Musser ESOL Tech Blog

I was intrigued by an article that came across in my Google alerts this week entitled, " Best language apps to help travellers click with locals" .  I'm often intrigued by the ways in which people attempt to learn various topics "in the real world" (language of course being one of them) as opposed to how they have been traditionally  approached in school.  I find that even tech-based teaching tools aimed at the same end goal (say, learning a new language) often vary in interesting ways based on whether or not they've been designed for the traditional educational setting or not.  Since I explored a new app being billed as a strong classroom language learning tool last week (Mondly) I thought this list might provide some interesting contrast. However, after reading the article I found that only the first app on the list, which I explain below, is solely designed for outside-of-the-classroom use, while the others are squarely at home inside the classroom.   T

An interesting article that came across my Google Alerts this week from The Times Free Press entitled, "Greeting Cards Help to Preserve Family History,"  describes a scene wherein a family learns about the history of their grandparents' love through asking a simple question at the bedside of their dieing grandmother, an interaction which then caused entrepreneur Christopher Cummings to launch a new tech start up aimed at preserving our familial legacies. The company, greetingStory, is connected to Cummings' original digital storytelling company, PassItDown, but it relies on physical, "old-fashioned" greeting cards with images and prompts on them to gather handwritten information from older relatives, which can then be preserved and displayed digitally. The whole idea answers a question I've sometimes pondered over myself as I've watched our world grow increasingly digital and as a natural consequence shed many of its traditional physical artifacts.

An interesting article that came through via my google alerts this week was a rundown of the 2107 FBStarts Apps of they Year.  If you are unfamiliar, FBStart is Facebook's program for assisting promising new app developers in getting their ideas off the ground.  A number of the apps featured in the article tied right into the mobile learning theme of this week's unit.  The FBstart Global App of the Year is called, "SoloLearn," and is designed to help beginners learn how to code. I've already earmarked it as a potential gem for my district's coding initiative. The app is "gamified," in that its learning experiences are couched in a gaming environment.  Even more in-tune with our current focus though was the Europe, Middle East and Africa app of the Year winner: Mondly.  Mondly is a language-learning app (or rather, a whole suite of apps) that bills itself as, " the first company to launch a virtual reality experience for learning langu