FluentU app

The FluentU app is a welcome addition to the list of practical apps out there for foreign language learners.  FluentU uses the concept of flipped learning and applies it to video and audio. 

If you have used the FluentU web video resources before, then you'll like the app even more.  For those downloading the free version only, you will find that most of the functions are available.  When I tested it out, I found that the free version had enough tools and applications and I find it even better than their web version.

Another strong point with the FluentU app are the mobility and accessibility it provides.  Being an iPhone app, and soon to be released Android app, great language tools are just a press of a touch screen away. 

Once the Android app comes online, this could well be the goto app for language learners.



Below are some of the apps features and some things to help you get started.  There is also a short video introduction below.  You will also need to register an account. 


Dashboard: This should be the first place to go to set you level, language and app settings. 

Once your settings have been confirmed, Browse will probably be the main page you will use.  When on the Browse page, you will find the app's functions at the top of the screen and easy to use. 

All: This application includes all the videos, audio and flashcards of your selected level in one list.

Video: Shows the videos only.  When in your level, once you select video, you will find there is an extensive amount of videos to choose from.  Most of these videos are linked to Youtube videos produced by independent video producers.  Videos can only be used with wifi and are not downloadable.

What FluentU has done, and done very well, is to texualize the video scripts which includes explanations, the vocabulary meaning, pinyin for Chinese, and audio.  Unfortunately, to access the Learn function you need to upgrade your plan.  I found there was no need to upgrade, but have a look and if you think you need it, then upgrade.

You can also favourite a lesson which adds this to your Favourites list on the dashboard. 

Audio lists the sound recordings available in your level based on topics.   Audio introduces vocabulary and plays short sound files that demonstrates the new words in a series of sample sentences.  These are set up similarly to the videos with vocabulary explanations, audio and pinyin for Chinese. 

 In Audio, the Learn function is accessible and has some useful tools with detailed explanations, sample sentences with audio and translations. The Already Know function lets you skip something you have studied and do not need to go over again. A bonus with Audio is that once you have downloaded the lesson, you can still assess the audio file and everything else off line.

Flashcards is different to Audio in that the vocabulary is grouped in either word usage, parts of speech or grammar items, such as "Personal Pronouns" or "20 Essential Newbie Verbs".  Like Audio, the vocabulary has explanations, sample sentences all with audio and translations.  

FluentU has really hit the mark with their app and I think it is one of the best language apps that I have come across.  

Watch the video below to see how to navigate the FluentU app. 


                              

Suggested Activities

With FluentU, teachers can select the lessons appropriate for their students and create reading, writing, listening and speaking tasks. Some activities could be;
1. Flipped Learning: The teacher could set a note taking activity so students could demonstrate understanding and mastery of the lesson's content.  If there are any questions, students can ask the teacher next lesson or via classroom communication methods such as email. 
2. Peer Teaching: Students could be instructed to select particular lessons or vocabulary items and ask to prepare these to present to the class or mentor and coach other students. 
3. Self Study: Just instruct the students to go for it!

This is a very good language learning app.  It engages the user, it's easy to use, it has a nice clean interface, clear and precise language explanations, video, audio and the tools are very well thought out and useful. 

The FluentU app is available on iOS and, at the time of this writing, they are working at getting the Android version. 

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iPad's Text to Speech Function

The iPad has many powerful functions that are useful for students and teachers.  One of these functions is the text to speech function.  The text to speech function can read out, in just about every language, text from the web, in ebooks, Pages and just about everything that is in text form on your iPad.  

For students and teachers, there are many ways to use this function in language learning and teaching.  You can refer to my post on SpeakIt! which has similar functions and capabilities to the iPad's speech to text. 

Watch the video to see how you can set your speech to text function on the iPad.  


                             

SpeakIt! is a useful tool for learning languages

SpeakIt! Chrome extension is a text to speech tool that basically can read out texts from web pages. It is easy to use and the great thing for language teachers and students is that it can convert text to speech in a variety of languages. So far you can set it to read English - male or female voice, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, these languages have a female speakers voice. 

You can also set the speed and pitch of the voice, it takes a bit of adjustment to get it right, but once set, the text is read out in an audible but robotic tone, but it's easily understandable and is as good Siri and most computer or web generated speech that I have come across. This is a handy supplementary tool for teachers and students and comes at the right price. 

I could not get SpeakIt! to work with web based PDF documents, but it reads web pages without much fuss.  So if you have a text you have saved on your blog or website it works fine, but is not so happy with Google Doc. 

Some ideas for teaching activities are;

1. Reading Set the students a reading text and have them repeat after each sentence or short section.  But you'll need to monitor they do not start talking like a robot!
2. Listening (combined with Reading) activity  For example, students could work in small groups or on their own to complete a listening-reading activity.  This could be an unseen text of one of your Google Doc or blog posts in [language].  This could be turned into a listening-reading activity by having the questions placed below the text. The student could highlight as much as they think they can listen to in one playing, and repeat the process to gain full comprehension and answer the question.                                                                                                                                                     The advantage of having a combined listening-reading text is that students can sound out the new vocabulary, and find it in the dictionary if needed, especially useful in character based languages such as Chinese.                                                                                                                                                                                                     This method also allows students to work at their own pace through the text at the speed they are comfortable with.  As most students have varying listening skills, this is another way of differentiating the task.  

This type of listening activity may be best used to supplement the listening resources you already use.   SpeakIt!, Siri and other digital reading apps are still someway off from sounding like native speakers.  

To activate SpeakIt!, first click on the SpeakIt! icon, highlight the text you would like read out then click the icon.   Right click to set your options, high light the text you want read out then click the SpeakIt! extension.  Watch the video below for an demonstration. 

                                  

Test SpeakIt! out on the Chinese and French texts below.

Chinese sample text

小明你好！

  我已经在中国两个星期了，这里人很多，但是中国人都很热情我喜欢中国人，他们帮助我学汉语。我觉得说汉语难，但是听汉语不难。我的汉语老师是王老师。他去年去了澳大利亚，今年五月再去了。

French sample text

Il était une fois une maman cochon qui avait trois petits cochons. Elle les aimait beaucoup, mais comme il n'y avait pas assez de nourriture pour qu'ils puissent tous manger à leur faim, elle les a envoyé tenter leur chance dans le vaste monde.

Find iSpeak in the Chrome store.

Workflow and App Smashing

Recently I presented a workshop to language teachers on workflow and app smashing. The term "app smashing" sounds so cool and app smashing itself is so much fun and you can really create some valuable activities with apps for your students. App smashing is also known as "app synergy" or "workflow", I also like the term "app blending", it's much softer than "smashing", but I imagine students prefer the "smashing" imagery. But whatever you want to call it, the concept of "app smashing" is nothing new to teachers.

Most agree that "app smashing" is taking at least two apps and using the functions of the apps to create something. Before digital technologies, I suppose we would have taken paper and pen plus maybe sticky taped a photo or other photocopied image to create an activity sheet. This would then be followed by photocopying or stenciling a class set and even added a audio cassette recording of the teacher and set activities to that. See, workflow, taking tools (technologies of the day) to create something is not new. In the pre-digital era, paper, pen, audio recorder, VHS recorder, even the television, were part of the "technology" of the day. Remember stencils and overhead projectors? Who would of thought these technologies would be superseded only 20 years later by digital technologies such as tablets that can mirror, laptops and smartphones? So no matter if you've been teaching 50 years or 5 years, you can already have the knowledge to do some app smashing.

App smashing is fun and can be very productive. Like taking a digital photograph, you can "app smash" as much as you like, drafting and re-drafting your creation till you have, what you judge at least, to be a worthy product for your students. If you download free apps, app smashing does not cost anything but your time. The other great thing about these digital products is that you can modify them and improve them after each time you or your students use them. It's never ending. Don't keep all the fun to yourselves either. Give your students a class activity or project based assignment and get them to smash some apps and call it "app smashing". What do you think they would prefer to call it? "App smashing", "app synergy" or "workflow"?

Any good app smashing activity needs to be well thought out and well planned. This is where I think the term "workflow" fits in. I think scope and sequence, lesson plans, teaching programs, are all different types of workflows. The content in these guide or inform us what to teach and work to cover. They can also include examples of how we can achieve to objectives of our units of work and lessons with "how to" samples. These "how to" sections could include app smashing. That's my take on "workflow" anyhow, isn't it to make "work flow"? 

There are teachers, who seem to have the talent to make apps blend effortlessly together, but for most of us, good planning and good knowledge of the apps to be smashed is essential. Use the apps you want to include in your lessons and be the "app master" of that app. Some students will catch on quick with how to use apps, but there's nothing worse than a teacher giving out an activity that includes app smashing and not being confident in using them. Here are a few ideas of basic to advance app smashing ideas I have used.

Video Activities for the Languages Classroom (1)

       

Using videos in the language classroom is one way of getting authentic language to the students.  In most cases, students can have access to your video activities via prepared video activities and flipped lessons in the classroom or at home, so accessibility is a strong feature and advantage when using videos.  

Some suggested teaching ideas for video activities

Videos can be used at any stage of the teaching and learning process.  For languages, videos can be a great way to introduce, revise and review vocabulary, sentence patterns and language concepts.  With some of the products below, you can create and design video activities to also be formative and summative activities.  Following are a few suggested activities how I have used videos in the classroom.  

Collaborative group work: students can view a video together in pairs, taking notes, stopping, replaying, and discussing the content as they go.  With products like Educanon (see below) and Edpuzzle, strategically placed questions or references by the teacher, get the students thinking and add another activity apart from those mentioned above. 

Flipped Lessons: Flipped lessons have been around for ages and similar to the collaborative group work idea, students can work not only in groups but also on their own.  The great thing about flipped lessons and using videos is that students can go over the material as many times as they need to master the content.  So for example, if they have missed a lesson, they can catch up on their own, take notes and discuss the content with the teacher. 

To view some of my flipped lessons, please go to my Narralakes Youtube channel. 

Educanon 

Educanon is a free web based product that is a powerful tool for any teacher.  You can create your classes or student lists easily by copying and pasting your lists or adding them in manually.  The Educanon dashboard is neat and easy to navigate and the functions below should help you get started.

Creating: The teacher can create an activity via the Design page.  Look for a video or upload your own from a wide range of web based sources, such as Vimeo, Youtube, and the Khan Academy, just to mention a few.  Once you have found your video, past the url in the finder, Educanon finds the video and then you can start adding activities.  You can add questions and crop the video if you only want to use parts of it.  

Assigning:  Once you have created your video activity, you can assign a class from your list.

Sharing: The great thing with Educanon is that you can share it with students or anyone via Twitter, email or Facebook with the url code or embed it into your web page.  

Bulbs: Bulbs are basically your storage area for your videos and then assign classes or students to them, creating the "bulb" .  You can store the videos you have worked on and created or find new videos.  

Monitor: Another great feature of Educanon is that you can monitor your students, this is great for formative or summative assessments and as with most good products, grades can be exported and saved.  

Overall, I find Educanon an excellent product. The free version has most of the functions that any class teacher would need, not many of us would have more than 8 classes.  If you do need feel you need the extra functions the Basic version does not provide, the Premium and Blended School versions come at a reasonable price.  

Here's an example of part of one of my Educanon videos. 




Check out my video resource list at Pinterest. Follow Ken's board Videos on Pinterest.

Online Tools that make a task fun!

There are many online web tools that can make learning fun for the student and are valuable resources for teachers.  With the tools listed below, teachers can actually be giving students a variety of activities such as pre-task (getting to know), formative and summative tasks.  Well planned tasks can assist teachers easily gather student information and see how they are progressing once set up.  

Prior or pre-testing, also known as entry tickets, is to gain the background knowledge of what your students know if they are a new class or before introducing a new topic.  They can take the form of just simple questionaires or surveys and usually short.  For example, if I was to teach a new class of Year 7 (1st year high school) Chinese, I would pre-test them to see what knowledge and language ability they had.  You can find the example I created in Socrative, if you have a Teachers or Students account, you can search for it on Socrative and search for SOC-12288269.  

Socrative is an easy to use web based application for teachers and students.  You can download the apps for iOS and Android and there are lots of support and forums out there.  Socrative's power is not only the smooth and easy way you can design your activities, but also in the way that you can include games and most important of all for teachers, the feedback function.  As soon as the activity is finished teachers can at the press of a button receive an emailed spreadsheet of the results.  You can download from other teachers from the generous list of shared, prepared activities at Socrative Garden.  Student can access the activity via the web or download the app. 

Kahoots  is a fun tool that is similar to Socrative.  The interface is different though and once in the activity it is very engaging.  Students find it very entertaining and it has a count down function that really engages students.  It also has a feedback facility for teachers with a new download to Google drive function.  You can log onto the Kahoots website and create an account for free and then start designing your activities. 


Google Forms are incredibly powerful as an online tool that you can create a multitude of activities with. When you download the Flubaroo or Doctopus add-ons, it is an even more powerful application.  Teacher feedback, like in Socrative and Kahoots, is sent via the email in a Google sheet and then you can check out the data.  To log onto the activity, the student can be sent the link or it can be hyperlinked on your webpage. 

Quizlet is a useful addition to this list of free web tools for teaching and learning.  Similar to the ones mentioned above, Quizlet can be used to support student learning by creating lists for vocabulary and sentence pattern activities in a variety of languages.  It's test feature is a good summative and formative tool that gives a variety of options to how to set up the test.  The only negative aspect of Quizlet is that it does not have the teacher feedback like Kahoots and Socrative in the form of an excel spreadsheet.  I have mentioned this to the Quizlet people but their response was to get the students to screen shot and send it which I don't think is a good option.  For such a good product and if you pay for the teacher's version like I do, I think an excel feedback facility for teachers would make Quizlet one of the best out there.  Besides this gripe, it does have several great feature for example, it has is that is provides native speaker audio for the texts and a few basic but fun games, even on the free version!  The iOS and Android apps work well as well, but do not have all the functions the web based platform has.  

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Apps For Chinese

There are a million apps for Chinese out there for learning Chinese, but for the Chinese language teacher, the list below are amongst the most useful I have found and would recommend.

This one came via the Twitter feed and if you have been searching for a scanner or tablet that can convert Chinese characters to editable text, optical character recognition (OCR), then your search is over.

   1.      Pleco an excellent Chinese dictionary that has hand writing recognition and it is   
                                           FREE :)

2.  2.         Qingwen: an even better Chinese dictionary that has what Pleco has and more including; voice, create wordlists, but NOT FREE $6.49  :(

3. iBooks: to download Chinese books, although many are too difficult for the Continuers course.

4. Pages: to annotate downloaded texts.  Great app, but expensive @ $12.99

5. Goodreader: one of the best readers. You can annotate by using the speech bubble function, but for text annotation within the original, Pages has it over Goodreader. Good value @ $1.29

6. Keynote: good for presenting in slide format, also has the advantage of sending your work to open in Powerpoint.  Great app, but only if you really want it @ $12.99

7. Comic Apps - check out the list by Education Technology and Mobile Learning here 

8. Writer: a Chinese writing game, good for revision exercises and having fun at the same time. FREE :)

9. Chinese Writer for iPad: Chinese writing revision FREE :)

10. Pinyin: perfect your tones with this revision game app FREE :)

11.   Translate Photo Free   is a free app that you can use on your iPad.

1. Take a photo of the image or page of a book with Translate Photo Free.

2. Press "Next" in the top right hand corner.

3. Preview the text.

4. Choose your language at the bottom of the screen. 

5. Tick the box if ok.

6. Wait for the conversion and there is your text.  

7. There are various ways to send the text so you can edit it further, press the sharing icon at the top right of the screen.  I found that when I sent it via email it was very slow, so don't be in a hurry to work on it.  

Overall, I found this app very useful and easy to use, if they speed up the share function, it would be perfect.

There is also a speak and translation function available.  Just be aware, digital translations have some way to go yet, but at least it gives you the gist.

Also, check out the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK),  China Panorama series and Boston University Chinese courses  iTunesU Chinese resources.  
Google also has some great apps, more to come about Google apps later.  
See my recommendations for other great language tools in the other sections or my Pinterest boards. 
There are lots more out there, so let me know of anymore more that you think useful.