I ❤ mobile learning.
Okay, I didn’t create my first app (yet) but I did come up with a way to repurpose an existing app for learning, a much more edupunk approach.
I came across an app called Music Quiz, which recreates a game that came standard on older iPods. Music Quiz plays part of a randomly selected song on your iPod and then asks you to identify the song title, album title or artist. You can set the difficulty (more difficult means more possibilities to choose from) and even choose a subset of songs to form the game (just songs from one album or artist, for example). While it’s fun to sit on the bus and see if I can identify the name of every Sloan song ever released, I also started thinking if this same game could be applied to learning English.
So I recorded some idioms as mp3 files using Audacity, a free audio recorder. The actual sound file is me reading the definition twice in twelve seconds (because Music Quiz can be set to play 12 seconds of each song). Within Audacity, I saved the idiom as the song title. The files are below, if you want to try it out:
- a heart of gold
a heart of stone
a bleeding heart
a broken heart
young at heart
faint of heart
heartbreaker
heart skips a beat
follow your heart
with a heavy heart
take heart
take to heart
have a heart
know by heart
tug at the heartstrings
heart set on something
pour your heart out
open your heart
from the bottom of my heart
cross my heart
A student can add these files to an iPod or iPhone and set Music Quiz to quiz them on these audio files. (From the menu, set Custom Quiz to on to choose specific files for the quiz.) As the recording plays, the student has to choose which idiom matches the definition she hears. I’ve chosen 20 heart-themed idioms, so I’ve used heart as the album title. Three levels of metadata are available within Music Quiz (artist > album > song title) though testing students in higher order information (i.e. whether a given idiom was a heart, food, or animal idiom) may not be worthwhile.
Alternatively, album could be defined as chapters in a vocabulary textbook. I’m not sure it would be much more helpful for students to quiz themselves on which chapter a given idiom was in, but it could be a good way to organize the audio files and make it easy to choose specific chapters for a quiz. Of course, if Music Quiz were used to review other structures (verb tenses, vocabulary, etc.) there might be better ways to take advantage of other levels of metadata.
Clearly an iPod is not going to replace traditional language instruction anytime soon. But, if students are always listening to their iDevices anyway, they might as well use them to practice English. A well-designed activity could really engage them in this kind of helpful practice. If you have ideas for other ways to use Music Quiz or other apps for English practice, leave a comment.
ESL Technology.com 
Hi,
We’re about to start using iPads in our ILCs, and I think this idea might be a starter on our “Games” iPad.
As usual, the frustration with these things is that you can’t embed it in html or something as a way of pre-teaching the idioms, which limits its appeal as independent learning. Having said that, I’m sure we’ll find a way of squeezing some of it in, and even giving it some context.
Rob
I love this idea, Chris. Nice one!
It seems like it might be quite time consuming for the average teacher to do, don’t you think, though? How long did it take you in total to prepare your Mp3 files and upload them? It would be a cool tool for a school to think about offering to its students as a whole, though and I applaud Rob’s efforts at getting these onto his school’s iPad. I’d love to hear how you get on, Rob!.
On a more general note, I’m hoping to go get myself an Android phone in the next couple of days to start experimenting more with mobile learning. The winds of change seem to be bringing mobile learning onto the scene at the moment and i think Ideas like yours here will be really important, Chris. I’ll let you know if I have any smart ideas 🙂
Seth.
I agree that it would be time consuming, Seth. Pulling these 20 recordings together took a good hour, and they are 12 seconds each. Once the recordings are made, though, they could be used by an unlimited number of students, which begs the question: Why aren’t book publishers on this bandwagon yet? Being able to study and review on the phone would be a great supplement to any vocabulary book — whether using an existing app like this one or by downloading the publisher’s own app.
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