Friday, 15 April 2016

Using apps for education

Hi!

We all know that in the near future we all have students who cannot think even a minute without mobile phones. Why don't we use this for good? If they integrate mobile phones into their lifes then let us do it for lessons too.
Today I am going to introduce you a useful app for young learners "Fun English." This app is available in googleplay and appstore. Now let us look at how it works.
This app is easy to use actually, when you download it you see instructions part and explains the steps. As you can see here there is an order and if learners do lessons regularly then 2 lessons and a game are added.


At the beginning you have two categories (colors and animals). For better understanding there are lots of exercises. I tried all of them and I liked seeing different kind of activities because they improve students’ listening skills and by recording their voices they can learn pronunciation. Furthermore there is a song for colors and animals with subtitles . Let us look at colors' activities:


   In this exercise, first
   you hear the color's name
     and choose the correct
ball.
First you hear the pronunciation 
then click the first consonant or vowel,
then hear its pronunciation.
After click on a card, you learn what
it is and try to find the same color.







 In the animals activities I saw nearly same exercises. Listening and understanding was the goal. Again a song was there. It was really memorable. Leaning in this way is easier and better I guess.

You listen the voice,
 then record your voice
Here is the spelling section
As you see these different categories, generally you first listen, then do what is wanted. Differently in this part you can see that there are exercises to better understanding of "plurals."

Here the song about animals like
 colors you have choices
(with subtitles or not)
I should mention that there is a section for parents and teachers in the app. If you want to contact with the writers you can and there are steps and explanations for better understanding and guide how to give the students.


With this app, 
- We can give them homework to gain a new lesson,
- Because they listen some songs about what they learn, we can ask them to create a new one,
In fact I would not use in the classroom because students progress would be different, so better if they use on their own maybe at home but we should check their progress.

Finally we should get the idea that teachers should aware of this kind of apps and use appropriately.

See you soon...






4 comments: