Evaluating authentic mobile apps for learning

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.

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 purposes.

Here I've divided the criteria into 4 categories and given some explanation of each. I welcome your comments and feedback as this is still very much a work in progress.

Technical

Accessibility - Will all the students have the necessary equipment to use it? Will it work across all / most mobile platforms and also work within a desktop web browser?

• Unless teachers are working in a teaching environment where a uniform set of physical devices are provided for students, such as a complete set of iPads or Android tablets, then they need to check carefully that all the variety of devices that their students possess are all supported. The safest way to ensure this is to check to see if the app also has a browser based version, so that students without up-to-date mobile devices will still be able to participate.

User friendly - Will students be able to learn how to use it reasonably quickly?

• Apps that are complex and take a long time to master may not be worth the commitment. Teachers need to ensure that they plan how to teach the students how to use the apps in a reasonable amount of time or have a strategy for gradually uncovering more features of an app as they develop more activities with it.

Registration - Do students need to register to use it?

• Getting students and teachers to register and remember passwords can be laborious and time consuming, so apps that don’t require registration and particularly those which run in the browser on mobile or desktop can be very convenient to use. Registration does however offer students more protection and makes any potential misuse or mischief trackable back to its source.

Security - Is the app secure?

• Although it can be difficult and time consuming to check, teachers need to determine that the app is secure and the creators will treat their students data and personal information responsibly and confidentially. If there is any form of social interaction enabled through the app teachers need to check if there is any mechanism or process for blocking and reporting abuse.

Financial

Price - Is it free or affordable?

• One of the great advantages of apps is that many are free, freemium (have both a free and a commercial version) or are quite low cost. Having said that, even if low cost apps are being used it needs to be decided who will pay for them, especially if each student in the class needs one.

Business model - Is there a business model to support the app? Is it clear how it makes money?

• Every app producer needs to make money somehow, so it is important to identify the business model supporting the development of an app. Although teachers and students are keen to use free apps, apps that have no visible business model may be generating money through advertising or by trading data. An app that has no visible means of financial support, may have a very short life span, rapidly become unreliable, and fail to develop and evolve due to lack of funds.

Motivational

Digital literacy - Does learning and using the app help students to develop a useful or transferable digital literacy?

• Just using an app in itself doesn’t necessarily constitute developing a digital literacy. The use of the app must in some way develop a digital skill that can be transferred outside of the learning context and used in some authentic way either in the workplace or as part of the students’ lifestyle.

Authenticity - Does it have an authentic purpose beyond language learning? Is it an app that a native speaker would use for a genuine purpose outside of a classroom?

• Apps that are motivating for native speakers to use for a genuine purpose should also be motivating for language learners for that same purpose, so authentic apps that involve some sort of linguistic input or output are ideally suited to language teaching purposes.

Personalization - Does the app enable user to express some aspect of who they are and what they believe?

• It’s important that language learners have the opportunity to use language creatively to express something of their own personality or identity. Apps which support this kind of creativity can be potentially very useful.

Pedagogical

Learning goal / outcome - Is there a a possible learning outcome that use of the app will lead to?

• Using an app is not in and of itself a learning outcome. Use of the app needs to lead towards some form of learning goal. In some cases it can be easy to see what learning goals can be achieved through using the app, at other times teachers may need to think carefully what learning outcomes can be achieved through building activities which include the use of an app.

Interaction / communication - Does it support interaction and communication between users?

• Apps which are developed around social interaction and communication are much more likely to be able to find a useful place in the language classroom and should be easier to base tasks around as communication naturally fits with the aims of language acquisition.

Prolonged use - Does the app need prolonged use to achieve a satisfactory outcome?

• Many apps are designed around short daily tasks build up over a period of time to achieve an outcome. If teachers choose to use these kinds of apps they need to factor this long term approach into their timetabling.

Assessment - Is the work on the app assessable by the teacher? Does the app support the delivery of teacher response and feedback?

• Students need to know that teachers are evaluating, assessing and responding to their work, so apps which can support this kind of teacher intervention can be potentially very useful.

Collaboration - Does the app support collaboration between users?

• The ability to collaborate on projects or producing some form of tangible outcome is viewed as being a potentially significant digital literacy so apps which foster these kinds of collaborative interactions in a meaningful ways have great potential.

Context - In what context would the app be useful? For whom is the app more useful?

• There are a number of different contexts in which apps can be used. Some may be more appropriate for use at home by the student, or in the class by students, whereas others could be more appropriately used by teachers for their own development or the development of content for students.

Reusable - Does the app have sufficient depth of purpose to support multiple activities and tasks?

• Many apps have great novelty value which can be motivating for students, but novelty can soon wear off, so it is wise to weigh the amount of benefit students gain from novelty apps against their potential for extended use and the amount of time it takes to download install and register them.

Learner autonomy - Can app be used independently outside of the class by the student to support some form of learning?

• Apps that can be used by students working independently may well help to foster a degree of learner autonomy if there is some in built learning outcome.

As I said, this is still a work in progress, and I did struggle with which criteria fell in to which of the categories and with the categories themselves, so all comments are welcome.

I hope you find these criteria helpful in evaluating the apps that you choose for your students.

Related links:

• Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker
• Creating interactive video on the iPad 
• Tools for learners
• Video communication apps and mobile learning
• Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments 
• Taking notes from the web on the iPad

Best

Nik Peachey

Video communication apps and mobile learning

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 spoken messages which don't require the viewer to have any specific software or to download large video files. They just click a link and watch your message. This kind of cross platform compatibility is really important if you are working in a BYOD environment where students could be coming to class with a wide range of devices.

EyeReport for picture in picture

EyeReport  puts an interesting twist on the video communication genre by adding the ability to record video on video. By this I mean that students can upload or record a video on their mobile device and then add a video commentary over the top explaining or commenting on what they see in the original video. This opens up a whole range of potential activities that we can get students doing. They could add commentary to sporting clips, give guided tours of places they have visited, explain processes or even make their own documentaries. Once students have completed their recording these can be shared to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or emailed directly from within the app.

CoachesEye for video annotation

CoachesEye is a similar app to EyeReport (though this one is no longer free) but is much more feature rich. Like EyeReport you can record video commentary over video, but with CoachesEye you can also add annotations and you can stop and control where you insert your comments into the video. This app was designed for coaches to give detailed feedback to athletes on their physical movements, but it's a great app to get students creating and talking about their own videos, and also a useful tool to use when observing teachers for training purposes.

Storytime for bedtime stories 

Storytime is another app which puts a new Twist on the video communication genre. It combines video conferencing with reading stories out loud. The app was designed to enable parents to read to their children from a distance and it contains a number of books you can choose to read and while you read you can discuss the books, ask questions and point to things on the page whilst chatting with the video window at the top. This is great for doing online tutoring with younger learners. There is quite a range of books from very basic and up and they are nicely illustrated.

Teleprompter for controlled speaking practice 

Teleprompter is an app that I wrote about a while back when it was still free (iPhone for Speaking Homework ). The app is what it says, it allows you to import text and then it scrolls through the text while creating a video of you reading it. This is great to get students doing controlled speaking practice and then watching and improving their speaking. You can set texts which include a range of sounds which they find difficult and then watch them together and help them to understand what elements of their pronunciation are causing problems.

Keek for video journals

Keek mixes web with mobile in the form of video journals. Users can post short messages of up to 35 seconds from their mobile or computer and these are published to the web or can be browsed through the app. This would be a great tool to use as a daily learning journal, but it's probably best used by adults or more responsible teens. It seems to be a very popular tool with teens in the USA and there is a wide range of content that students can browse through, some of which is not best suited to educational purposes, but as a concept this is quite a good app. If you prefer your students to be sheltered from this kind of popular culture app, then you can still take up the idea of the video learning journal and just get them to use their built in video camera app and post the messages to a Dropbox site.

Six3 for video messaging

Six3 is similar to MailVu and also compatible with most platforms, but it gives you the choice of recording private or public message and has an additional filter feature which can help to improve your appearance on the video. It's called Six3 because you have 63 seconds of recording time in each message. Like Mailvu, the messages are also sent via links through your email, but they can also be posted directly to Twitter or Facebook from within the app.

Skype for synchronous online tutoring

Skype has been around for a good while and was one of the first video based communication tools to break into the mainstream. It's being used by many online schools to deliver live online lesson from teachers to all parts of the globe. One of the great things about Skype, apart from the reliability, is that it keeps developing and adding new features. The recent addition of video messages that enable it to be used as an asynchronous tool will really help to widen its scope for use as a language development tool.


Built in camera app
With all these apps and the possibilities they offer, it can be easy to overlook the obvious. Most modern mobile device come with a built in video camera application and you can always use this to record and send video message. This has the advantage that messages are very safe from third party app providers and any possible security breaches, but sending the video clips to someone else often involves sending the whole clip via email which can be slow and require good connectivity.

For more ideas and activities for using video and webcams to develop languages see my posting 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

Why use video communication?

• Well one of the best reasons to use these kinds of apps is to get students speaking. Speaking homework has always been particularly difficult for students, but now you can ask students to produce spoken homework which you can watch and assess.
• Video as a communication genre is likely to become increasingly important as a 21st century digital literacy, so it's important that our students have practice and are able to use this communication genre, just as they do with speaking on the telephone or writing emails.
• Video can draw students' attention to many of the paralinguistic features of communication that are hard to highlight in a crowded classroom.
• Enabling students to record themselves speaking and then to watch themselves can be very enlightening for students as they can then start to self assess their own performance and look for ways they can improve. It can also encourage some students to try harder, because they know that someone else might see the video.
• Video can be very engaging and can be played repeatedly so it gives students the chance to listen again and in more depth.
• Video communication can help teachers to build a stronger sense of connection with their students, especially with online course when you might never physically meet your students. Conveying some sense of your personality, sense of humour and character can be very difficult in written communications, so video has some really big advantages.
• Giving students 1 to 1 time and having the time to just sit down and spend a few moments listening to a single student without the noise of others around can be really difficult in the classroom, but having a short recorded video clip of our students can really enable us to focus on their specific strengths and weaknesses and enable us to give them some really personalised feedback.

Potential problems

• As with any kind of online communication, make sure your students know how to protect their privacy and also themselves from harassment. Be sure to have a transparent and open policy on any kind of harassment so students know what is likely to happen to anyone harassing and how to report harassment.
• If you are using video communications with younger students also make sure their parents know what you are doing and why you are doing it and get their approval (in writing if possible) and if possible get them involved too.
• Make students aware of the difference between poor quality speaking and poor quality audio. You don't want them to think they sound bad if the real problem is the recording quality and interference from background noise etc. Help your students to understand how to get he best quality results from whatever recording tools they have, by finding somewhere quiet to record and experimenting with the best distance from the microphone.
• Helping students to look their best on video will also help to boost their confidence. Getting the camera angle right and having the light coming from the right direction can also have a big impact on how students look, so helping with this can be part of the learning experience. There is a useful article here which may help: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/look-good-on-webcam/
• Always remember and remind students that anything they do or say on video can potentially be seen by other people for years and even centuries to come, so whenever one of these apps is used, encourage them to think about what they are doing and saying and keep in mind that it could be seen by people they know and people they might yet meet as well as strangers who they might never meet. It's important to remind students of how they want to be perceived.

I hope you enjoy these apps and that they help to get your students speaking. Please leave a comment if you have any favourite video communication apps that you use to get your students speaking.

Related links:

• Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments 
• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best

Nik Peachey

Peer editing in digital and mobile environments

For years now I have been happily using EtherPad based services like http://primarypad.com/ and http://sync.in/ to get participants on the training courses I deliver to work collaboratively to create and peer edit texts. Increasingly though I've been having problems with the reliability of the free services these companies provide and the lack of reliable compatibility with mobile devices.

At last it seems that now I have a very elegant solution in the form of https://quip.com/.
Quip looks a lot like Evernote and has a similar interface with documents contained in notebooks, but one of the big differences is that Quip was designed specifically to enable peer editing and collaboration on documents and has a very clear way of showing and tracking the changes.

Here's a short tutorial showing you how it works:


Why should we get our students peer editing?

• It improves their awareness of accuracy
• It can improve the quality of their writing
• Pushes students to accept that writing is a process that needs revisions and redrafting
• The ability to collaborate in digital environments is likely to be an important real world digital literacy

What kinds of peer editing activities can we do with students?

• We can give them texts with planted errors (10 - 20) in to work on a find and correct together. These could be the lyrics of songs they like or stories or articles they have read.
• We can get students to correct each others' compositions before we look at them.
• We can give them texts with specific features missed out and get them to work together to add them. These could be linking or referencing devices, punctuation, vocabulary words, grammatical features such as prepositions or articles etc.
• We can get them working together to rearrange parts of a text into a better order or structure.
• We can give them the bare structure of a story and ask them to embellish it and make it more descriptive and interesting.

What I like about Quip

• It's free
• Nicely designed interface
• Works and looks well in both tablet  app form and in the browser
• Clearly tracks and highlights changes to documents by different users
• It looks secure and enables you to limit who sees and works on the document while editing
• Has a kind of chat messaging feature which works along side the notes for changes
• We can use it to get students collaborating and working together outside the classroom

What I'm not so sure about

• It requires registration, which can slow things down in class, but it does also add a degree of security
• I haven't tried it with larger groups yet so I'm not sure how reliably it will function when scaled up to say having a whole class work synchronously on a single document
• Not sure how long it will stay free (There is a Quip Business already available)

I'm now looking forward to my next course so that I can try Quip out and get a bit more experience with it. I hope you also find it useful with your students. Do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

Related links:

• What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need? 
• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation 
• How I use social media for my professional development  
• Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey

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:

• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

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:

• Get the News Through Images
  
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
  
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Create Image Books
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases

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