High School Spanish App Review

This week I was able to go back to my own content area and review an iOS app for High School Spanish. The app is called "High School Spanish - 5 Essential Tools to Study Spanish & Learn Vocabulary!" By Common Ground International. 

Overview: This app is very good at what it does. For $4.99 I would recommend it to my students as a companion app to my classroom. Teachers and students should not expect it to be a stand alone app or a magic bullet. But when used with a strong curriculum, talented instructor, and ambitious student, this app is one of the best apps I've seen for Spanish students enrolled in Spanish levels 1 through 5. 

Upon first launch, the app brought me to the screen below. It seemed to be downloading the dictionary onto my iPhone. While connected to wifi this download/sync screen lasted for about 5-10 minutes.

The app has 5 main sections or tools.  They are all represented in the 5 icons at the bottom of the screen.  The dictionary is pretty cool it has a very comprehensive library of vocabulary words. The user can click the speaker icon on any word to hear proper pronunciation. It seems that this feature requires an internet connection to stream the pronunciation. Clicking the checkmark icon enables the user to copy that word into a user-made folder of vocabulary words.

The Writing Tips tool contains tips and instructions to help students with writing in specific circumstances. I think this would be a nice reference guide for students taking AP classes.

The grammar tool is a collection of explanations and text-based tutorials on the grammar elements seen below.

The conjugations section of the app not only includes explanations of the tenses, but also includes T-charts to assist students in memorizing the verb conjugations

The flashcard app is one of the most customizable features in this app.  There are lots of categories and folders of vocabulary words. 

Once a vocabulary folder has been selected, the user can swipe through the words in either Spanish or English.  Double-tapping on any card will flip the card to reveal its equivalent in the other language. When a word has been learned, the student can click the checkmark icon to mark this word as "learned." This removes the word from list.

The user can also add their own vocabulary words and organize existing words into personalized vocabulary lists. 

The final tool is the comprehension tool. The comprehension tool is full of tests and quizzes that students can use to quiz themselves and test their abilities. The quizzes include listening comprehension complete with audio prompts and questions. The reading quizzes are aligned to Spanish levels 1-5. The listening quizzes are aligned to Spanish levels 3, 4, or 5.

The quizzes also provide the student with very useful feedback that can be used for self-correction.

For those teachers and students that are fans of Quizlet, there is an available in-app-purchase to add Quizlet into the app.

Pros: 

• Good quick reference resources
• Writing Tips
• Targeted to students in AP Spanish classes
• Grammar Helps
• Verb tenses and conjugations
• Parts of speech
• Excellent collection of vocabulary
• Customizable lists for flashcards
• Audible pronunciation guides
• Flashcards
• Customizable lists
• English to Spanish / Spanish to English
• Definitions
• Grammar
• Quick reminders/tutorials for grammar
• Conjugation reference
• Tense Explanations
• Comprehension checking
• Reading quizzes and practice questions levels 1-5
• Listening quizzes and practice levels 3-5
• Hints and self correction features provide students with instant feedback.

Cons:

• App cannot be purchased and used on the spot. Takes 5-10 minutes to download and sync dictionary terms.
• Pronunciation feature in dictionary requires an internet connection (understandable when you take into account the amount of data this app already has.
• Not connectable to class or teacher.  I'd like to see this app have a classroom feature where the teacher can push vocabulary lists to the students in his/her class. 
• $4.99 is a bit steep for many students/schools.
• Not Android compatible

 All in all, I am impressed with this app.  I would recommend it to any student enrolled in high school Spanish.  I'd like to see an Android version, cheaper price tag, and some type of connectivity to the classroom teacher.  However, the current features of this app make it a very good choice for students and parents to supplement the classroom curriculum.

If you or your students have used this app I'd love to hear what you think.

Lenovo Thinkpad: Android tablet review for schools

I was fortunate enough to get a hold of a Lenovo Thinkpad 10 inch tablet this week.  (Thanks to GovConnection).

Basic Specs:

Image: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/

Lenovo Thinkpad 10.1 inch 16gb

• Android 3.1 Honeycomb
• 1GHz Tegra 2 
• 10.1-inch (1280 x 800) IPS display
• battery good for up to 8.7 hours of use, 
• 1GB of RAM, 16/32/64GB of storage, 
• 3-in-1 card reader, 
• A-GPS, 
• accelerometer,
• ambient light sensor,
• front (2MP) / rear (5MP) cameras, 
• a mini HDMI port (1080p capable!) 
• and Lenovo's own app launcher / app market.

Overall impressions:

• Screen - good resolution and is very snappy and responsive (unlike other Android devices I've had my hands on.)
• Camera - Pretty good, struggles in low-light
• Speed - The dual core processor makes this tablet pretty snappy.
• Internet speed - Good, about the same or a touch slower than my iPad.  (This is hard to judge due to wifi speed and variability)
• Mail App - Mail has one app for exchange and one for gmail.  I like having both accounts in one app (like my iPad).  The Mail app doesn't have a default file view for office & pdf docs.  A separate app must be installed and set as default for viewing these docs.  (This is a big drawback for me, especially when using this with students, I want something that just works. But perhaps not a big deal for everyone)
• On-Screen keyboard - The keyboard when compared to an iPad keyboard doesn't come close to measuring up.  The auto-prediction/correction is pathetic at best.  I missed little features like double tapping the space-bar to auto insert a period and capitalize the first letter in the next sentence.  This was probably the most frustrating aspect of using the device.
• Apps - There are some great apps on Android.  I didn't notice any problems with any apps scaling to size the 10.1 inch widescreen.  
• Google Docs App - I was somewhat disappointed with this app.  It works, but not any better than the web version you can get on any iPad or iPhone
• Stylus - This tablet comes with a stylus and I really liked it.  The tablet was snappier and more responsive to the stylus rather than my finger.  When i really needed pin point accuracy on the screen, this made it much easier.
• USB port (full size) - For many people this will be a a great feature, as long as you have an app installed that will open the files on your flash drive.
• 3 in 1 card reader - Also very cool.  Can easily pop out SD card from camera or any device and upload files onto the tablet.
• Physical buttons - One of my favorite features on Android phones is the physical menu button.  The only buttons besides the volume and power/sleep buttons were: screen rotation lock, instant browser launch, back & home.

Image: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/

The big question here 'Is this a good device for a teacher or student?'  I think the jury is still out on that one.  If the school is going to purchase these devices, there is some work to do.  There needs to be an easy solution for managing multiple devices at once.  Preferably and over-the-air syncing solution, that doesn't require a month of training to use.  Also, since our district is using Google Apps, multiple sign-in of Google accounts on one device is not very desirable. If this device were for an individual student to be purchased and managed by the student, however, I believe this device or one like it would be a good solution if the price were right.  In my opinion, if the price difference between a tablet like this and an iPad were within $100, I'd still have to recommend the iPad.  Although, this and other Android tablets can be good competitors, the standard, for now, is still the iPad.  The most compelling reasons to get an android table will be price and/or a hatred toward Apple.