in touch with you.
The site could be useful for a class project. Get the students to decide on issues that they feel are important to them, then set up the site based around one of these issues and try to get students from other classes or schools exchanging opinions and polling each other.
You could set up polls and surveys on Winksite as a form of action research to get anonymous feedback from students and create dialogue with them about some of the methods you’re using in class.
You could get students to create their own site as a form of learner diary.
You could set up a site to keep in contact with the parents of your students and help to keep them informed about what’s going on with their children and any events etc that are happening at the school. You could even post your homework assignments on the site so that the parents check to see that their children are doing the work you set them.
You could try to get students to collaboratively write a book/ story from their phone or computer. Decide on the topic first and then ask students to take it in turns to add a page each. Others could interact and vote on what they would like to happen next using the survey feature.

Conclusion
If you want a multi-featured mobile phone website with lots of interactive features, and you don’t want to pay anything for it, this is a great place to start. The feature set is rich and varied and the interface seems to be pretty easy to use. It’s difficult to say though at the moment if having a website that is accessed though a mobile phone has any really significant advantages over one that is purely accessed through a computer. I suppose a lot depends on how much change there is in coming months / years regarding access the web through mobile phones. The popularity of Apple’s new I-phone certainly points towards, this happening, but looking at the costs involved at present, it’s still going to be a while before this kind of access is available to many in poorer countries.

If you try out this tool or have tried similar one please leave a comment.

Best

Nik

Creating audio-visual monologues

Flipz TV is a really useful piece of free software for creating entertaining audio-visual materials.

The software enables you to record your own audio monologues and lip-sync them with a choice of animated talking heads. It then turns them into small Flash files which can be run in a web browser. These can be put on the Internet, run form your computer desktop, or the Flash files can even be delivered to mobile phones.

Here’s an example that I created using a Sonnet (130) by William Shakespeare. (You’ll need to have the sound o your computer turned up)

Click here to see an example

Use the small controls on the right to stop and replay the audio.

What I like about this software, apart from the novelty value, is Flipz creates quite small files. You could easily email the file to students with some instructions so they could listen at home or in a self access lab. Or put them on their phone or mobile device. You could make some really useful homework tasks for them. The students could even download the software onto their computers at home and create their own materials to bring to class.

Creating something like this is very easy. Just click through the five steps on the interface.

The first step is to choose the character you want from a possible 8 talking heads (two come with the standard download of the software and you can download another 8 by registering)
You then type or copy and paste in the text that you want the animated head to read.
You then either import your audio file or record your own
Then simply click a button and the software generates your audio character and synchronises the speech to the text
You can the either preview or finish your project. The software generates an html page with the talking head embedded in it.

You can watch this short tutorial movie to see just how easy it is.

Tutorial movie (Flash 523k)

Here are some ideas for combining this into your teaching.

Record short poems or stories for the students to listen to
Record some tongue twisters for the students to listen to and practice
Get students to produce and record their own news reports
Get students to record an imaginary daily diary for one of the characters
Get students to record imaginary problems for a problem page. They can then listen to each other’s problems and record some advice
You or your students could record a song or import a song audio file and add the words

You can download Flipz for free from: http://www.flipz.tv/
It’s about 3.15Mb so it shouldn’t take to long to download, then just unzip the file and install it. It only runs on PC (sorry MAC users)

Click here to see how Flipz would look on a phone or PDA
Flipz on phone

If you use Flipz or have any good ideas for how to exploit it, by all means post them in the comments below.

Best
Nik Peachey

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