Comic Touch

Price: Lite = free, full app = $2.99

Comic Touch Lite

Comic Touch

Comic touch is an app that lets you turn any photo saved on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch into a captioned comic. 

This app is really fun.  It is a great way to add attention grabbing content to photos that you can then use for videos, presentations, you name it.  If your students use this app it will get them writing in the target language (good!) and it could be used to teach culture, grammar, and vocabulary simultaneously!

 

The controls on this app are a little difficult to use.  Across the top you have some pretty abstract icons and in order to figure out what they are for you really just have to touch them.  The trash can icon is obvious, but the other three--not so much.  

From the top left: The first icon is how you start editing a new photo.  You can choose photos from your photo library or take a picture with the camera.  

The second from the left opens a menu of photo effects that make really funny faces.

The third icon from the left has options for saving and sharing your finished photos.  You can add an email address that the photos are sent to and they can be saved to your photo library and used with other apps.  

It's also a little tricky to get the captions and quotes right where you want them.  The icons pop up across the top and bottom of the photo every time you touch the screen and if you want to put the caption icon near them you have to wait until they disappear in order to add your words.  You add the speech bubbles and captions by clicking the one you want.  It drops the captions towards the bottom of the photo and the bubbles in the middle of the photo.  

You can drag them where you want them (i.e.: by the mouth of the person in your photo).  In order to add your text you double click on the bubble or caption and the edit dialog opens up.

The delete button in this dialog box will get rid of any bubbles or captions that you accidentally click.

Type your text and click done.  You may need to adjust font size if it is a long sentence.  

When I got this app I thought is was going to let me create a comic strip but it is really just for single photos.  There are apps that create whole strips and would certainly make for a great project for students.  These photos have many uses though, as they are stand-alone and can be added to videos, presentations, etc.  

Animoto

http://animoto.com

Price = Free!

I have always been a gadget lover.  I am definitely an early adopter of new technologies.  However, I did not start thinking a lot about the educational uses of technology until I learned about something called Digital Storytelling.  About seven years ago, one of my colleagues in the Communications department at UVa-Wise, Amy Clark, gave a presentation to all of the professors who were planning to teach the 1st year, freshman seminar course at the College.  During the talk she provided us with a variety of ways to promote writing in our classes, and Digital Storytelling was one of the methods she introduced.  I was immediately intrigued because I could see how it would benefit language learners by promoting writing and speaking in a very personal way; by telling a story.  I began doing some research into the process and came across this webpage from the University of Houston: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

I began to ask my students to produce digital stories about their weekend, a trip they took, their semester, their family, etc.  These ended up being about 2 minutes long and required a process of writing drafts and revisions followed by adding photos and recorded narration to a program that created the video.  It's a great process and my students have been making videos for about six years in all of my classes.  At first, before I had tested it out, the technical requirements added a lot of extraneous cognitive load to the activity, but now that I can anticipate the difficulties that might arise, I have really streamlined the process so that the students can focus on writing and recording the story in the target language as opposed to struggling with the technology.  

I will discuss the longer video creation apps in a later post.  This current post is actually on Animoto, a webpage and now an APP that creates very short, video slide shows with text-based narration.  This is a project that students can complete in less than one class period and it only requires a device with access to the Internet: a computer, a tablet, a phone, or an iPod.  It very definitely works in a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) classroom, and is ideal for classes with 1:1 technology.  Basically, you upload around 5 or 6 photos from a variety of sources such as the Internet, your device's hard drive, your Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa accounts, or from the Animoto photo collection.  Unfortunately, the app doesn't provide the same access to your online photo collections, so if you are using the app you'll need to save the photos you want to the device in advance.  Once the photos are uploaded you can add text boxes to narrate the photos.  I have my online students create an autobiographical video in the target language with Animoto and it's a great icebreaker/getting to know you activity.  

Animoto is free IF you are willing to create videos that are 30 seconds or less.  There is also a limit on the number of characters you can write in each text box, although this number just increased a bit.  I actually see the time limit as an advantage.  It's very easy to want to include way too much when you're making a video, especially one about yourself, so the time limit encourages economy and it makes you choose only the most important things that you wish to communicate.  It also makes it the perfect project to do in one class period.  As for the character limitation, if our students use Twitter then they have already  been trained to conform to a character limit, so I don't think they even think twice.  It is also useful in beginning and intermediate classes because it keeps the novice from trying to use language that is beyond their current capabilities (not that this is necessarily a bad thing but it can cause frustration if they can't express themselves) by requiring them to keep it short and sweet.

Once the videos are created there are a ton of ways that they can be shared.  There are share links to all of the social media sites; recently they even added a Pinterest share option!  It can be shared via email with the link and they provide HTML code that can be copied and used on a webpage (I use wikispaces.com).  Here's my latest autobiographical video!

Try our video maker at Animoto.

Dropbox saved the paper I'm supposed to be writing right now

Dropbox

Price = Free!

On Saturday my daughter spilled an entire glass of sweet tea on my laptop, causing it to turn off and it has not restarted (stifled sob). As an online student and an online instructor you can imagine my close proximity to nervous breakdown. It has dried, with lovely sugar crystal crunchiness, and has a date with an Apple genius tomorrow evening who will no doubt tell me it is wrecked.  I am hopeful that the hard drive will be salvageable; first world problems.  No laptop.  I have had to download a few apps to my iPad so that I can attend my classes via video conferencing, and I am typing this blog on the touch screen of that same tool.  I was mid-research on a literature review dealing with, you guessed it, studies involving iPads in education when this occurred, and thanks to some foresight, and an app called Dropbox I have pdf copies of all of the articles I found in a nice tidy folder that I can access from my iPad, iPhone, and from my computer (sniff).  I also have all of the syllabi, articles, and written assignments from two years of Phd coursework, as well as a variety of shared folders with friends, family, and colleagues.

So, how is this a useful tool for educators?  Um, let me count the bajillion ways.  If your students have Internet access at any point during the day, you can create shared folders to store class assignments, photos, videos, you name it.  These could be organized by chapter, by unit, by topic, etc.  if you are lucky enough to have some kind of mobile technology in the classroom (smart phones or tablets) then dropbox has an app for that device.  If you have a classroom set of these devices they could all be synced to have the same content in their dropboxes.  However, this is really an app that is helping to shape the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement.  Unlike the Amazon, Google, or Apple renditions of cloud storage and sharing, this is accessible from any device under the sun.  If your students have Internet access at home, Dropbox could facilitate collaborative learning by housing group assignments and folders, not unlike a wiki or a google doc (stay tuned for more on these). Assignments could be posted and completed here.  Each student could have their own folder where they complete assignments.  Best part: it's free and you can grow your storage space by inviting others to join.

As a graduate student I have fully adopted a paperless lifestyle.  No more huge files of articles I've read that inevitably get stepped or spilled on (shedding a few tears).  I have my iPad and my Dropbox.  Hundreds of articles in nice neat folders, labeled and everything.  Moving documents between folders is super easy, and this week sans laptop has shown me that I can access my library and EBSCO from the iPad and save articles directly to the Dropbox app.

There might be a slight learning curve for those who have never experienced cloud storage, but there are lovely tutorials to help you get started: https://www.dropbox.com/tour. This one little app has seriously made research, writing, and collaboration so much more efficient and streamlined.

Google Translate

Google Translate

Google Translate iTunes App

Price: Free!

In the last five years my perspective on cell phones in the classroom has done a complete about face, probably right in line with the advances in smart phone capabilities.  Online translators have traditionally been the bane of language teachers' existence.  Students erroneously believe that they can install a paragraph of text and get an accurate translation.  Five years ago, if a student put the English word "kid" into a translator, they would get the word for baby goat as the translation.  I cannot tell you how many times a translator produced a hilarious mistake like this.  However, Google has created a program that learns!  I'm no expert on artificial intelligence or adaptive technology, but in that time period, the Google Translate program has learned that most of the time, people searching for "kid" wish to find a word for child and now provides a list of possibilities, not unlike a dictionary search.  Check it out: http://translate.google.com/#en/es/kid

Not only does it translate text into a myriad of languages, it also will pronounce words that you write in the translate window.  My daughter and her friends have spent hours of hilarious fun making it say slightly inappropriate things (think potty humor) and some ingenious people have actually gone as far as to paste song lyrics into the translator and to create videos with the results.  Check it out:
 Lady Gaga Google Translate

 How does this translate to the classroom?  I now allow my college students to have their cell phones or iPods out during group work where they might be writing a dialog to perform or completing a reading followed by a comprehension activity.  Sure, they are texting and looking at their Facebook/Twitter accounts, of that I have no doubt, but in the 1-2 minutes that it takes me to circulate the classroom and check in on all of the groups, they self-censor that type of activity.  They understand that they are using the phone as a tool.

So, why should you buy the $19.99 dictionary I reviewed in my last post when this app is free?  This is not a dictionary.  It does not show your word in an alphabetical list.  It does not provide whole verb conjugations.  It does provide a list of synonyms, but it is not as comprehensive as in the dictionary, nor does it provide potential phrases to accompany the word you have searched for.

For a quick word search, this is an exceptional tool.  For a language scholar it is certainly worth it to invest in a dictionary in addition to a translator app.  For teachers, this will certainly empower your students to search for and create their own meaning with the target language, however you must be very clear that only single word searches are allowed or appropriate, as full sentences are still not translated well by a computer program.

Ultralingua Dictionaries

Ultralingua Dictionaries

     This is the most expensive app I have ever purchased, and probably ever will buy.  I used to lug my enormous Oxford Spanish-English dictionary to class everyday for my students to use (did I mention big and heavy?).  When I got an iPhone a few years back I decided to look for apps that my students might use to translate their work (as opposed to learning the language if you catch my drift) and came across these dictionaries in that search.  Now all I have to do is bring my phone to class and I have access to tens of thousands of words, just like I did with that hefty book.
     The main difference and advantage I see with this dictionary as compared to one of the many translation apps that are available is that just like an actual dictionary, when you look up a word, it lists the words that surround it alphabetically in the word list.  This is great because an avid learner will look at those words and perhaps learn new words just by way of a dictionary search.  Like many of the translators you can switch the direction of your search, Target Language to English and vice versa.  They also offer several bilingual dictionaries that do not feature English, which is I think is pretty great.
     If you have this dictionary on your phone, you can read a book in the target language and have your phone nearby (in your hand even!) as you read and it really makes looking up a word a lot more efficient.  
     From the webpage these features are listed:

• Conjugations of thousands of Spanish and English verbs in all standard forms.
• Number translation into Spanish or English text.
• History of recent look-ups so you can return to results quickly.

     So, is it worth the $19.99 that I paid for it?  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! If I went out and bought a physical dictionary with as many words, plus all of the verb conjugations it would cost as much if not much more: Dictionaries available on Amazon.  Plus, it's a lot more portable!