By christopher clarke on January 19, 2019
Mobile education is excellent at embracing accessibility and global connectedness. Part of accessibility is providing experiences that fit into those short sections of free time we all hopefully get throughout the day. Between busy days and short attention spans, it’s important to compress content into easy to access, quick, and mobile doses. When it comes to language acquisition, Elllo (http://www.elllo.org/) does a great job of that. Elllo stands for English Listening Lesson Library Online and it’s a free site that provides thousands of micro lessons for learning English. The backbone of the site is a collection of one minute video interviews of people from around the world. Pick any country you want and there are most likely interviews from residents. It allows users to practice their english and learn about other cultures at the same time. A large number of the videos are personal stories that give the viewer a sense of authenticity and open a window to the region. The site provides transcripts to follow with every video, as well as comprehension checking questions, and games. There are viewpoint comparisons, worksheets for both students and educators, and daily news-related stories. The site showcases what is possible when a person provides open access to educational tools and invites an international community to contribute to the operation. One thing in the negative is all the ads shown around the site, but as this is a free site operated using the creator’s free time, it is understandable why they exist.
Having lived in a few different countries, using that time on the subway to learn a few more words and phrases and more about the culture is awesome. Especially since most other countries have cell signals in their subway tunnels (I grew up in Toronto and I think they finally have some areas of coverage now but I left a few years back).
The amount of tools at one’s fingertips now to help with traveling almost makes me forget that things required more planning “back in the day”. Now that I teach ELL students, this is yet another tool I can recommend to students looking to supplement their school learning.
These days there are so many apps and websites out there. I wish there could be websites and tools like these for other languages too. What I am hoping is that there is one site or organization that can provide these tools for every language out there.
I appreciate the fact that this is free, there are many students who do not have the means to pay fees. I wonder if students do take advantage of all these free tools that they have available. Wish I could have those back in my days.