ELT Archives - Page 18 of 18

The Grading Game: birth of the “first person tutor”

January 30, 2020April 17, 2013 by Tim Gifford

The Grading Game is an addictive action word game centered around the pursuit and eradication of grammar and spelling errors. The game’s levels take the form of students’ papers, with a fresh set of errors generated for each play. Meanwhile, the papers themselves cover the most interesting and unusual topics, from the history of ramen to … Read more

10 tips to make $700k from education iPad apps

January 30, 2020April 14, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Here’s a happy tale of how Pierre, an independent French developer made nearly $700k in two years from his portfolio of education iPad apps. What was the secret to his success? From reading his story, we’ve identified the 10 key things that made the difference.

Houghton Mifflin buys Tribal Nova

January 30, 2020April 12, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Tribal Nova, based in Montreal, create apps and online learning – probably best known for their iLearnWith apps for primary age children. Houghton Mifflin are fully integrating Tribal Nova into their own business as a short-cut to developing digital-first product development expertise, as well as adding a successful product range to their portfolio.

Online language learning start-up Busuu reaches 30m users

January 30, 2020April 5, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

In the week that Livemocha was swallowed up, Busuu has announced that it has now reached 30m users, with a growth rate of 40,000 a day. It’s not clear how of those are active users, though. Their main growth is coming from countries like Brazil, Turkey and Russia – the same group of countries that most ELT publishers see as the source of their own growth.

Chinese primary schools introducing tablets

February 3, 2020April 5, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Beijing local government has invested $500k to trial the introduction of tablets in primary schools, with one device per child. The aim is to replace books with what they are describing as an ‘e-bag’. The first schools have started trailing this Spring. In one school where the tablets are being used for Maths, Chinese and … Read more

Google Course Builder

January 30, 2020April 5, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Google have launched Course Builder, an open source tool for creating online courses. Course Builder uses the platform Google put together in order to deliver their own course Power Searching With Google – a course which attracted over 150,000 subscribers. It’s pretty rough around the edges, and requires some basic programming skill in order to … Read more

Rosetta Stone going online-only

January 30, 2020April 5, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Well, that was quick. Following hot on the heels of the news about their acquisition of Livemocha, Rosetta Stone has just announced that it’s closing all of its remaining kiosks in the US, shedding jobs, and moving to focus purely on online courses and digital downloads. The future is purely digital for them now, as … Read more

Tablets to outsell laptops in 2013

February 3, 2020April 4, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

A report from IDC shows that sales of ‘smart connected devices’ (PCs, smartphones and tablets) broke through the 1bn barrier in 2012, with Apple and Samsung each taking about 20% of the market. Tablets represented 128m of those devices. This is expected to rise to 190m in 2013, while PC sales are flatlining. The big … Read more

Rosetta Stone buys Livemocha

January 30, 2020April 3, 2013 by Laurie Harrison

Rosetta Stone has bought Livemocha for $8.5m dollars.

Livemocha has been making waves in the last couple of years with its language learning platform for crowd-sourced and publisher content. Initially providing free online courses to individual students, it’s recently been moving into b2b and the provision of ‘professional’ content sourced through licencing deals with publishers. As such, it represented an intriguing new player in the language learning market, and a rising competitor to established players.

We’ll see what Rosetta Stone does with its new toy.