The English Blog

Glovico: The Fairtrade Online School

I received an email from Dr. Tobias Lorenz telling me about Glovico, a Fairtrade online school where native speakers can teach their mother tongues via Skype: "... we want promote additional income opportunities in the developing world and foster intercultural dialogue. Having started out with Spanish and French last year we are currently moving into more regional languages at the moment."

This feature from BBC will give you a better idea of the venture.

COMMENT
If you're a learner, the first lesson is free and there's a money-back guarantee, so you can't go wrong really. If you're a teacher, you're not going to become rich—the recommended asking price for a 55min lesson is €5 to begin, so perhaps that's why there are only two teachers offering English lessons at the moment. However, if you're not in it for the money and want to get some experience of online teaching, Glovico could be the answer.

English Addicts Online Training

I first came across Edulang's daily news-based English lesson service English Addicts back in May 2009 and gave it a very positive review. At the time, full membership cost a whopping 120 euros (though some lessons were available for free). Things rarely stay still in the digital world, however, and since December 2011, Edulang have been offering an annual subscription for just one euro. To be more exact, you decide how much you want to pay (so you could still pay 120 euros—or more—if you wished). Half the money goes to charity, which seems like a good way to persuade people to pay more than the strict minimum.

I still think English Addicts (see demo video here) is a great way of improving listening and reading skills, and there are now over 1500 lessons available in the archives. That should keep all you learners busy for a while.

Other Edulang applications available on a 'pay what you want' basis include the TOEFL Test Simulator and its TOEIC counterpart (which I reviewed yesterday).

ALSO SEE
• Fair practice and low cost in our #ELT industry (Edulang blog)
• Building a Didacticized World English Resource into a Teacher-led Course by Philip Hawkes, Pedagogical advisor, Edulang (Vimeo video)

The Open University's Learning Space

LearningSpace is part of OpenLearn, The Open University's website that gives you free access to its course materials. LearningSpace is open for you whenever you want to learn.

COMMENT
A fantastic resource which I wish I'd discovered earlier. Business English teachers should check out the Business Studies materials where you can find videos (with audio versions and transcripts), quizzes, and articles. And (very) advanced learners or teachers of English should be interested in the English Grammar in Context unit.

Rosetta Stone's New Online Language Learning Program

Rosetta Stone has launched a new online program for learning languages called Totale. The program works well, if you can afford it, Katie Boehret says.

 

COMMENTS
$999 seems an awful lot to pay for an online course—you could probably get a two-week intensive in the country for that price (mind you, the headset is included). The Rosetta Stone website has a video describing the course and the method. Please feel free to comment if you've had any experience of Rosetta Stone courses.

English Addicts: Daily English News Lessons

English Addicts is a web service from EduLang offering daily English lessons based on Voice of America news reports. Here's what they say.

English Addicts is originally based on the works by Michel Perrin from the University of Bordeaux II. He compares the way a language is being learnt to the way a child can learn how to speak: when learning a language, listening comes before speaking.

To become proficient in a language, thousands of listening hours are required which is very much difficult either at school or college. However, the repetitive aspect of such a training is unavoidable. But to make it more interesting, Mr. Perrin suggested that the use of news items on a daily basis could foster linguistic improvements.

This is what has been developed through the implementation of English Addicts. Indeed, every day, and each time based on a different theme, an audio news item related to current events is being offered by experienced native teachers. The prime objective is to entice people to become "active" while listening.

Each lesson of English Addicts comes at one of four levels of difficulty and is divided into nine main activity sections plus a glossary. Last Friday's lesson is available for free on the site and can be downloaded as an mp3 file or podcast. Full membership (120 euros) gives you access to the archive of over 1000 lessons, but you can also register for free and keep your scores on a personal account. For more information download this PDF brochure.

WHAT I THINK
English Addicts is one of the best ways of improving listening (and vocabulary) skills I've seen in a while. If I were an English learner, I would sign up for a free account right away and check out the new lesson every Friday.

Slideshow: The Future of E-Learning is Social Learning

Jane Hart has produced a series of slide presentations on social learning in organisations. This first one covers: What is Social Learning? Social Learning platforms, and the role of Social Learning Professionals.

The future of e-learning is social learning

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

Myngle gets a million euros

TechCruch reports that Myngle, the Amsterdam-bassed online language learning platform, has secured 1m euros in funding.

Myngle, founded by ex-eBay employees, is essentially a “marketplace for languages” where teachers and students can virtually connect and determine if there’s a match for an online course to start between the parties (from both sides). The e-learning platform advocates the use of Skype for video-conference tutoring and accepts online payment transactions via PayPal, so most of the operation is automated and doesn’t involve Myngle staff.

Here’s how they pitch the service on their site:

Myngle is free for students and teachers to sign up and provides an online environment for live individual and group lessons for basically any language and level from any type of teacher. You can choose your own teacher or student depending on your specific needs, availability and price! If you are a student, you can try out a demo lesson with your selected teacher before you have to pay anything.

Myngle claims to have attracted almost 50.000 members in 125 countries since its inception in 2007, and boasts providing language courses in 52 languages. VoxSwap, LiveMocha and Babbel offer a similar proposition. Read full article >>

Comments
Is this the future of language learning/teaching? It certainly beats an 8h30 Thursday morning class with 20+ French students who've been partying late into the night—and you can drink your coffee as you teach! I should imagine that Milagros is quite in demand.

iTunes U proves better than going to class

From ReadWriteWeb: 

Skip the lecture, download the podcast. That's probably not what university professors tell their students, but perhaps they should. New psychological research conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, shows that students who only listened to podcasts of lectures achieved substantially higher exam results than those who attended class in person. Read full article >>

Comments

I've long thought that most lectures are a waste of time—especially those where there's no interaction between teacher and students. And don't get me started on PowerPoint!

Footnote
iTunes U, part of the iTunes Store, is possibly the world’s greatest collection of free educational media available to students, teachers, and lifelong learners. With over 100,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement. It puts the power of the iTunes Store in the hands of qualifying universities so they can distribute their educational media to their students or to the world.

Free Online TOEIC Classes

Simon Bourn from englishonthe.net is giving a series of free online TOEIC classes on WiZiQ. Session #2 is scheduled for Tuesday 10th February from 1pm to 1.45pm CET (GMT +1). You can watch a recording of Session #1 here. Four sessions are planned in all.

Tools for TOEIC Success by Simon Bourn

Get your own Virtual Classroom

Comments
I watched the recording of the Session #1. Besides giving a useful overview of the TOEIC, Simon had some great tips on building vocabulary. If you follow the class live, you can chat with Simon in real time. I'll be recommending these classes to my students, who have to get 750 on the TOEIC as a condition of graduation.

Jane Hart's Top 100 Tech Resources of 2008

Jane Hart (of Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day) has compiled a list of her 100 favourite resources (articles, postings, PDFs, presentations, etc) about learning tools and technologies in 2008.

Jane also produced this Wordle word cloud using the titles.

WiZiQ Virtual Classroom

WiZiQ is a web-based platform for anyone and everyone who wants to teach and learn live, online. Teachers and students use WiZiQ for its state-of-the-art virtual classroom, to create and share online educational content and tests, and to connect with persons having similar subject interests.

Whether you are a teacher or a learner, signing up for a WiZiQ account is free and simple.

In the virtual classroom, you can interact online using:

• Images, PowerPoint presentations and documents
• Full way audio and video sharing
• Live chat enhances the interaction amongst the participants
• Control Privileges with you having full control over the session like in real-world classroom

All sessions on WiZiQ are automatically recorded so that you can revisit and even search for a certain topic anytime at your convenience.

Verdict: I have to confess that I haven't actually used WiZiQ - the above is taken from their About Us page. If anyone's tried it, please leave a comment.

The advantages and disadvantages of online TEFL courses

Earlier today I posted an article giving advice to learners who want to find an online tutor. However, it's not only learners who can benefit from e-learning. The ELT Times ("The only online TEFL newspaper") has an article for teachers about online TEFL courses.

Online TEFL courses open up amazing career opportunities for aspiring teachers in countries that are experiencing a high demand for people with English language skills. With globalization, there is increasing pressure on people to acquire excellent writing and reading English skills. In fact, mastery of language often becomes decisive when selecting people for jobs. That is why many people are desperately trying to improve their English language skills. Read on >>

Busuu - a Social Network for Language Learners

I posted a review of busuu.com, a social network for language learners, a few weeks ago but Michelle Gallen has written a much better one  on her e-learning blog.

Udutu

Udutu is an online course authoring tool which allows users to create interactive e-learning courses quickly and easily. It's free to use but any materials you create and publish on Udutu's servers will run with a watermark unless you sign up for a monthly hosting contract at $1 per screen. To test the application I created a lesson based on a CNN video about Bill Gates' 'retirement'. I tried to use as many of the question types as possible just for demonstration purposes - it's not meant to be a real lesson!

The authoring system was easy to use although, being online, it was a bit slow. From a language teaching standpoint, Udutu has some drawbacks. I would like to have been able to create some Hot Potatoes type exercises such as a gap-fill. However, it should be possible to create interesting lessons if you're prepared to spend some time and use your imagination.