Since 2005 I’ve been part of a community of educationalists from around the world who are recognised for “doing amazing things with Apple technology”. I first became an Apple Distinguished Educator while I was working on the Partners in Excellence languages and technology project where we were using film-making, animation, music production and podcasting to motivate language learners in three education authorities in the west of Scotland. Since then I’ve worked with colleagues from all over the world on various events, conferences and training sessions, and of course I continue to use Apple technology every day producing content for Radio Lingua language courses and in my educational workshops with Radio Lingua Schools.

The closing date for applications to become an ADE in the “Class of 2011″ is fast approaching. If you’re an educator who uses Apple technologies in an innovative way, consider applying to become an ADE. The application process involves completing a form and then creating a two-minute video about your story in which you need to show Apple how you’re “integrating Apple technology into your learning environment in meaningful ways”. According to the official application documents, the profile of an ADE is:

• a “digital” educator actively engaged in a modern learning environment
• an inspired user of core Apple technologies personally and professionally
• uses and integrates a full range of mobile devices for teaching, learning and creative expression
• an early adopter of promising emerging technologies, pedagogical models and digital content
• actively shares best practices by authoring authentic content, delivering professional presentations, or conducting and publishing research
• a full-time professional employee in a public or private school, local education authority, college, university or non-profit agency/organisation.

The deadline for applications is February 15th at 11:59pm GMT, so you still have a couple of weeks to complete your application if you’re interested. Find out more about ADEs here and start your application process by clicking the link below!

ADE Class of 2011 Application

Radio Lingua

Four years ago, in an attempt to keep my language teaching roots alive while focusing on other things working with the East Ayrshire education team, I decided to start teaching Spanish via a weekly podcast. Since then Coffee Break Spanish has become one of the most popular education podcasts in the world and this year we reached our 33rd language learning series and our 24th language. We now provide language lessons for languages from Catalan to Zulu. Hopefully early next year we’ll add Arabic, Afrikaans or maybe even Alsacien, and then we’ll really be able to offer language-learning from A to Z!

I’m delighted with how things have gone Radio Lingua-wise this year: we’ve now had over 82 million downloads – averaging around 1.7 million per month now; we have had three podcasts in the Best of 2010 iTunes Rewind list; and we’ve just found out that Coffee Break French, Coffee Break Spanish and Show Time Spanish were #3, #4 and #5 in the UK Professional Podcast category of the European Podcast Awards. We’ve also just found out that we currently have the #1 or #2 educational podcast in iTunes not only in both the UK and USA, but also in Australia, Canada, Egypt, Finland, Jamaica, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa and Sweden! I love a bit of end-of-year stats!

What constantly blows me away about the whole Radio Lingua adventure is the huge amount of support we get from our faithful listeners around the world and the comments they post on our Facebook pages (CBF | CBS | Radio Lingua), on Twitter and in iTunes reviews for our shows. This support is hugely appreciated and we hope that learners around the world continue to enjoy our shows.

We are still a very small company with only 3-4 key staff, but I have a fantastic team of teachers and native speakers around the world with whom I have collaborated over the course of this past year to produce our new shows, and this remote team is growing all the time. I’d like to say thank you, merci, gracias, tack, ngiyabonga, дякую and 谢谢 to all of my colleagues with whom I’ve worked this year, and I look forward to further collaboration in 2011!

It’s not just the end of 2010, but also of the first decade of the 21st century and what amazes me is that my business could not have existed ten years ago. Even six or seven years ago it would have been difficult to create a company based on the publication of regular language lessons reaching a world-wide audience through mobile devices which learners can carry with them wherever they go. Who knows how language learning will be happening in 2020! In recent weeks I’ve heard about the launch of Word Lens, a new iPhone app which translates signs and information instantly simply by directing the camera towards the image, as shown in the screen grab below.

Is this the future? Or will we have this function built into contact lenses? Of course, the translation is dodgy, and can only be as good as automatic translation can be, but that’s improving all the time. I don’t think it replaces the traditional skill of language learning, and to have successful multilingual business and personal relationships, holding an iPhone up between you and your interlocutors would perhaps be a bit inconvenient! Who knows what the next decade will bring, but I hope to be involved in it and I hope that our style of language-learning through whatever medium the future brings will continue to help people around the world learn languages!

Radio Lingua Schools / Consultancy work

This year has been a big year too for Radio Lingua Schools – we launched our schools site last year and it has been developing nicely over the course of the year. It’s difficult to balance the workload between the consumer side of the company and working in schools, but it’s very often the schools workshops which I particularly enjoy.

In 2010 I’ve been in Strasbourg twice running Euroscola activities along with the inimitable Gerry Toner. In 2011 it seems I’ll be taking a greater role in the organisation of the Euroscola activities, so I look forward to that. It’s always a pleasure working with enthusiastic young people and working with them in intense language immersion activities in one of my favourite towns in France.

In the past year my work as an Apple Distinguished Educator and Apple Education Mentor has increased too. It’s been a pleasure joining a team of talented and committed individuals from all over the UK, Europe and further afield. I’ve had some fantastic opportunities to travel to amazing places, but more of that below.

Travel

Taking my liking for end-of-year stats to the extreme, I’ve been calculating my travel this year. I’ve apparently travelled over 34,000 miles in Europe and Africa. Before any comments about “too much time on my hands, these distances are calculated automatically by Tripit.com which I use for organising my travel plans! My work has taken me to Copenhagen, Dublin, Dundalk, Johannesburg, Kiev, Moscow, Nantes, Nice, Palma de Mallorca, Paris, Pornic, Prague, Pretoria, San Remo, Strasbourg and Svendborg as well as various trips in the UK to London, Edinburgh and Manchester. The links above are to my photos of each trip on Flickr. While I love travelling and seeing new places, I don’t like being away from home and it certainly makes keeping up with the ongoing Radio Lingua work that bit more difficult. It looks like 2011 is going to be quite busy for travelling too, so I’m looking forward to discovering new places and will hopefully get the chance to take lots of photos too. In addition to all the work travel this year, we also had a lovely family holiday this summer in France and Belgium, and we have some interesting plans for 2011 too

Music

This blog has been the home of my 365songs project and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting back into my piano playing again this year. I’ve also been playing a bit more of my accordion, and still stand by my challenge of being able to play Monti’s Czárdás by my 40th birthday! I’ve got 16 months to get that one sorted out!

Languages

I always seem to have a number of languages on the go in my personal language learning, and these are often linked to what we’re doing with Radio Lingua. This year I’ve dabbled in Zulu, tried my hand at Russian and Ukrainian before my trips in March, had an ongoing on-off relationship with Chinese, and continued my love of Scandinavian languages with various attempts at improving my Norwegian, converting it all to Danish for my trip to Svendborg in May, then trying to squeeze it into Swedish as we produced One Minute Swedish later in the year. I think 2011 will bring further interest in Scandinavian languages and Chinese, and I may have to rapidly improve my German before a trip to Switzerland in March where I may have to do a workshop in German! I’m not going to set myself any challenges this year, but I would definitely like to get more into Chinese – I just haven’t found the right course yet, so perhaps we need to make one! I’d also like to read some of my favourite Scandinavian crime novels in their original, so perhaps that’s a challenge I should try to complete this year: Mankell in Swedish? Nesbø in Norwegian? Or even Indriðason in Icelandic?!

Best wishes for 2011

I’m not sure who – if anyone – reads this kind of year’s review. I’m sure everyone is far too busy to spend time reading my thoughts, but they’re really just for me anyway – some thoughts on my plans for 2011, and perhaps I’ll look back at this next year or in ten years’ time. Anyway, if anyone is reading this, very best wishes for 2011: may it be a year of happiness, good health and success for you and all those who are dear to you.

And of course as soon as we got home and my 5 year-old watched the animation produced by his big brother he wanted to do his own, so with a little help from daddy, here’s his own Octopus animation!

It appears to allow you to create learning content including audio, video and interaction with objects. If you’re a student reading a ‘textbook’ created through Inkling you can share the notes you’ve made on your textbook with others learning the same content at that time – a social network for learning. It also appears to allow you to sync your learning content across all your devices. Teachers can see who has completed the reading assignment and the aspects of the lessons which students are finding difficult.

Arguably much of this could be found within an average VLE, but the difference is that Inkling makes this content entirely mobile and accessible on iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad. Looks very interesting, and understandably early days, but I want to know more! Follow @inkling on Twitter or find out more on their site.

The long-awaited day has arrived and in about nine hours’ time Steve Jobs will take to the stage in the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and announce Apple’s “latest creation”. Speculation has been peaking over the past few days and weeks as to what form this creation will take, and I think that there are huge possibilities for this device, particularly in the world of education, both in its traditional in-school sense, and in a wider lifelong learning sense. However, I think that today’s event may well be more about the creation and delivery of content, and this is where the real news will be.

The rumours suggest that this device is likely to be some kind of keyboard-less tablet device, bridging the gap between the iPhone / iPod Touch and the MacBook. In my Mobile Devices presentation at BETT this year I looked at using the free content currently available through iTunes podcasts, iTunes U and on the app store on iPod Touches in the classroom. There are some amazing opportunities for engaging learners, young and old, using existing content, whether it’s fantastic language-learning podcasts ( ), learning about the history of Jazz from McGill University’s iTunes U content, or Making a Martian with your primary school learners, then thinking about how to describe it in English or indeed in any other language! Now, this same content on a larger device makes things even more interesting.

For example, I’ve just finished the latest enhanced podcast for Coffee Break French (episode 73, available later this morning) and when creating this content we have to think about the screen resolution, using really large fonts in Keynote when preparing the slides to accompany the audio. We also produce pdf lesson guides for learners to print out or to view on screen either while they listen or as an additional support before or after they listen to the lesson. The pdfs aren’t really practical to use on an iPod Touch or iPhone because of the screen size, but with a 10″ screen things could change somewhat!

It has been suggested more than once that the new device will be a “Kindle-killer”, that it will introduce a new class of ebook reader, and that it will be possible to read newspapers and magazines on the device much more intuitively – and enjoyably – than in the past. I think the key to all of this will be how this content is delivered to the device, and I would expect that it will involve podcasting. I’ve always thought that podcasting pdf documents has been one of the most underused possibilities of podcasting. It’s as easy to podcast a pdf document as it is to include audio and video in a podcast feed, and iTunes is quite capable of organising pdfs too (see Adam Burt’s work on Photocopier Podcasting for a brilliant way to distribute information in an institution). It is quite possible to include video and audio in a pdf document, but as far as I know the only way of doing this is with Acrobat, and I’ve just double-checked that you can’t export a pdf from Pages with an embedded video. So are we perhaps going to see a new version of iWork today which will allow us to create pdfs with embedded videos in Pages? Or perhaps Apple will come up with some proprietary format which combines text, images, audio, video (I’m not going to mention Flash…) and we’ll be able to create and consume the content on our new devices. I hope they don’t go this route – it’s always going to be more difficult to make a new format become standard, and makes things more difficult for content producers…

According to Wired this morning, it’s perhaps more likely to be HTML5-based, similar to the iTunes Extras content which was recently released. iTunes is already capable of presenting content which combines text, images, audio and video. So will iWeb get the much-needed makeover which would allow us to create fantastic HTML5-based content destined for this iTunes browser (and obviously also for other devices, not least standard web browsers)? Or will there be some new app added to iLife or iWork? It’ll have to be easy to use, and the creation tool I think is key. We don’t want to go back to a world where only the big publishers are capable of producing and distributing content!

Will we see a new element in the iTunes Store today? One where books, magazines and online content can be purchased? Where in-content purchasing will allow users to buy more content? Where consumers can subscribe to magazines and have them delivered automatically to the device as soon as they are ready? [Sounds very familiar...] And will there be a new App-Store-like element which allows independent content producers to deliver and sell their content? Even with a 70/30 revenue model like the App store, this presents a massive opportunity for companies like ours for a new revenue stream.

It seems that Apple has already been working with some of the major content producers: McGraw-Hill’s CEO Terry McGraw apparently let slip last night that they’ve been working with Apple for quite a while. I have to be honest and say that I’m not quite sure if it was actually a slip – perhaps it was the work of the Apple PR machine helping to push the fever further! Anyway, McGraw-Hill seem to have 95% of all their materials ready in a format which would be usable on a new device.

When iTunes U first appeared, I got the impression that some of the content was very much “videos of lectures”: you were transported into the lecture theatre with the professor standing at the front, delivering the same lecture he/she had delivered for 20 years to groups of students. While this is fine if you’re the student who missed the 9am lecture because you were out the night before, it’s not really maximising the potential of the platform. Now there’s much more content on iTunes U which is ‘made for the platform’, providing short-form video reviews of lessons, concentrating on the important points of learning. The institutions have seen the potential of the medium. I doubt that McGraw-Hill have recreated 95% of their content in a new format which combines text with images and multimedia, and I think that the real power of this device in the world of learning will come when content-creators see the potential of the device and the formats it can use. And when I say “content-creators” I’m not just talking about the big publishers or even independent content creators like Radio Lingua: I’m talking about the learners themselves. With an Apple iSlate (or iPad or Canvas or whatever it’s called!) in the classroom, a new creation tool which may combine handwriting, text entry, photos, artwork, audio recordings, music and video recordings together and packages them in a format viewable on other iSlates, iPod Touches and indeed on other devices, the possibilities are endless.

Like many geeks and non-geeks around the world, I’ll be following the event tonight (6pm UK time) on the various feeds. I hope Twitter survives what undoubtedly will be a massive load on its servers as it’s always one of the best ways to get and share in the information which appears.  I think while the tablet device will get the headlines tomorrow, the real story today is going to be about content, and hopefully about the creation of that content. Yes, it’ll be a fantastic experience consuming that content on a beautiful 10″ glass screen, but I think if Apple does for text-based content what they’ve already done for music, tv shows, films, and apps, this is the game-changer. And we’ll have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days, weeks and months! Bring it on, Steve!

This past week I've had the privilege of spending six days in Strasbourg in the company of a fantastic group of young people from schools in East Dunbartonshire. The students were taking part in a Euroscola activity, a day of debate and discussion organised by the European Parliament. Throughout the day the students were mixing with their counterparts from across the EU, discussing the future of Europe in a mixture of French and English.

Espero que vagi a tenir un poc de temps per a aprendre més català abans de viatjar a Barcelona. Encara estic llegint el llibre de Carme Riera que es diu L’Estiu de l’Anglès i estic molt content perquè ho entenc gairebé perfectament. També estic notant frases interessants i útils que podré utilitzar després.

Per ara això és tot. Tornaré a escriure més aquesta setmana.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: