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Interview with Ashleigh Lincoln, Ultralingua: Innovators in E-Learning Series

What role can online dictionaries play in e-learning? Finding just the right word to use, or understanding the true meaning of a word is often a matter of context as well as denotative meaning. Dictionaries can fall short because they do not always adequately present the full spectrum of meaning(s), and they are not flexible enough to engage deep learning. To offer a solution, Ultralingua combines technology with a philosophy of rich context and situated learning to build language knowledge and skills. Because Ultralingua offers monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, they support communication across cultures and nationalities. Welcome to an interview with Ashleigh Lincoln, Ultralingua. 

1. What is your name and your relation to elearning?
Ashleigh Lincoln, marketing and communications coordinator. E-learning embodies what our company, Ultralingua, is all about. We provide accurate, simple and accessible education on the web.

2.  What is Ultralingua? What does it do?  What makes it special?

Ultralingua is a software company that makes monolingual and bilingual dictionaries for people who love languages. Our dictionaries come with advanced reference and learning tools, developed to address the verb conjugation, vocabulary memorization, and grammatical challenges language learners face. Ultralingua is not your average software company. We have a passion for making easy and accurate software that people love to use. We take every user comment seriously, and use feedback to make Ultralingua dictionaries the best they can be.

3.  What are the learning theories that underlie the instructional strategy of Ultralingua?

 At Ultralingua, we believe technology can be a great asset to language learners, as long as they pick tools to help them learn rather than shortcuts to get around the challenge of learning. If a language learner is motivated to learn a new language, they already have taken the first necessary step. We aim to make our dictionaries the ultimate reference tool for people who are committed to learning a language and have the motivation necessary to learn a new language. Our software contains multiple translations with context and usage examples so learners can distinguish between word choices themselves.

4.  How effective is the strategy that you use? Is Ultralingua equally effective with everyone? What are the conditions that are required for learning to be optimal?

Language learners need context in order to choose the right word, and our dictionaries were designed to make that context accessible. Ultralingua is effective because we include so many additional tools and resources with our dictionaries. We believe the key to learning a new language this day in age, is balancing technology with teacher and native speaker interaction. If the learner has that fundamental motivation, and possesses an app like Ultralingua to use as a reference on them at all times, they have a recipe for success.

5.  Who has used Ultralingua? Do you have any examples?

Generally our users are people in the process of learning one or more languages. These users vary from students in high school language classes, graduate and undergraduate college students majoring or minoring in a language, teachers and professors, students and workers abroad, bilingual people, language translators, homeschoolers, and self-language learners.

Ultralingua actively communicate with the Ultralingua users and have been fortunate enough to interview a handful of them. Our users vary across the world from a farmer from California who needed to improve his Spanish speaking abilities, to an Esperanto-speaking world traveler, to a young man studying abroad in France needing a fast and easily-accessible bilingual dictionary. To check out some of their stories, visit our blog at http://blog.ultralingua.com/.

6.  What are your plans in the future? 

We just completed a complete redesign of our two most popular products: Ultralingua for iOS and Ultralingua online dictionary.

The new Ultralingua dictionary 2.0 is equipped with a new design, a “favorite” feature, for users to mark entries to remember or save for later, and as well as grammar references with answers to hundreds of usage and syntax questions for the Ultralingua 2.0 dictionary for mobile devices.

Interview with Mike Sommer, Digital Backpack, Innovators in E-Learning Series

The beauty of mobile learning is that it allows you to access content any time, anywhere. However, there can be a few bumps in the road. It can be very tedious to download content in a way that allows you to listen or view the material, even if you're not online. In addition, downloading can be cumbersome if you have to go through several different apps and portals. If you're enrolled in an online program, your downloads may take quite a bit or time, and you could probably benefit from a streamlined way to access your course materials. Further, you may wish to take courses from several universities at the same time for a complete list of online accredited colleges, many of them requiring multiple apps and digital content.

Welcome to an interview with Mike Sommer, who, with the team at Digital Backpack, has developed an integrated function / Mobile Application Management (MAM) for downloading, access, storage.

1. What is your name and company affiliation?
 Mike Sommer, CEO of Digital Backpack.

2.  What is Digital Backpack?  How does it work?
Digital Backpack helps your organization capitalize on mobile freedom by providing you with an efficient and secure way to share, manage, and upload company-branded private apps and digital content on to your audience’s devices. We do this by focusing on managing content and not the device through a super app called the Backpack.

Designed to be easy to use, scalable, and efficient, we connect businesses with employees and school administrators with students through a Mobile Application Management (MAM) platform called the Backpack.

The Backpack is a secure “super app” that sits on a mobile device – whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, and powered by iOS or Android. Through an online, cloud-based Dashboard, an administrator can upload, manage, and share apps and digital content right to the Backpack using push technology. You’ll even get detailed analytics that will show you how the content you’re publishing is being used.

3.  What can Digital Backpack be used for ? what kinds of files?  Does it interface with iTunes and other digital repositories such as Amazon?
Within the client Dashboard we are able to manage, push, remove Audio, Video, Flash, and PDF documents.

Instead of integrating with third party stores like iTunes and Amazon for digital resources like audio, video and other documents we provide your own private network that you have full control over.

4.  How can Digital Backpack be used in conjunction with e-learning?
Coming from an Online Learning background we understand the importance of SCROM based courses for tracking student results. Since Android allows for the use of Flash we are not only able to leverage content within LMS systems yet we can also allow e-learning experts to push flash based lessons right into a students Backpack.

5.  I have a Windows phone and an iPhone.  Will Digital Backpack work with them?
Our infrastructure is designed to roll out to a variety of devices as the market evolves and matures. Our next release will include iOS and as Windows 8 gains market share we will look to build a Backpack for these devices also.

6.  What do you think is the future of mobile content?  Will there be more or less?
I believe that the future of mobile will be more of a concierge service. Instead of 200 apps on each device and a one size fits all to corporate app deployment I see focused and user specific material being delivered as it is needed.

With the ability to push and then remove digital content the end user can have relevant and timely information available at the right time vs all the information all the time.  As digital technology evolves we are able to store more and more information in the palm of our hands and in essence our digital devices are cluttered. We believe that when you have a managed Backpack that holds relevant information at the time you need it you are more likely to use it.

To use the analogy of a hiker. You do not carry a full loaded suitcase with you that has everything in it when you are going for an afternoon day hike. The same is with mobile content. Take what you need and leave the rest behind. You can always access it if you need to but it should not be the focus of your day.

Nominated for Most Fascinating Blog of 2012

E-Learning Queen is thrilled to announce that its sister blog, FringeJournal,  has been nominated for a 2012 Fascination Award in the Creative Writing Teacher Blog Category! The nomination was given for FringeJournal's "Iraq, American Soldiers in Iraq, Werewoves of Paraguay and War: El Luison."

Online creative writing programs are found in many online courses and programs. Ranging from autobiography, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, creative writing in hybrid, face-to-face, and 100% online courses is very popular. You may wish to look in collegefinder.net. 

Other creative writing examples include "Tear-Down of the Murder-Suicide House" and "The Killer of Lover's Lane, or, the Ten-Mile-Flats Murder: Transgressions of Closure." 

Interview with Jaley B, Silver Medalist, Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award

Welcome to an interview with Jaley Bruursema,  one of the winners of the first-ever Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards. Jaley B, age 14, and a student at Augustus H. Burley Elementary School in Chicago, IL, won a Silver Award for Narrative Video. Jaley's project, Gone, was created in conjunction with co-authors Anna Gould, Teagan Letscher, Elyssa Saldana, and Avery Weiland. The students were provided with professional-grade tools and were encouraged to make compelling digital media projects that spoke to the issues they most cared about.


1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? My name is Jaley B. The Aspire Awards project I worked on with a group is called Gone (It is in the narrative section).

Silver Award for Narrative Video: Gone
Jaley Bruursema, Anna Gould, Teagan Letscher, Elyssa Saldana, Avery Weiland

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? The project is a story in stop motion addressing the issue of child soldiers in Africa. There is no talking but music accompanies the motion and in between scenes are slides reading the written pieces of the story you are watching. The purpose of this project is to inform viewers about child soldiers.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people take away a thirst to help. As a group, we wanted the video to be horrifying enough to feel compassion and sympathy for these children, but not gruesome, so that audiences have no need to look away. We also wanted to demonstrate the great losses and sadness that happens in this situation but leave viewers with a sense of hope and a sense of obligation to donate money, protest, and do anything they can to recover areas that are influenced by this devastation. Of course it would be nice to win the competition, but it would be far better to lose and have a bunch of people do something than to win and have no one do anything.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do? I hope that they will be adequately informed and that they will not just walk away and think about the issue but walk away and do something about it.

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?) We took a LOT of photos and piecing them together on the computer was a big portion of the project. Some had to be longer than others for a dramatic effect. We did not create any graphics digitally but we did traditionally. All the artwork that appears is something we made with paper. For our audio we used general tracks from Garageband and downloaded free instrumental and choral songs from the internet. We displayed our video on a school media gallery website and at Adobe’s TechXpo.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? The Aspire experience has given me a background in creating media that many people will view within a deadline. It has given me a little glimpse into what the world of professional media looks like. Now, going into high school and possibly doing more high quality media projects like Gone I’ll know what I’ll be doing. I am not entirely sure what my next steps will be but this project has been very fun to create and exciting to watch grow and I will definitely explore creating more media and media like this in the future.

Interview with Anny Liu, Adobe Aspire Award Winner

Welcome to an interview with Anny Liu, one of the winners of the first-ever Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards. Liu, age 17, and a student at Balboa High School in Redwood City, CA, won a Silver Award for Animation. Her project, LOOK, was created in conjunction with her co-author Janice Lee.

Here is the text of E-Learning Queen's interview with Anny Liu.


1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? 
My name is Anny Liu, and my Aspire Awards project is titled "LOOK". It's basically about how a conversation between two friends awakened a bunch of little creatures/spirits that represent the creativity that is put into designing everyday objects. 

LOOK
Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award Silver Award: Animation
Janice Lee and Anny Liu, Balboa High School

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? This project is actually a collaboration with a few friends. We all thought that people usually think of art only in the spectrum of "fine art" and do not see how artistic elements can be found in almost everything around us. We hope to express that with "LOOK," and inspire people to look at the world around them. Using little cute creatures popping out of common objects and such, we tried to do that in a fun and interesting way so the viewers will smile and make their own realizations instead of us preaching to others about our ideals of art.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
 I hope that people will learn to appreciate the work and thought put into making everything around them beautiful. And I wish to show through the video that even mundane things actually are designed by someone. The video doesn't try to enforce any type of thinking to the viewers, but it would be great if it made them happy or inspired them to look at the world with a fresh perspective.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do?
Just "LOOK" :)

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?)
 The videos were shot in HD with a flipcam. Since about half of the footage were picked spontaneously around the city and we wanted as much footage as possible to choose from, the camera had to be pretty mobile. The audio was actually a song that was made by Can Nguyen, who makes awesome electronic music and kindly let us use his track in our video. The creatures in the video were created in Adobe Illustrator and then placed into the footage with Adobe After Effects in 3D space, after I did some 3D camera tracking of the footage. It was a bit laborious, but the outcome was pretty neat. We shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to gain publicity. Thanks to the support of my friends, although "LOOK" was put up on the website many weeks later than the other videos, we still managed to generate a good amount of votes.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? I learned a lot through the Aspire project, and I will definitely keep in touch with all the amazing people I have met and worked with. My next steps are college and then into the real world, hopefully I will be able to work in a media-related field because I really enjoy the type of work and being with other amazing people who share my interest.

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Free download for E-Learning Queen readers: E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers

Interview with Dantorie Reeves, Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award Finalist

Welcome to an interview with an Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award finalist, Dantorie Reeves, age 16, from Mt. Pleasant High School, San Jose, California. Adobe Youth Voices aims to empower youth in underserved communities around the globe with real-world experiences and 21st century tools to communicate their ideas, exhibit their potential, and take action in their communities. You can vote until June 8. 

1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? My name is Dantorie Reeves and I have two projects up for awards. One of the projects is a documentary called Martha's Soup Kitchen and the other one is an animation called The Ball Game. 

Dantorie Reeves, Aspire Award project

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? Well, [for Martha’s Soup Kitchen] my project was basically a couple of my classmates and I volunteering at a soup kitchen by serving drinks ,cleaning up, and also getting to know some of the clients. The purpose of my film was to open my community's eyes so that they can see that it doesn't take much to give back or help out our community or people that are less fortunate then us.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people will learn that anybody can help other people. You don't have to be rich or even an adult because I'm not rich and I'm only a sixteen year old high school student. My primary goal is to get lots more people involved in the community and help get the hungry feed.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do? I hope that people would ultimately just stop avoiding the homeless and hungry people and start trying to help them instead because even the littlest thing might help.

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?) On this film we used Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects to make the words in the background. After we finished the film I put it on Facebook, twitter, the school website. It is also on YouTube and our podcast on channel 28.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? This experience was really great so I am going to take this and hopefully make even better films. I loved seeing something that I made in a theater shown on a big screen [at the year-end event] and I really enjoyed watching films made by other students.

Free Resources for Community-Building / Youth Activities / Teacher Materials
Are you interested in activities that you can implement in your own community or school? Check out Good Deeds Society activities! They are available free and can be downloaded and shared.

E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers -- 400-page e-book version totally free.
Printed library / personal copy version also available.

Kindle version here.

The Adventures of Tinguely Querer -- NEW reviews

Interview with Aashita Jadhav, School in Mobile, Innovators in E-Learning Series

Mobile learning via smartphone has been a possibility for learners since the earliest smartphones (T-Mobile Sidekick was an early example), but the the recent explosion in apps, access, and the essential ubiquity of mobile devices, there is a growing demand for instructional content that meshes with the learner's lifestyle and learning habits. In a smartphone world, developers can no longer simply try to make their content mobile-friendly (early example: smartphone science class). Developers have to think of the mobile environment first, and then make it also accessible via laptop. The best schools now must incorporate new strategies for delivering m-learning. One innovator in mobile learning is Aashita Jadhav, whose SchoolinMobile.org has developed a platform to enable expanded access to instructional content that is both engaging and effective. 

What is your name and relation to elearning / mlearning?

My name is Aashita Jadhav, the founder of the SchoolinMobile.org 

What is School in Mobile? 

School in Mobile ( SchoolinMobile.org) is a FREE educational platform (accessible by web and as an FREE Android App)

OUR MISSION - Every Student in the world to have access to learning material, the green way.

School in Mobile provides the following benefits:

•                Fast - Students can learn a chapter in less than 30 minutes including test.

•                Useful - Helps students pass the STAR test and thus helps improve the school rating.

•                Fun - Students get cool badges for getting good score from the quiz.

•                Green - As the content is in digital format , it helps the environment.

What needs does School in Mobile address?

I consider that we are fortunate to be at the time of  three big revolutionary shifts - - mobile, social and cloud. Every industry is trying to make the best use of these advancements. School in Mobile is helping the Education sector with this shift to make learning an engaging process.

Students have been caring heavy textbooks around for decades. Today technological advancement make it possible to change this.

School in Mobile provide ease of access , speed of completing a chapter and finally helps them pass the grade tests.

What kinds of devices does School in Mobile work on?

School in Mobile is practically available on all devices.

•                A FREE Android app is already present on Google marketplace.

•                For all other devices ( including Apple devices) , it can be accessed through the web link

•                We just launched FREE Chrome Web Store app

What are the underlying learning strategies and philosophies in School in Mobile?

School in Mobile is not just provider of content in form of books or videos.

It is an end-to-end platform for student to learn as well as test their knowledge.

Proven research shows that students learn by going through summary notes and retain the knowledge for longer duration.

School in Mobile provides

•                Ready to use summary notes in text as well as movie format. 

•                Once the students have studied a chapter at school. They can revise it on School in Mobile in less than 30 minutes including quiz test.

•                Engagement is increased by this quick and easy tool. Also the cool badges which students get from test makes it fun.

How can you overcome the problems of access to the cloud? What happens when students do not have wifi access to the cloud or wifi connectivity?

Currently School in Mobile is available on the cloud and accessible everywhere. We are working on the next phases to make it easy to download on the device making it available without wifi connectivity. This is crucial for developing countries.

What are the next steps for School in Mobile?

The  steps are really exciting for us.

We are working on enhancing  the platform by several ways like

•                Making  more grades, subjects and chapters available

•                Add capability to login using facebook and google accounts

•                Open the platform to allow teacher add content. We are partnering with more teachers . Any teacher can reach us at info@schoolinmobile.com

Also we are working to deploy this to other countries.

How can students and teachers try out School in Mobile?

You can download the Android App from Google marketplace.

OR 

Access the web version ( for all devices including Apple) from our website ( SchoolinMobile.org)

Interview with Paige Johnson, Project RED: Innovations in E-Learning Series

Welcome to an interview with Paige Johnson, Intel Corporation, on Project RED, a research-based method to bring technology into the new "smart" schools.

 

1.       What is your name and your relation to elearning?

My name is Paige Johnson and I am the education strategist for Intel Corporation. Intel gets directly involved in education programs, political advocacy and technology access efforts that enable today’s youth to develop the skills they need to be the innovators of tomorrow. Over the past decade alone, Intel and the Intel Foundation have invested more than $1 billion and Intel employees have donated close to 3 million volunteer hours toward improving education in more than 60 countries.

Intel has invested millions of dollars in education transformation efforts through our Intel Teach program, which offers professional development to over 10 million teachers around the world, to Intel’s support of the K-12 Blueprint, which helps with technology planning and deployment in schools.

2.       Please describe Project RED – What are its goals?

Project RED provides a research-based method to effectively integrate technology into the classroom. To analyze what’s working in technology-transformed schools and to show how technology can lead to improved student achievement and return on investment, The Greaves Group, The Hayes Connection and One-to-One Institute conducted extensive research of 1,000 schools across the U.S., which is the first and only national research study of this kind.

The second phase of Project RED utilizes that foundational research to provide a series of educational opportunities, including webinars and regional institutes, for district leaders and school administrators who are passionate about improving education through technology. With the knowledge gained from Project RED, districts can avoid mistakes that have led to past failed technology implementations, and instead, successfully uplift their instruction’s productivity through the research-based curricula.

The researchers identified 9 “Key Implementation Factors” that related to better student achievement. In very successful implementations, the following characteristics were evident:

1.       Technology was integrated daily into intervention classes

2.       Principals were trained to guide 2^nd order/transformational change

3.       The principal lead the transformation 

4.       Students were allowed to collaborate online

5.       Technology was integrated on a regular basis into all core subjects 

6.       Teachers and students used online formative assessments on a regular basis

7.       Students took virtual field trips (this may just be an indication that the teacher is using technology in novel or innovative ways)

8.       Students continuously used search engines to support their learning

9.       The closer to a 1:1 student to computer ratio, the better the student outcomes. Many cost savings cannot be achieved without each student having a dedicated computer for home and school

In regard to funding a robust technology implementation, the researchers found that one-to-one schools can actually become revenue positive if they achieve many of the efficiencies through the use of technology. One easily understood example is the potential cost savings of switching from printed textbooks to web-based digital content.

3.       What does Project RED involve?

The Project RED team, with the financial support of Intel, HP, SMART Technologies and Pearson, is creating an online community of practice, and will provide guidance and resources to help districts in their implementation efforts. Members of Project RED are given access to a free professional learning community where experts will share the methods and tools for effective technology implementation. Examples of tools are a comprehensive project planner, a one-to-one ROI calculator and a school readiness assessment. Members can access resources, participate in webinars, research, forums, summer institutes and more. During these events, members will gain the knowledge to effectively implement technology into their own districts.

4.        Who are the people responsible for it?

Project RED is the brainchild of:

·         Thomas Greaves, CEO, The Greaves Group, Co-Author, America’s Digital Schools

·         Jeanne Hayes, President, The Hayes Connection, Co-Author, America’s Digital Schools..

·         Michael Gielniak, Ph.D., Director of Programs and Development, One-to-One Institute.

Intel Corporation is the founding sponsor of Project RED. Additional sponsors include Hewlett-Packard, SMART Technologies and the Pearson Foundation.

5.       Who implements it?

We hope that every K-12 school in the country will use Project RED to guide their transformation of schools that use the latest and greatest tools to engage students, personalize learning and improve academic outcomes.

6.       Who are the beneficiaries?

Future generations of students, and the country as a whole, will benefit tremendously if the Project RED findings are implemented properly.

7.       How does Project RED relate to today's increasingly mobile world?

Every student having ubiquitous access to personal, portable technology connected to the Internet is essential to dramatically increase achievement and to maximize cost savings. Project RED is the blueprint to the proper implementation of that technology.

8.       How does Project RED overcome/counter the creeping mobile digital divide?

The Project RED team believes that every student in the U.S. should have continuous access to personal, portable technology connected to the Internet. Many districts use a lack of funding as justification for not implementing one-to-one technology. Project RED research shows how schools can make revenue positive decisions by giving every student a laptop combined with good connectivity.