Tag Archives: iPhone

Music and Technology: Making Language Learning Memorable, a TiLT Webinar-Thursday 29 August 2020⤴

I have always been a strong advocate for using music in the Languages classroom and was delighted to be offered to present a TiLT Webinar for ALL London on this topic.

I have been a member of ALL, the Association for Language Learning for as long as I can remember and their programme of free Webinars to support language teachers during the pandemic has simply been amazing. Co-hosted by ALL London chair Helen Myers and ICT expert Joe Dale, there are now more 50 TiLT Webinars that can be accessed through the ALL London website and Joe's YouTube channel.

In my webinar, I shared a range of tools and ideas for integrating music in activities in and outside the classroom. We looked at streaming platforms like Spotify, recording tools and apps as well as sites to source free beats and loops to support pupils' creativity and memorisation of language.

I also presented tools to use melody, rhythm and song lyrics to enhance pupils' enjoyment, motivation and support their recall of key language structures.

I showed different resources to develop teachers' knowledge in order to link music and song lyrics to the culture of the Target-Language countries.

Last but not least, I shared how specific websites, apps and social media can support teachers in discovering new artists and tracks from a range of Target-Language countries.

My slides can be downloaded from here

A copy of the chat discussion and the recording of the webinar is available from ALL London website and Joe Dale's YouTube channel

The following collaborative Wakelets were started in the session:

French https://wakelet.com/i/invite?code=5665d3a

Spanish https://wakelet.com/i/invite?code=882ab34

German https://wakelet.com/i/invite?code=792a9af

Songs for young learners https://wakelet.com/i/invite?code=ad5b361

Do join in and share your favourite songs to teach languages....

Listening to the Parakeets⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

A bunch of parakeets were settling down for the night in Victoria Park this evening. A quick recording with a bit is speach at the end. 🎙

Podcatching with Castro⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Recently I was being Pedantic about Podcasts. Trying to point out that the important thing about podcasts is the way they are distributed making it is be easy to listen as we wash the dishes or drive to work.

I posted about this before: EDUtalk: How to Listen.

Once you get this set up to be automatic it makes listen to podcasts as easy as listening to the radio.

I started way back, syncing podcasts to an iPod. One I got my first iPhone I used that, trying a few different apps before settling on Overcast.

A few weeks ago I deleted Overcast as I was running out of space to record a movie, planning to reinstall ASAP.

Last week as I went to do this, on a whim, I spent £3.99 on Castro 2 instead. It turns out that this app matches my listening habits better than overcast. I’d guess, from memory, it has less settings and options but that is not a bad thing.

I listen to podcasts mostly on my 45 minute commute home. I am interested in more podcasts than would fill that amount of time. Castro lets me subscribe to a bunch of podcasts and queue up (and download) only the episodes I want to hear. It does this in a very simple way.

New episodes from the feeds I am subscribed to get listed in my inbox.
From there you can quickly add then to your queue, at the end or at the top. At this point they get downloaded.
You can set any feed to have its episodes automatically added to the queue.
You can archive episodes, you don’t loose them but they get out of the inbox.
You can queue episodes from your archive or the discovery tab. That means you can search or paste the url to a podcast into the discovery tab and see the episodes, you can add one to the queue without subscribing.

Once in the queue you can rearrange the episodes and they play in order. Each moves to the archive after it is played. Importantly for me, the next queued episode plays automatically.

Bonus, as you add an episode to the queue there is a nice wee animation as seen in the featured image of this post (my image is a gif, speed and quality are not reflections of the app.)

A peep through the periscope⤴

from john @ John's World Wide Wall Display

periscope icon

Periscope is a new video streaming service that hooks up through your Twitter account. It seems to have stolen a march over its rival Meerkat: Periscope v. Meerkat: Our Initial Re/action | Re/code

I gave periscope a quick test yesterday afternoon. In a break in the rain I headed to The Whangie for a quick walk. When I got to the Whangie itself I had I blob of 3G on my phone so without much hope I fired up periscope.

I was quite surprised that I seemed to connect and started walking and talking. I could not really see the screen due to lack of reading glasses and s rain speckled screen but I think a few people connected.
After nearly four minutes I finished. He app seemed to be trying to upload the video? Given the poor connectivity I was not surprised that it failed. The video was saved to my camera roll though.

Later reviewing the video I see that I made the mistake of assuming periscope would do landscape videos. The video look like a misty day in minecraft, I guess quality is decided by connection?

I’ve watched a few other streams and the quality has been a lot better than mine. It is quite strange watching random streams as folk try to figure out what is going on. I did see a broadcast of a ‘sporting’ event from quite nearby as swimmers in wetsuits tackled the Maryhill canal locks.

Educationally, what is this good for? Perhaps live links beamed back into classrooms from field trips or broadcasting egg incubators out to pupils at home after school.
The app is optimised for iOS 7.1 or later and iPhone 5 and up which I guess rules out my old iPhone 4 for experimenting with.
Why use it rather than other streaming apps, ease of use first and perhaps the low bandwidth requirements.

iOS Workflow⤴

from john @ John's World Wide Wall Display

I quite enjoy scripts and things that make my computing life a we bit easier. I’ve blogged a few times about AppleScript which I find very handy on my mac. On my iPhone I’ve never really found a way of automating things that stuck with me. I’ve downloaded and played with a few apps, but mostly they have felt a bit too convoluted for me.

I do regularly combine application to get a result, the so called app smashing, although I prefer the less destructive sounding playflow (I think I am the only person who does).

Workflow Icon

I’ve now found an application which looks like making this sort of thing on iOS a bit simpler: Workflow.

Workflow is more like Automator than AppleScript as it uses the same sort of block steps. You can combine any of the actions to create workflows. These steps or rather actions can deal with images, text, maps in all sorts of ways.

The think that makes this application stand out is that it has arrived hot on the heels of the iOS 8 improvements to inter application communication. You can set the application to the a Action Extension, this means it can be run from the share sheet in other applications. As you can set the input for a workflow to accept different things you can control the sheets where it will show.

In the screenshot below I’ve selected 2 photos and then hit the share button. When I click the Run Workflow button I can choose a workflow from the next screen(shown on the right) . In this case one choice is a simple workflow I made to downsize image an save it to the camera roll.

Sharesheet

These workflows are made by dragging and dropping action blocks onto a workflow. Workflows can be set to be run from a icon added to your home screen, the Launch Center app or from share sheets in other apps. The latter can be set to accept different types of data and will then show up in the appropriate apps.

So far I’ve only made a few very simple workflows with two or three block, but there is potential to loop and have if-then type decision making.

Some Workflows