Macmillan Sounds Mobile App for Android now available

Macmillan has just released its mobile Sounds App for the Android market. It was previously only available for the Apple market. You can download the Android version from here.

Please share your opinions if you have used this app.

Related posts:

Cockney Rhyming Slang

Pronunciation of regular simple past

Teaching and learning pronunciation

Transcribing text to IPA symbols

Top 5 posts of April 2011

Do you read your analytics? Which do you use?

It's rather curious to see how each service reports differently. Lately, I've been looking at Blogger's, more for the convenience than anything else. In case you haven't noticed, on the posting page, there's a button, alongside the others such as settings, design, and monetise, which says STATS. Click on this and you'll see all kinds of statistics for your blog.

I made a quick comparison between Blogger and Google Analytics, and was rather surprised at the differences. Don't they belong to the same company? Here are my top 5 posts for the month of April.

BLOGGER

1. Help Japan if you can (250 page views) (published 15 March 2011)
2. Interview with Nicky Hockly Listening Activity (168 page views) (Published 21 April 2011)
3. Tweeting is for the birds - Debate Activities (167 page views) (Published 21 April 2011)
4. To be like a dogme with a bone (113 page views) (Published 27 April 2011)
5. Barcelona vs Real Madrid Cincomentarios (110 page views) (Published on 30 Nov 2010)

Total page views for April 2011: 8,481

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

1. Help Japan if you can (127 page views)
2. Prepositions of time and place: at, in, on (105 page views) (published 29 Mar 2011)
3. Tweeting is for the birds - Debate Activities (103 page views)
4. We are the champions: One song, countless activities (101 page views) (published 3 Apr 2011)
5. Transcribe text to phonetic symbols (94 page views) (published 25 Feb 2011)

Total page views for April 2011: 6,099

One thing worth noting is that if someone visits the home page (902 visits according to Google Analytics), the posts they read aren't recorded.

What they both agree on are the top 2 referring sites, which are Google (a long way in front) and Facebook. What they disagree on is the third spot. Analytics gave it to Oxford University Press, while, for Blogger, it's That's English. Direct visits coming from email (Feedburner) are excluded as Blogger doesn't seem to record these.

If I were to look at the figures controlled by other analysts I use such as Sitemeter, Blogpatrol, and StatCounter, they all give varying results. It doesn't really matter much to me, but I do wonder which of these potential advertisers look at.

"When you educate a girl, you educate the whole world"

In January 2011, I posted a video showing how they were building a music school in  Kirina, Mali, from scratch. The school opened its doors in October 2010, and Playing for Change takes us into the school to see what teachers and the kids do...

Related posts:

Building a school from the ground up

Dogme still has its bone! The saga continues...

As titled in my previous post, dogme is indeed like a dog with a bone. The recent IATEFL 2011 Conference in Brighton seems to have started it off on a roller coaster ride once again. The weekly Twitter #ELTchat featured it for the second time, prompting a lively hour-long session, and with that in mind, Scott Thornbury decided to respond to five of the most common issues surrounding dogme.

1. Dogme is nothing new - we've always been doing it. Scott's answer: It wasn't so much that dogme was an idea whose time had come, but more that it was an idea which needed labelling.
2. It's OK for some, but it won't work in our context. Scott's answer: No single methodology is universally applicable, but comments from teachers applying dogme in a wide variety of situations suggest that it might be more elastic than some critics would have us believe.
3. Dogme is prescriptive; it imposes its rule of conversation-driven, materials-light, and emergent language top-down. Scott's answer: It isn't so much prescriptive as descriptive.
4. Dogme is evil! It's irresponsible and unprofessional. Scott's answer: We aren't suggesting that teachers go into the classroom without having a clue of what they are going to do and just hoping that something will just come up; we're actually suggesting that they go in with a very clear idea of how and where they want things to go, in relation to that particular class and the needs of that particular class.
5. To end the video, Scott addresses some positive comments such as 'It's changed the way I feel about teaching', 'One of the reasons why I like dogme is because it fights conservatism and laziness', and 'we overestimate the value of branded materials and underestimate the potential of ordinary people'. Scott's answer: What has been extraordinarily encouraging has been the responses of teachers saying things like how dogme has changed their way of teaching, how it's made them feel good about teaching, how it's given them professional self-esteem, and how it's given them a boost and often at a time when they needed it most.

There is life left in DOGME!

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To be like a dogme with a bone

To be like a dogme with a bone

If you haven't heard of dogme, you must have been hibernating in your shell for too long, and you'll have an awful lot of catching up to do. If you have heard of it, you'll know that if you were to mention the word to another teacher, you're likely to win a friend for life, or... you'd be left wondering if you had bad breath! I don't know what it was really like in Brighton, but from afar, I can't help but think that some teachers are like a dog with a bone on the subject of dogme, and it's contagious!

Whether you've heard of it or not, whether you're in favour of it or not, I'd suggest you watch these enlightening interviews with Luke Meddings and Anthony Gaughan at the recent IATEFL 2011 Conference in Brighton. Unfortunately, their presentations weren't recorded (I think). Also, don't miss Diarmuid's hilarious parody of the dogme saga after that! Click on the image and the video will open in a new tab/window.

Then, there are a couple of excellent blogs, whose links I've posted at the bottom, which are currently discussing dogme. Do visit them from time to time. Interesting reading indeed.

Interesting thought-provoking discussions are going on at the moment here:

Diarmuid's Questions which dog me and
Gaughan's Every dogme has its day

Wiki, of course, has a page on Dogme language teaching, and more links can be seen there.

And, if you really want to know more about the subject, read Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings' Teaching Unplugged.

Of course, both Scott & Luke have their blogs, which, undoubtedly, will contain references to dogme from time to time.

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Tweeting is for the birds
What is m-Learning?
Speaking using close-ups

Macmillan's Pronunciation Application on Apple & Android

If you've got an Apple or Android phone, you might like this pronunciation application from Macmillan, based on Adrian Underhill's chart. I haven't got such a phone, I'm afraid, so I haven't been able to test it. If you have managed to test this application, please make your opinions known to us by commenting below.

Updated 26/04/2011: It has just been brought to my attention that the application is only available for iPhones at the moment. I suspect it's to judge the demand, so, the more people who download it, the quicker will it be made available for Android phones, too - that is my guess!

You can download it here:



Related posts:
Cockney Rhyming Slang
Pronunciation of regular simple past
Teaching and learning pronunciation
Transcribing text to IPA symbols

Interview with Nicky Hockly on IATEFL 2011: Listening Comprehension

Note: Last updated on 24 April 2011 to add phrasal verbs and vocabulary questions to the quiz.

Watch this interview with Nicky Hockly during the IATEFL 2011 Brighton conference. First, just watch and listen. Then, click on the image above, and review all the questions. Watch the video again, but, this time, attempt to answer all the questions.

Teachers: if you would like to use this activity for your students, you can ask them to enter your email address. This way, all their results will be sent to you, and you can evaluate them.