The infographic below shows how digital natives outgrow traditional forms of education and how we can apply mobile learning into everyday teaching.

Via: Voxy Blog

Post sourced from Joanna at Macmillan English Campus

You may be familiar with web analytics, such as Google Analytics, which monitor people’s movements around a website, their clicks, buying habits, social network interaction and more. Learning analytics is similar. However, it involves looking closely at things like how competent a learner is, how they interact with the curriculum, how influential they are on their academic social network, and where they succeed and fail in the learning programme they are using.

The advantage of learning analytics is that it helps us to better understand the people using the technology. It is all very well creating an impressive Mlearning programme but, even better, it needs to be able to respond to how people use it, and adapt itself to the user. According to elearnspace, in the future learning apps will be offering a much higher level of personalization, responding to how each individual goes through the tasks and tests, and changing the programme to address their specific strengths and weaknesses.

How’s it useful?

If a teacher is able to see which exercises on the app the student finds the hardest, they can target areas of difficulty that need to be worked on. They can look at data to answer questions such as:  Is the student spending too long on a task?  Are they using ‘language of frustration’ on the learning forums that show they may not be adapting well to the app? Are they logging on and logging off too quickly?

In years to come such analytics will not only mean adapting learning apps to each user, but also looking at their interaction on social networks to start to predict general competencies and communication skills before they have even starting using the app. Now that’s what I call bespoke.

What do you think?

So are Mlearning analytics a good thing or in fact another privacy invasion by online technology?  Is it progress or just one step further towards becoming a Big Brother state? Please share comments below.

There are already Mlearning apps in use, like our Sounds App, that work well to supplement classroom teaching and self-study. However, it is early days for these apps and anyone thinking about creating their own programme needs to take certain factors into consideration to ensure successful adoption.

Here are ten things to keep in mind when creating a Mlearning programme:

1.    Involve teachers in the design, content and piloting of Mlearning initiatives. A sustainable community is one in which people have input into the materials they are using.

2.    Ask yourself, does this technology make life easier for the teachers, or is it just a distraction? It needs to effectively tie in with their current teaching methods.

3.    Design your Mlearning programme with different ‘types’ of teachers in mind. Is this going to be for teacher trainers, working teachers, novice teachers or teachers working outside of formal classroom settings?

4.    Integrate, integrate, integrate. If there is an overlap with other programmes you currently run, make sure you design the Mlearning programme with them in mind and, if possible, cross-promote.

5.    Don’t just focus on the bells and whistles. Make use of the more practical possibilities of Mlearning, such as tracking attendance.

6.    Immediate feedback is a big plus of Mlearning, try and make use of this.

7.    Content should lead, technology follow. Don’t let jazzy functionality distract from what’s being taught.

8.    Hand in hand with good teaching comes effective assessment. How might you go about incorporating methods of assessment into the Mlearning programme?

9.    Teachers need to be able to TRUST the virtual community they are working within. Reassure them every step of the way.

10.    With Mlearning teachers can build their skills and knowledge wherever they are. Make sure your programme makes the most of this, with short and sweet lessons that fit around life.

Do you have tips to share? Please comment below.

*Email Marketing Reports, Feb 2012

Onestopenglish, a division of Macmillan Education, today announced that the Onestopenglish App, a mobile application for English language teachers, is available for Apple iOS and Google Android-based devices.

Onestopenglish is the number one resource and community website for English language teacher working around the world. With resources organized across key subject areas, it features a huge range of lesson plans, worksheets, articles and tips.

Now for the first time users can access the Onestopenglish world via the free mobile app, which includes a range of features:

- A comprehensive Teaching Tips section with a wealth of instantly usable classroom activities

- Keep up to date with all of the latest news and topics from across the ELT World

- A selection of Teacher Tools to record classes, time activities and more

- A weekly update about What’s New on Onestopenglish

Learn more and download the Onestopenglish App.

The English Language Teaching Innovation Awards are run by the British Council and celebrate the crème de la crème of English Language Teaching products. We are excited to have been shortlisted for such an important prize and are looking forward to the awards ceremony!

Two other Macmillan products have also been shortlisted: Gateway in the category Excellence in Course Innovation and Learning Teaching 3rd Edition in the category Innovation in Teacher Resources.

You can read the official press release about the 2012 ELTons shortlist here:

http://www.britishcouncil.org/new/press-office/press-releases/british-council-announces-shortlist-for-eltons-2012/

We wanted to wish you a Happy New Year from all of us here at the Macmillan Apps team. And what better way to celebrate the new year (and all those shiny new smartphones and tablets that Santa left under the tree) than with a sale!

For three days only next week we’re dropping the price of the Premium version of Sounds: The Pronunciation App, for both Apple and Android users. It will be just £1.49/$1.99 (usual price £3.99/$5.99). So if you haven’t picked up your copy yet this is the perfect time to. And if you have any friends who may be interested, why not forward this email to them too.

Vicky Loras, a teacher and blogger has sent us this about Sounds:

“After trying out the new app by Macmillan ‘Sounds: The Pronunciation App’ on my iPad, I absolutely loved it and found it to be exactly the thing I was looking for… My students can practise recording themselves and also doing quizzes, for which they get instant feedback. the app is super both for work in class and for practice at home.

Many many thanks to everyone at Macmillan – my students will love it, as I already do!”

You can read more from Vicky at http://vickyloras.wordpress .com, or on Twitter @vivkyloras.

Our second review comes from Lindsay Clandfield, who has done a round-up of mobile apps for language learners and teachers on the Global website. Sounds was one of the apps he looked at:

“Sounds is the latest app from Macmillan, and it uses the phonetic chart developed by Adrian Underhill in his book Sound Foundations. The app allows you to choose between American or British pronunciation.

The centrepiece of the app is the chart itself. You press on a sound and hear the sound, if you press for longer you hear a sample word. Just this in itself provided for quite a bit of fun and I can see its use for my trainee teachers who are learning the phonetic chart. In fact, I found that if you swooped your finger across the sounds you could almost make the app say words.

There’s a lot more though. The wordlist has over five hundred words which you can listen to, and record your own pronunciation of. The practice and quiz sections are also very useful. You can select a phoneme or a group of phonemes to practice. Then there are three different possibilities:

Read – you read a word in phonetics and have to type what it is.

Write – you read a word and have to type what it is in phonetics (the phonetics typewriter is cool)

Listen – you hear a word and have to type what it is in phonetics (again with the phonetics typewriter)

In the free version you get the chart and a sample of the tests and practice activities. In the premium version there are more activities, tests and a tips section for teachers and students.

Of all the apps here, this is the one I like the best and I am recommending it to all my students and student teachers.”

If you’d like to submit a review of any of our Apps we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment below with your review, or get in touch directly if you’d like at help@macmillan.com. 

Lindsay Clandfield, lead author on the Macmillan course Global has been looking into the growing phenomenon of Mlearning. What is Mlearning. and what does it mean for language learners and teachers?

This video gives a brief introduction to the topic:

The following is taken from the Mlearning Sessions section on the Global website (we recommend checking it out for a lot more resources on Mlearning),]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

MLearning? What’s that?

First of all, before we go any further, it may be worth examining what MLearning actually means. The ‘m’ stands for mobile. Mobile learning is learning that takes place using a handheld, mobile technological device. “Learning using mobile phones” I hear you say. Yes, but not entirely. Mobile devices now include much more than phones. There are the smartphones (e.g. blackberry, iphone), tablet computers (the ipad, the Galaxy tab), digital readers (e.g. Sony e-reader, Kindle) and netbooks. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that these other devices will be far more common in educational circles in the future than phones.

Why is this a hot topic now?

According to the Horizon report (http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2011/ ), which “examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry”, there are several reasons why mlearning might be “coming of age”. The first is that the price of the devices is coming down quickly. While higher-end products like Apple’s iPad are still quite expensive, we are beginning to see cheaper tablet computers more and more. Netbooks, like the Acer or Dell ones, now feature in back-to-school catalogues and cost less than $200. Smartphones used to be just for business people, now they are favoured by teenagers in more and more places. And when Amazon slashed the price of its new Kindle e-reader to around100 pounds, it became one of the quickest selling items in theUK.

Secondly, many of these devices are experiencing convergence. Convergence means that your handheld device is a combination of a bunch of other separate gadgets you may have had. Your computer, digital camera, video camera, telephone, GPS and game console are now all in one device. And it connects to the internet.

Finally, there is what is curiously called the 21st century button. In the past, these devices were too small to really work on (the keyboard was tiny). Now new devices are not only bigger, they rely on touch screen. This means that writing with them is becoming easier, and in some cases you don’t even need to use a keyboard. And in the future, we may be able to interact with these devices using gestures and voice.

The combination of all these mean that people are increasingly expecting to learn and study wherever and whenever they want.

And the connection with Global is…?

Well, I’ve been interested in this aspect of learning since we began developing the e-workbook for Global. I’ve also worked with some of the educators in our field who are becoming specialists in this area and it’s great to explore new territory. Finally, I believe that some of the elements of mlearning can truly be beneficial to our learners, especially in the area of exposure to English outside the classroom.