Living in the 4th Screen

Exploring the use of mobile technology in education and life

Learn a new language by changing you cell phone settings

From the BigRedChili blog in the UK comes the idea to use your cell phone to learn a new language. They suggest changing the language settings on your cell phone to the language you want to learn.

Here are three tips from the blog post:

Tip #1 – Set up your cell phone to use the language you’d like to study. – Go to the menu, find settings, locate language and change it to Spanish, Chinese, whatever you would like to learn. If you ever get stuck you can go and change it back.

Tip #2 – Take a look at the buttons you normally push and begin associating those items with the new vocabulary. – This is a great way to master simple words and phrases with little or no effort. For example, each time you open up your cell phone you’ll see, (in the case of Spanish), “mensajes” instead of “messages”, “juegos” instead of “games” and “llamdadas hechas” instead of “calls made.”
These words begin to stick once you see them again and again. Before you know it you’ll recognize the Spanish word just as quickly as the English one.

Tip # 3 – When you have downtime, take out your cell phone and start hitting buttons. – You’ll be surprised at all the vocabulary you can learn by just playing with the different menu items. Some things you’ll recognize immediately and others you’ll be able to guess just by where you find them.

As you probably know, the more contact you have with the language the better. That is particularly true of vocabulary. Seeing a word for the first time and then not seeing it again is a recipe for a very limited vocabulary. You have to get the repetitions needed to help move the information into long term memory.

You also need to see things in context. With a cell phone, you begin to see relationships between words of the same category. For example, the category “llamadas” is “calls” in English.

I think this is a great idea for learning a new language. I agree with the authors premise that repetition and context are important for learning a new language. I changed the language settings on my iPhone to Portuguese (Brazil) and it worked very nice. It definitely would help you learn some vocabulary words in another language. Give it a try.

The Perfect Lesson in the Imperfect Sense

I observed a lesson the other day in a Spanish 2 class. The lesson dealt with using the imperfect tense i.e. describing activities that one used to do in the past. Each student first had to pick two slips of paper - one with an activity on it, the other with a classmate's name on it. They then had to draw a picture of the classmate doing the activity. Using their cell phone, the students then called into the teacher's Google Voice account and described what the classmate used to do using the imperfect tense. The students, a few at a time, went out into the hallway to place the calls. Afterwards they turned in their drawings which the teacher numbered. While the students were drawing their pictures the teacher had Spanish music videos playing through her LCD projector on the front screen. The songs contained vocabulary words the students were currently learning and primarily used the imperfect tense. The next day in class the teacher played each call to the class. The students had to listen to the call and decide which picture the call was describing. If they guessed correctly the student then had to further add to the description using another original sentence in either the imperfect or the preterite, which they had studied earlier in the year. Correct answers were tallied and winners received homework passes. During day one of the lesson I asked the teacher how she would have done the audio recordings without the cell phones and she responded by saying she would not have been able to do the lesson. After thinking for a while she said she could have used digital recorders but would have had to download each file from the recorders in order to play them back to the students, which would have made it a much more time consuming process.

The take away from the lesson was that the students were immersed in the target language. They heard the language spoken by the teacher, classmates, and in the music videos. Additionally, the students had to write and speak in the target language. I must add that the teacher is an experienced teacher who utilizes technology and these types of activities on a regular basis so the students are used to it. It was a very creative lesson. The use of student cell phones with Google Voice blended very naturally into the lesson.

I want to thank Ms. Peters for her assistance in writing this post. You can click here to go to her webpage.

World Language teacher uses cell phones in class - watch the video

The video below is about Katie Titler. She is a Spanish teacher in Wisconsin who uses cell phones as part of her instructional practices. Click here to read a post I wrote about Katie and listen to a podcast she did with Liz Kolb. This link will take you to the article that accompanies the video.
 

Using Google Voice in a World Language Classroom

 
 
This article in the Asbury Park Press talks about world Language teachers using Google Voice in their language classes to record students speaking in the target language.
 
The picture above and the quotes below are from the article:

Another form of technology that Peters and Taylor have taken advantage of is Google Voice. With this particular concept, students use their cell phones to call their teacher's Google Voice number and discuss a topic in Spanish.

Kevin Bals, the supervisor for World Language and the school's assistant principal, says this is a way to "capture, record and share audio files."

Bals believes Google Voice has many advantages. According to Bals, teachers are able to listen to and grade the recordings at their leisure and unlike an oral presentation students do not have to speak in front of a class.

"I'm enjoying Google Voice," says Taylor. "I think it can do the most for us."

Freshman Priya Angara, 14, says the class is "Exciting and the technology makes it more interesting."

Jessica Chen, 15, a freshman, is another student in Taylor's class and enjoys the technological benefits of Google Voice.

"It's a tool where you call in and it records our conversation and she (Taylor) grades it,"Jessica says.

Another advantage of Google Voice is that students are able listen to themselves speaking in Spanish. This is just one of many technological tools used by Taylor and Peters.

These world language teachers are using student cell phones to call into Google Voice and record messeges in the target language as part of in-class activities. Using Google Voice allows these teachers to very quickly capture audio recording from each student in a single location. The teachers can then listen to and assess each student's speaking ability. The teachers can email these recordings to the individual students so that they can listen to them. The Google Voice accounts are free and the students only use their cell phones for a couple of minutes so the cost is minimal. Most students have unlimited voice minutes and that reduces the cost to zero. For students that do not have cell phones the teachers will let the students use their phone or the students will borrow one of their classmates phones. In this post I wrote about another teacher who is using Google Voice in a world Language classroom. Using Google Voice and student cell phones is a very cost effective way to record student's speaking in the target language and can be done very quickly so as to minimize the impact on instructional time.

Update: Converge Magazine did a short article on this topic.

A new meaning to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words.

At the Mobile World Congress Google demonstrated a prototype of Google Translate using  Google Goggles. The application will allow you to snap a photo of a menu in another langauge and have it translated into your language. All this would be done using your phone, of course. Follow this link to view a demonstration of the product.
 
It will be interesting to see if this product ever makes it into consumers hands.

Call anyone in the world and speak their language with Google Instant Speech Translationtion

Geek.com is reporting that Google is working on a service that would instantly translate your speech into another language so the person on the other end of a phone call would here the conversation in their own language. This service will be targeted at cell phone users. According to Google the delivery date for this service is two years

Frank Och, head of Google translation services explained to Times Online:

We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.

If this service ever materializes will it make foreign language instruction obsolete?

Cell Phones & Google Voice in a World Language Classroom - Perfect Together!

There is a great article in the December issue of Educause about using cell phones in a World Language classroom. The writer talks about using Google Voice as the tool to capture student recordings. I have a Google Voice account and I never thought of using it this way. I supervise the World Language Department at the high school where I work. There are teachers in my world language department who are using cell phones as an instructional tool but they are using different platforms to capture the student recordings. 

Follow the link above to read the full article. Below are the key takeaways listed at the beginning of the article:
  • To pursue a paradigm shift in education with limited finances, schools should consider taking advantage of ubiquitous cell phone technology for pedagogical purposes that square with best practices within appropriate disciplines.
  • New Internet SMS and messaging services are proving especially useful to language teachers, turning the focus away from the particulars of language and writing and toward whole language oral output and pronunciation, even at the beginner level.
  • Cell phones give faculty access to students both in and out of the classroom, providing greater power to instruct, persuade, cajole, encourage, motivate, and engage.
  • Students who record their voices in computer language labs or using cell phones become more engaged and invested in those potentially public recordings.
Peyton Jobe, the author of the article, elaborates on how students invest more time for an activity if they know it is going to be recorded. She states:
It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.

This is a key observation Jobes makes. She backs up her statements by the results of an informal survey she conducted on the students in one of her classes. I know the few times teachers in my school have used student cell phones to capture student recordings they have had very positive experiences.The article is well written and worth your time to read it in it's entirety.


via Liz Kolb from CellPhonesInLearning

Near Instant Voice Translation from Google

On Monday, December 7th, Google held a major demo event at the Computer History Museum and unveiled some new features as reported in the NY Times. One of the features was near instant voice translation. Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google, spoke a full paragraph into his phone in English and within seconds the phone blurted out the translation in Spanish. Google plans to support all the world's major languages by the end of 2010.

via Mind Dump Blog

This has interesting implications for world language instruction. Overtime as more people walk around with mobile smartphones it becomes increasingly clear that you could use Google translate to carry on conversations with nearly anyone regardless of the language they speak. Will students lose interest in learning a foreign language, since they no longer see the need for it? If Google plans on rolling this out within a year, what will Google Translate look like in 5 years? 10 years? 

Using Student Cell Phones and ipadio to Record Conversations in A World Language Classroom

This past week one of the teachers in our World Language Department used student cell phones and ipadio to record pairs of students having a conversation about a famous Mexican painting. Prior to the activity the teacher paired the students off and had them write a dialog in Spanish talking about the Mexican painting. On the day of the activity the students paired off around the room and using one cell phone dialed into ipadio, entered the 4-digit access code, and began talking. When they were finished they just hung up the phone. Each of the recordings were saved in the teachers private ipadio account. Later that day the teacher listened to the conversations and assessed each student's performance.

After the class when I spoke with the teacher she told me that she had the students do the recording in groups at a time so that she did not have 20+ students talking at once. She said that doing the phone calls took less time than she planned. She had about 20 recordings and all but two worked as planned. One recording was nothing but static and the other one was just not that clear. The next day she had those students redo the activity.

The lesson required the students to study the culture of Mexico (painting), use correct grammar in writing the script, and use proper pronunciation in speaking the target language. Additionally, the activity afforded the students the opportunity to perform an oral activity with just one of their peers while talking on a cell phone (something they are quite comfortable with) as opposed to doing it in front of the whole class. The take away for the teacher was that she could listen to the recordings at her leisure and replay the conversations as much as needed to properly assess the student's performance. This scenario is much better than when the teacher has to assess the students live when they perform in front of the class. In the live scenario the teacher has to asses both students at the same time and does not have the option to replay the conversation.The end result is a much better assessment of the students speaking ability. The teacher can provide much richer feedback and even replay the recording for the student. The students enjoyed the activity and were eager to listen to themselves speaking.

I believe this activity demonstrates an innovative way to use student cell phones within the confines of the classroom and is an example of technology being used to accomplish something that would not be possible without the technology. Did I mention that the activity used none of the schools technology resources?

A big thank you to Liz Kolb for sharing about ipadio on her podcast and to James O'Malley from ipadio for setting up the "open channel" to make the multiple phone calls possible. Thank you also to the brave teacher in our world language department who was willing to use student cell phones in the classroom.