appedELT

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The app is a digital representation of the felt boards many of us grew up playing with.  While some might argue the added worth of the more traditional version in terms of appealing to learning styles, this app can be put to a lot of uses in the ELT classroom. 

The app is very easy to use, which makes it ideal for even the youngest hands. A series of menus  allows you to  choose everything from letters through to items of clothing. After that you use typical Ipad gestures to move and resize.  If you want two items to stay together you simply ‘glue’ them. Once you have constructed your masterpiece you can take a photo.

Take a series of photos and the students are half way to creating a story book.  However, aside from the obvious digital story telling use, the range of  things covered in the different menus makes it ideal for use in and out of vocabulary lessons. 

Teaching clothes, you can shout of the colour and type and the students can respond by choosing from the menus.  21^st century TPR!  This would work both class wide use or one Ipad in the room.  Going beyond words, it can be assist with teaching prepositions (the dog is on the left has a red hat on its head). Having a couple of devices immediately opens up a whole world of describe and draw activities.  And of course should the studetns have the apps themsevles then lot so homework potential as well. Enjoy. 

Simply put Aurasma allows you to overlay a video over an image.  When someone using the app views that image then the video is activated.  

The app is easy to use, first you record the video then you choose an image to put it on and that it's it. You can either record and take the videos via the app or use ones previously made.  The ease of use is a definitely a bonus for the ELT classroom as there are few complicated instructions that need to be conveyed. 

At BETT,  the uses of it that caught my eye were to do with bringing written work to life. One immediate cross over is that of book reviews. Many ELT classrooms use graded readers with teachers setting the dreaded written book review once the students have done. Using Aurasma, the student instead could record their review and overlay that on the cover of the book.  Fellow students can then use the app cover to see what their peers thought of the book.   Alternatively  the covers of the book (or other illustration) can be put around the classroom wall and the app used that way. 

Using the app to bring the walls to life can lead to more clever adaptations of activities.  In many classrooms, students work is put on the wall.  Using Aurasma, the author or the work can record a video to accompany and add further details; activated when the reader waves the app over the work. 

Furthermore the app could be used to bring vocabulary to life. Vocabulary is often put around the walls of the ELT classroom, well if you overlay a photo rather than a video you can do things such as overlay translations, contextualising sentences and so on. Alternatively use the video option to add the pronunciation. 

It seems to me there is a growing interest in augmented reality and the aurasma app is an easy way to introduce this in to the ELT classroom. 

Here are the slides from my talk at the IH DoS conference at the weekend.  They might not make a whole lot of sense without seeing the talk but most of the apps will feature on this blog over the next month if they don't already. 

Sentence builder is the Ipad equivalent of cut up pieces of paper.  You know,  when you cut up sentences and ask the students to manipulate the paper so that they get the right order.  When IWBs made their appearance, this could be replicated into a drag and order exercise. Well this app saves the cutting up and means if you don’t have an IWB you need only hook your Ipad to a projector. 

The app has a free version with a limited number of prefabricated sentences for you to use or a paid version (£1.99 on the UK app store), which gives you hundreds more.  

While I concede that so many sentences might be a bit of chore to link to the grammar point you are teaching; as a whole the app provides a good basis for a team game and general revision of sentence order.  In addition the app has a picture for each sentence thus adding a bit of colour and help for the visual learner and also had all the sentences and words audio linked so students can hear them as well.

However as useful as all that it is, like most apps I ends up reviewing , the best bits come when you get away from the given content and start to create your own and sentence builder lets you do with ease. 

The apps gives you foolproof steps for you to upload your own photos or pics, type in your sentences, record your own voice. You can even add distractor words and in seconds create your own sentences for the class to play with or even better the students can create their own for each other. So not only do students get to play with word order, they get to practice spelling and pronunciation as well.

At the IH teacher’s conference last we launched the ‘my words’ app. The app aims to be a ‘mobile’ vocabulary notebook for students. It is available for both android and apple. Since I work for IH it would be remiss of me not to give it a quick mention on this blog along with suggesting a couple of activities you can do with it.

One of the things I like about the app is that it has the potential to store vocabulary in a number of ways. I have spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to encourage students to do more than simply write down the word off the board and then the translation of the word.  In this app you can store the word in a number of ways. First of all you get to choose the language you want it to work in (though the app itself is in English). Having done that you can enter a lot of information about the word.

The app is by no means perfect and hopefully in future versions things like the search function will have greater useability which would allow for more scope for activities but for a first go, I think it does start to bring the vocabulary notebook to the generation. 

I imagine that many school might recoil in horror at their student getting their phones out to record vocabulary but actually the app can be a good starting point for phone / tablet use in class.  Afterall the app doesnt have to about the words covered in class. When I was piloting the app, I took it with me on trips to record words I came across in a day. This kind of activity makes the basis for a lesson. `Ok your homework is to record ten words over the weekend'.  Then over the weekend the student takes ten picture of words and follows that up by completing all the details about the word.  Alternatively students swap devices and use the search button to  test the owner on vocabulary or to compare their lists on the same topic.  In fact just because it is an app, it doesn't stop you doing all the activties you would usually do with vocabulary notebooks and vocabulary lists. Afterall  the one thing it doesn't do is make sure the students have learned the word they have stored :-)

Last week I was in the Czech Republic to talk to teachers about social networking. On the same conference bill one of the talks was about the use of mobile devices in the classroom.  David Bish, who gave the talk, showed how both phones and Ipads have been utilised in the EF classrooms around the world.  

Almost as much fun was the post conference evening, which had  geek-filled  moments of  ‘have you seen this app, do you use this’.  These show and tell moments albeit somewhat informal were a great way to learn something new but more of that in another post, for now back to the talk.  

Of the number of ideas and activities David showed, three stood out for their sheer simplicity.

The mobile device ring tone as a buzzer for team games. This is such a simple but excellent way of utilising the students’ phones and letting them be used in a meaningful way.  Perhaps as a first step to further use.

Secondly, the talk introduced the idea of using a traffic light on the screen of an Ipad (in this case the teacher’s Ipad). The traffic light can be used to indicate when it is ok to use a mobile device in an exercise. Red means you can’t, green you can and amber only if you must.  Of course this can be extended to it simply being a classroom management device as a whole i.e. for timing an activity.

There are quite a few traffic light apps in the store.  One designed for such a purpose is Stop go! which is also free to download. 

Another free app he showed was Whiteboard, which of course is just what the name suggests.

However Ipads using the app on the same wifi network can connect and colloborate - thus making is great for describe and guess type actitvities (see post on draw something) and if you are like me and my colleague you can send each other messages when you're supposed to be listening.  

A few weeks ago I was giving a talk to teachers on the implications of technology on teaching. At the end of the talk a fellow trainer came up and raised the issue of reading skills in the Internet age,  something I had alluded to in the talk. He asked if I’d heard of wiki wars on youtube and explained how it could be a useful thing to do in the class to develop scanning and skimming skills. 

A quick youtube search later and I knew fully what he was on about. Not only that a google search turned up the rules.  As the trainer had mentioned, this indeed could be a fun and useful ELT activity.  It can be done on Internet mobile devices or laptops. There are a couple of nice apps that allow Idevice users to easily access wikipedia. Wikimobile  is the official wikipedia app and wikipanion an easy to use way of searching wikipedia.

Playing wiki wars in class can promote a number of things. First of all, working in groups with one device per group leads to collboration. Deciding on the best way from A to B promotes conversation and critical thinking as the student. Likewise after the event the groups can analyse the choices they made and why their route worked / didn't work.  Then of course there is the competitve element introduced by getting from to A to B in the quickest way, promoting scanning and skimming.

If you only have one device then most of this still applies assuming you have it attached to a larger screen. 

A few days after discovering this, I found an app called the wiki game 

I came across Decide Now by accident last week and immediately thought it might be a handy little app for the classroom. Basically the app is a ‘fun’ app to help you make a choice. For example if you are at a loss for what to do in an evening you spin the wheel and it will make a choice for you. What is of more use for the ELT classroom is in the paid version (69p) you can create your own ‘wheels’. 

Herein lies its use in the classroom.  There are numerous possibilities it can be put to.  Get the students to put in infinitives of irregular verbs  and you have an instant revision game – spin the wheel and give a point to person who can name the past form etc.  Alternatively add words from a previous lesson and use it for revision or add topics that you want students to talk about, spin and then talk. Learners can even make their own wheels on a topic oftheir choice. 

Ok it is not earth shattering but it adds another way of doing something and therefore another way to engage the class.

Twitter was a buzz with this app earlier this week and I can understand why.  Nearpod is an app, well rather apps, which allow a teacher to send work to students’ smartphone or ipad when they are all on the same network.   What it provides is a synchronous collaborative tool.   It works via a teacher app and a student app. The students join you via a pin code they enter into their devices. Once the student has entered the pin they appear in a class list so as a teacher you can immediately see when they have done a task and how well they did. 

http://edtechdigest.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/interview-getting-cozy-with-near...

When I began teaching many moons ago, one of the first activities that went in my ‘filler tool box’ was one called ‘colour my picture’. The basic aim of which was a speaking exercise based on a black and white photo. The students worked together to decide what the colours are in a black and white photo. They discussed why they thought so and had to agree. Not only a handy filler, but also useful exam practice exercise.  Back then it was black and white photos from newspapers. As technology advanced, computers and digital cameras meant that more photos could be used, students could start to bring in their own and comparisons could be made with original photos. The exercise could also be adapted to paint by number exercise, with students colouring in the pictures.