Simple Instructions for Using the Real English® Site Thanks to recent translations from Sunggyung Hong and Narine H., we now have Korean and Armenian translations of the instructions for using the Real English site, in addition to 35 other languages.
It's a bit early for me to be presenting the new Mobile version of Real English®. Only a quarter of the Lessons are finished. On the other hand, the numerous videos and quizzes which have been completed provide beginners and pre-intermediate students on the go with at least 40 hours* of fun work.
Besides, it will take me until the end of the year to finish the job. More importantly for myself and other social-oriented content creators, a minimum of general feedback seems essential in order to continue the longish job with relative confidence concerning the final outcome.
Moreover, in a case like mine, the job will be interrupted by new filming in the streets, as I make brand new videos, and then new edits and finally new lessons for the new clips (BTW, a "lesson" is a collection of interactive quizzes for a small portion of a main video). So the job is never completed, really. It will only be finished the day I stop filming and make a lesson for my last good clip.
So here she is in demo form:
If you just spent 6 minutes watching this entire clip, I hope you'll leave a comment, or try it out on your own mobile device before making a comment. Concerning feedback, I was very lucky to learn that this site works pretty much the same way on Windows and Android phones. Android devices are especially important since their market share is increasing much faster than Apple's iDevices at the present time. So I tried to find someone to try it out on an Android device, and I simply googled "Mobile ESL" and within minutes I succeeded in contacting David Read, who surprised me with a screencast showing me how it looks on his Samsung Galaxy Note 2. David has created a Google+ ESL Community which he continues to develop and which is definitely worth a detour. His screencast, below, inspired me to find a way to do the same for the iPhone. He had a look at the Alphabet Lesson (Lesson 3).
I have made improvements to Lesson 3 after carefully watching Dave's screencast, but I haven't found all the solutions yet.
My next screencast will show you how the ProProfs Quiz Maker works. This is the application I have chosen for all the quizzes on Real English Mobile.
* It's impossible to make an accurate estimate of the time to be spent to complete the existing 21 lessons. Here I write "40 hours" and in the screencast, I say "80 hours". The latter estimate might be closer to the truth when speaking about a real beginner, starting with lesson 1, while also learning English with other tools.
ProProfs Quizmaker & Real English® Videos How Students Learn English on Our Sites
In order to ensure that Real English® videos are truly useful for learners, we
have implemented "Interactive Lessons", i.e., collections of quizzes for our entire library
of videos.
And in order to ensure that the learning experience is user-friendly for all
levels of students, we break up each video into small parts for each quiz, in
our case this means one, or sometimes 2 street interviews per quiz. In this
way, students do not have to search or navigate back and forth to the relevant
part of the video for compleing the quiz at hand.
This quiz strategy works well, which
brings us to an even more important question: which tool is best for making
quizzes for our videos?
We put a lot of thought and research into this question, and installed trials
of 6 different quiz programs before making our choice. Our requirements for a
quiz maker included the following criteria:
1 - The program must provide us with quiz output which works on both mobile
devices such as the iPhone and other iDevices, as well as Android phones &
tablets AND computers. In other words, all the quizzes we create must work well on all devices.
2 - When we create quizzes for our own students at The Marzio School, we
want to personalize the activity, i.e., to know which students took which quiz,
in order to be able to help them in the future after looking at their mistakes.
We also want to test our students from time to time using the quiz application.
3 - The quiz maker must be easy to use, without requiring the teachers
to use HTML (only half our teachers are familiar with HTML basics). Along the
same lines, the instructions for the students must appear in contexts directly
related to the quiz they are taking. Here's one of many examples: 4 - There must be some variety in the types of quizzes, including
Multiple Choice,True or False, Fill in
The Blanks, and Matching Exercises.
5 - Given the fact that our quizzes are based on our own videos, the
possibility of embedding these videos into the quiz must be included as a
built-in feature.
6 - The students must get "double feedback", i.e., feedback
concerningwhy the correct answer is X
and not Y, but also a score at the end showing all of the students' results.
We had been using the Hot Potatoes quiz maker for the past 10 years, because it
fulfills our most important requirements
except for #1, which is now the most important feature for us in 2012 - 2013.
This old venerable "Hot Potatoes" program is now truly "old
software",since it does not
support mobile platforms, and its creators have no intention of making it mobile-compatible. ProProfs failed in only one area - the last point in # 2: there are no
matching exercises. This is a tiny fault compared to the fact that Hot Potatoes
is useless for mobile devices.
ProProfs also includes features that will certainly be useful to our
students,such as the fact that students
can acess the quiz from their laptops using ProProfs "embedded link"
feature. There are also options for working with the ProProfs-generated files
off-line, a truly unique feature.
There is really no comparison between Hot Potatoes and ProProfs relatively new
entry into Web 2.0 interactivity. Just a few examples:
Many teachers
who don't have time to produce completely-original content all the time will be
happy to know that theQuiz Maker
includes the largest library of pre-made questions on the Web (more than three
million of them according to the information we find on the site) and also quiz
templates (over 300,000).
It
automatically converts any user uploaded documents, including PDF & Word
documents, into HTML5 so they can be loaded seamlessly across mobile devices.
There is a
"statistics dashboard" that allows teachers to generate reports for
each quiz-taker, or for individual questions, or for groups of students, and
includes the average time spent per question, and percentage of
correct/incorrect answers, for example.
Once a test
or quiz is created, the teacher receives a specific URL where it resides
online. An embed code ensures that the test or quiz can easily be placed on a
school Web site for secure access.
This quiz
maker does exactly what it says it does. The interface is simple, and it is
completely customizable.
And it's free if you don't mind the ads and branding
that accompany the quizzes you make. Otherwise, there are reasonably priced
subscriptions to choose from.
All in all, ProProfs is probably the program which
most educators will find the most useful and the most complete. It's close to perfect for our
particular needs, allowing us to serve both our world-wide audience with
"anonymous quizzes", and also for the needs of our own students &
teachers in our language school, allowing us to track all aspects of student
performance with ease.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Are you a serious YouTuber like myself? I just found an excellent tool that allows you to reply to your subscribers to thank them for subscribing, for example, without having to type individual messages to each person. But that's just one of the features of this useful time-saver. You can either send your personal message to the subscribers which they receive as email messages, or have your message automatically appear in the comments box on the subscriber's channel.
I don't like to "leave my subscribers in the dark" after they subscribe, but I was spending so much time writing to all the student subscribers to explain that they can do the exercises concerning my videos on my site, that it was becoming ridiculous.
This is, quite frankly, a marketing tool, and I have never before written about commercial stuff like this. However, it saves me so much time, I thought I should share.
I have mentioned only one of the Tube Toolbox functions. Have a look and you will see that you can automate any action which you now do manually. The 2 guys who created it are also very careful that the YouTubes Terms of Service are strictly respected, and they keep up with YouTube's constant changes on a daily basis.
I have not finished the new Mobile site
yet, but there are already 15 complete lessons up, with quizzes (about
80 hours of work for real beginners). You are more than welcome to use
it now, while it is still under construction.
I have added most
of the videos (58 videos already up), and I will soon go back to add the
quizzes with the short individual-interview clips, which allows the
learner to do quizzes based on very short extracts from the main video
of each lesson.
Making these short clips for the quizzes is the
longest part of the job, but it makes the learning experience much more
effective, and especially more user-friendly.
"Old" quizzes
already exist for lessons 1 to 12, including the 4 lessons in unit 8,
giving us a total of 15 complete interactive mobile lessons as of
October 22, 2012. I update progress on a weekly basis at the traditional
Real English® site at http://www.real-english.com/mobile-info.asp
Hope you like it. And it's definitely going to get better in the very near future. PS: I bought my first iPhone yesterday October 21! Up until yesterday, I was testing the new site using Mobile Device Emulators like this one, on my computer, with Safari. They are good for essential testing, and
their most important advatage is that they allow one to test not only the
different iPhones, but also Android phones such as the Galaxy, as well
as tablets, and certain Blackberry phones as well. However,
using a real iPhone has opened my eyes. I see now that I must redo the
quizzes in a different format (change of widths, especially, according
to the nature of each quiz). Everthing else looks great! The videos are
very crisp and clean, even better than the videos I see on the traditional
Real English® website!
Did you know that the slang word "sick" means cool? Neither did I until I discovered a brand new siteand YouTube channel called "Slargon". I couldn't believe it. An old guy like me had to check out the Urban Dictionary to confirm it. The new "sick" is now being used as a near-antonym of the traditonal "sick". This young lady goes on to say that if something is "sick", it's something you really like.
The site has been and is being created by the Corbo Brothers, Stephen and Jimmy. They both have MA degrees and work in the New York City Department of Education as Speech Language Pathologists We're obviously not talking about the usual cowboys we often find in the world of ESL who throw up new sites on a wing and a prayer.
On the other hand, they learned how to make video and a site just like I did, without any training, learning by doing.
"Growing up in New York", Jimmy writes "we have been exposed to many different dialects of English and we are fascinated by the different ways in which people can use language. That is what prompted us to dedicate our video language library to slang, idioms and other peculiar language".
Their videos are all spontaneous steet interviews, just like Real English. No boring actors. You meet a lot of people filmed in different parts of New York City who agree to make a "language donation" as they call it.
The videos are very short - some less than 12 seconds. The longest clip I've found so far is 30 seconds. We're talking sound bites here, and it's really a hoot!
In some of the clips, we find classic idioms such as "the cat's pajamas", but in other cases we find cool everyday expressions which are widely used by native speakers but never, or almost never taught in the ESL/EFL classroom. One thing I learned that is very
important when building a coherent language library based on the
spontaneous speech of street interviews, is how to approach prospective
interviewees, or "donators". I am lucky to have a friendly, attractive
French wife who does this job. She puts people at ease and makes them want to give us an interview. This is what Jimmy says about their approach: "Stephen tends to be the bolder brother but we do switch off approaching people to ask for language donations. We usually approach them with a short pitch about our project. "Hey, how are you? We are from slargon.com, and we're creating a video language library of slang, idioms and other peculiar language. We are looking for language donations... Do you have a word or phrase that you would like to contribute?" They obviously make a good team. Jimmy
told me "Slargon is something that has really grown from my brother
Stephen's ambition to merge technology and language services... Once we
decided that we would do the project together we hit the ground running.
Stephen went to work building a website for Slargon and I went to work
learning about Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects
for the purpose of editing".He goes on to say "This is a mouthfull, so sometimes we spend an additional 15 minutes explaining our project, and sometimes people jump right in with a word or phrase, and other times we are completely blown off. All in all our general success rate is 50-70%".
I can't help comparing this figure to Real English. After our first filming campaigns in the US and the UK in the mid-90s, we got about the same success rate. The problem comes later when we have to decide who is "good enough" to include in our library. That was my problem 3 months ago when we filmed in my new favorite spot in South Beach, Miami. I thought everybody was great while filming, but in the end, we only used about 20% of our footage.
You will also find donators who speak English as a Second Language. You see a French girl below who explains the slang version of "J'adore" (i.e., without an object) which is not exactly the same as the literal meaning. Several foreign languages have already been included in Slargon's library.
And finally, Slargon's Web 2.0 clincher: "Generally speaking we have gotten a great response on the street, people seem to love the idea. Filming is a great part of the job but we are hoping that eventually users will make their own online contributions by uploading their videos to Slargon". A word of caution in regard to young children learners. You will find some vulgar clips here too. In fact they have divided their clips into 27 categories so far, and that includes the "gross" and "lustful" categories.
Hi Teachers! My friend, Ryan Detwiler, has just published a new iPhone/iPod App for children learning English. It's his 1st app:
Star Speller-- Reading and Spelling games for beginning English students. Great pronunciation practice too. Have a look!
He's a great developer. Here are the main features: - Teacher developed content - Reading Power and Spelling Power games - 30 levels of game play (10 words per level) - Track player's high scores - Adjustable game speed ("Challenge Speed") - Option to delete all current scores - Option to turn audio instructions on or off - Professionally recorded American English - Flash Cards activity (read and swipe) - Simple, easy-to-navigate interface design
PS: I bought my first iPhone yesterday October 21! Up until yesterday, I was testing the new site using Mobile Device Emulators like this one, on my computer, with Safari. They are good for essential testing, and
their most important advatage is that they allow one to test not only the
different iPhones, but also Android phones such as the Galaxy, as well
as tablets, and certain Blackberry phones as well.
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This is what Jimmy says about their approach: "Stephen tends to be the bolder brother but we do switch off approaching people to ask for language donations. We usually approach them with a short pitch about our project. "Hey, how are you? We are from slargon.com, and we're creating a video language library of slang, idioms and other peculiar language. We are looking for language donations... Do you have a word or phrase that you would like to contribute?"
