How to be a successful education app developer

When this blog was brand new (nearly two years ago), I stumbled across a post by a French indie app developer called Pierre Abel who was having great success by focussing on educational iPad apps for young learners. As someone who had spent quite a lot of time and effort trying to develop successful ELT apps while working in-house at an ELT publisher, I was interested in how an independent developer had approached it, and whether I could find any useful lessons that ELT app publishers could apply. I thought it would be interesting to see how he’s done since then and whether the same lessons still apply.

Will your app win the next YUDU award?

There’s a steady stream of great new apps every week, so how do you decide whether an app is worth the space it takes up on a device? More importantly, how do students and teachers decide which apps should stay and which apps should go? Is there any absolute standard we can employ? Laura Summers reflects on the winners of the YUDU Design & Technology Awards

Social Enterprise in ELT – The E3 Project

The primary aim of the E3 Project is to engage those with the lowest levels of spoken English, particularly women over the age of 30, who are isolated within diaspora communities but committed to living in the UK. This is based around three main areas; digital inclusion, positive integration and active citizenship.

Categories ELT

Learning on Rails

It’s possible that we’ll discover that providing the student with highly relevant, engaging content will be more effective than crafting learning experiences on rails (à la our current, item-response-theory-influenced “adaptive learning”).

Equal rights for nNESTs?

In this guest post Marek Kiczkowiak from the blog TEFL Reflections and the TEFL Equity Advocates campaign explores the issue of prejudice against non-native English speaker teachers and issues a plea for a more egalitarian approach to hiring teachers, placing more emphasis on skills and qualifications than on mother tongue.

Piracy in ELT

What publishers and writers can do about piracy right now … and in the future

If you haven’t already read Nick Robinson’s excellent post on ELTjam about book piracy and the lively conversation it’s started, go check it out. To sum it up, just about every ELT textbook that’s ever been published (including mine) have been ripped off by pirates and put on innumerable free PDF download sites all over the Internet. The conversation has branched off in many directions: Is piracy really that bad? Is copyright law generally a moral thing? Are authors totally screwed? And so on. One thing I think hasn’t been addressed fully is what we can do to limit piracy or make it work for us. Expanding on suggestions I’ve made in comments on the original post, why can’t some of these things be done?

Interview with a publisher Pt. 1/3

In all of the recent debate on this site about the future of ELT, the voice of the ELT publisher has often been noticeably absent . With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to get the views of a board-level ELT publisher to get their reaction to the conversations taking place about and around them. In this first instalment John Tuttle, until recently the Deputy Managing Director of ELT at Cambridge University Press, tells us about the evolution of the ELT publishing industry and some of the common misconceptions surrounding its key players.

Six Cool Tropes in ELT EdTech

Note: it has been more than three years that I stopped blogging at my site Six Things. But I was sitting in a conference the other day and I promised to myself: if I hear that trope or see that image one more time I’m gonna have to blog about it. Well, guess what? It … Read more

The Future of ELT

It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more

Self-publishing in ELT (Part 1)

My recent post on whether ELT brands had become more important than ELT authors generated lots of interesting discussion in the comments, and a few things in particular jumped out: Jason R Levine: … in the age of education 2.0-3.0, have the ELT teachers, content creators, and curators become more important? Eric Roth: Given the … Read more