Posts tagged mobile
ESU Awards: have the digital entries got any better this year?
Nov 13th
A year ago I posted an article on this site that was critical of the entries for the Duke of Edinburgh’s “President’s Award” for innovation and good design in digital materials for English language learning. I was a judge again this year, and I suppose the answer to my question above is “yes, they are somewhat better, but nowhere near good enough”. The winner was Cambridge English Online’s Phonetics Focus app, which we felt was a great tool for teachers and learners to learn the Phonemic alphabet, with a clear and attractive user interface and visual design. There were some other interesting entries, though we felt a couple were not quite finished enough for us to consider and we have contacted their developers to explain this. Otherwise, we were relieved to see some mobile apps, albeit of variable quality, though surprised to see CDROMS, even for entries that were web-based.
What next for mobile language learning?
Jul 20th
It’s a year since I started Constellata and I have been using this anniversary to reflect further on the growing area of mobile learning.
This is a fast changing area and there are no definitive answers, and my views are likely to change during my company’s second year of trading.
Developing Mobile Language Learning – Brighton
Apr 15th
Paul Sweeney and I held another knowledge building event on mobile language learning, this time in Brighton on the fringes of the IATEFL conference presenting our new whitepaper on mobile language learning which we will publish in the next few weeks. Before then we’ll also publish a summary of the event.
The event was kindly hosted by Paul Slater of the University of Brighton on Friday 15 April with a panel representing ‘traditional’ publishers, course providers, language app developers and educators will engage with the emerging challenges of developing apps for language learning.