flynn089

One of the true keys to learning and developing any ability is the willingness and capacity to reflect on what we have learned. So how can we encourage our students to reflect on what they have learned? Generally we want them to reflect from a slightly more distant perspective of time rather than more immediately within the classroom and this is where Recap can really help. Recap is a cross platform app that allows teachers to create classes and manage students and set them reflection questions that they can respond to using video on their laptop webcam or smart phone from their own home. How does Recap work? To create a class and add your students just register on the site as a teacher. Once you have registered you click on Add Class and complete the class details form. You can also decide at this point whether you want your students to register with a PIN or an email. Email is a better option for older learners, whereas a PIN is better for younger ones as this doesn’t require them to...

Back in April 2013 I delivered a workshop at the IATEFL 2013 conference in Liverpool. The topic of the workshop was ' Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps ' and in the workshop I encouraged participants to share and explore their subconscious criteria for deciding which apps and web based tools they used with their students. I particularly encouraged them to think about 'authentic' apps rather than those made for learning. This is because in many ways I feel that most made for learning apps have made very little pedagogical progress beyond their roots in CALL from the last century. I also believe that encouraging students to get 'hands on' with authentic apps has a much more important role in helping them to develop digital literacies which they can use outside of the classroom. Check out my ebook As a result of that workshop and the research that developed from it I've now developed this list of criteria for evaluating mobile apps for educational purp...

One of the great things about mobile devices such as tablets, iPads and phones is that most modern devices have good quality cameras and microphones built in. This opens up a really wide range of potential for communication and speaking practice that used to be such a struggle to organise on older laptops and desktop computers. App developers have also been quick to exploit the potential of this powerful tool and in this post I'd like to look at some of the tools that have been created and how they can be used for language development. Mailvu for asynchronous messages Mailvu has been a long time favourite of mine, mainly because the web based version is so easy to use and doesn't require any downloads. You just point your browser at: http://mailvu.com / and as long as you have the Flash plugin installed on your computer you can start recording immediately. Mailvu also provides mobile apps for iOS, Android an Blackberry. These are easy to use and it allows you to send short spo...

A couple of years back I wrote about a really nice web based tool called Xtranormal and since then I've heard from so many teachers saying how useful their students have found it, so I was delighted yesterday to find that the same makes had now produced a free mobile / tablet app called Tellagami . The app runs on a mobile device and allows users to add animated speaking characters to a selection of backgrounds or to the users' own images. You can then either use text to speech to write a script for the character, or you can record your own voice and the app will lip-synch you text to the character. This is very quick and easy to do. Here's how. Open the app an click on create. Then choose your background, either from the ones provided, from your own image library or you can take a photograph of wherever you are at the time. Then you can choose the character you want to use and customise their appearance. Next you can select an emotion for your character. Lastly, you can e...

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 mai...