My First App

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.

Music in the Classroom

Drop the needle.

Next week I begin teaching a class that I designed called the History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP ME).  It’s a five-week class that will feature a decade of popular music each week.  The class meets every day and each day will feature a different song.  We will listen to the song, review and analyze the lyrics, and then listen to the song again and sing along.

There are many goals for this class.  First, it will expose students to songs that everybody knows to give them a foundation in popular cultural.  When a song comes on the radio, I’d like students to be able to say, “Isn’t that the Beatles?” just like a native speaker might.  The class will also include some linguistic content from each of the songs.  It could be a specific verb tense, idioms, pronunciation or whatever, but this will be an English class.  Finally, through the changing periods and genres of music, we’ll be able to talk about history.  Many changes in our culture are reflected in popular music.

Here are a few songs that I’ve identified for inclusion in the class:

All Shook Up by Elvis Presley – This song has lots of good metaphors and is a good example of an early rock song.

A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles – There are some good examples of the present perfect in the chorus.

Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones – A Stones song has to be included, but many have very repetitive lyrics.  Paint It Black has lots of English to work with including colorful metaphors that students could be asked to interpret.  It could also be contrasted with What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, which also has colorful metaphors.

I have a few others, but that’s a start.  Do you use music to teach ESL or EFL?  What songs do you use?  Share them in the comments below.  I’d like to know.  If there is enough interest, I’ll share my final set list once the class is finished.

Writing 1000 Words

So, tell me about your bus ride to school...

Getting your students to write (or speak) can sometimes be a challenge.  They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, which got me to thinking: Where can teachers find interesting pictures that might prompt students to write or talk.  Here are some examples:

Photoshop Contest.com

Photoshop Contest.com is a website that posts a picture each week for visitors to edit into other pictures.  The results can be fascinating.  The historical decoder device at right used this picture of typesetter’s letters as a starting point.  In addition to generating interesting pictures, trying to tease out which components of the picture are from the original can be an interesting challenge for students.

Worth100.com

Worth1000.com is similar to Photoshop Contest with a variety of contests for beginning through advanced photo manipulators.  Although the results range in quality and interest, some of the theme categories could generate some interesting writing or discussion.  For example, the subjects in Sports Literalisms and Bald Celebrities may not be universally recognized by students, but Unsung Vending Machines and Less Than Usual require no explanation.  Some of the Literalisms provide interesting visual examples of idioms and other common English expressions.

Compfight.com

Flickr is a very popular photosharing website.  And, although the sheer number of photos posted means it takes a little more digging to find them, similarly provocative photos can be found.  I often use Compfight.com to search Flickr because it’s very easy to select search parameters like Creative Commons licensed content and Safe Search.   Try searching for terms like manipulate, photoshop, and trick to find pictures that have been digitally edited.  Some, like the example of the car parked on the street have had no digital manipulation, but there is another trick involved.  Can you spot it?  Can your students?