The Open Education Alliance: A Brave New World

During TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Monday Udacity‘s CEO, Sebastian Thrun, announced the launch of the Open Education Alliance (OEA). The alliance represents the efforts of Google, AT&T and a range of educational organizations (Khan Academy, cloudera, etc.) who are combining forces with a view of developing and providing learning tools to help … Read more

Hugh’s Reviews: Lingro

hughsreviews

Hello there –

Welcome to Hugh’s Reviews. This is the first in a series of posts that aim to explore and consider a range of different tech tools and sites aimed at ELT practitioners and at EFL students. As the number of such things seems to increase exponentially week on week, it becomes ever harder to simply keep abreast of what’s out there, let alone to find sufficient time to digest them and critically appraise them. I shall be exploring things I’ve seen touted and praised – and seeing if they merit the hype.

To begin, I’m going to talk about a site I first encountered courtesy of Russell Stannard called Lingro. It modestly proclaims itself as “the coolest dictionary known to hombre“! And Russell himself was almost as enthusiastic, calling “this fabulous tool” “the best website” he found in 2011.

Lingro

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2013: The rise of the smartwatch?

A new report from ABI Research predicts that over a million smartwatches will be sold in 2013. Forget (for now) that apart from the Kickstarter phenomenon, Pebble, there aren’t really any available yet. What would really change the landscape would be if Apple’s rumoured iWatch does actually make an appearance. You never know, but it … Read more