Top Language learning Apps on the iPhone & iPad

learning a new language can be tough at the best of times but there are a few language translation apps on the market that will make your life a little easier for under $10.  Here are the the top 3 we found.

The Oxford Translator Travel Pro offers Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish. and has a heap of simple conversational phrases to begin with and lets you expand from there.  Whilst there are 5 languages it can grate after while due to the way it only  speaks single words sounding very broken.

It will set you back ten bucks per language and has all the necessary features to get you around a foreign country and the curriculum software to teach you plenty before you arrive if need be.

 Oxford Translator on iTunes Store

The Cool Gorilla Talking Phrase book is a cheaper application at One Dollar than its Oxford equivalent but still has plenty of features.  It includes Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. and is very easy to navigate thatnks to its friendly user interface.  The translators are animated and well recorded and have a ton of suggested phrases for any occasion.

Coolgorilla and iTunes Store

If you want a freebie then World Nomads is probably your best learning opportunity.  It has tons of languages including Arabic, Cambodian, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Mandarin, Nepali, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

It doesnt have the brillaint organisation and interface of the other two discussed but is clearly the best value for money if you are just a passing tourist who does not want to come across as an alien from another planet.

World Nomads and iTunes Store

We would love to hear of any great language learning apps / translation tools that you come across.

BBC Magic Key - Great Literacy site for Junior School Students

Just a quick one today.  This is a great site for junior school students to learn about full stops, sentence, structure, capitals, seeing spelling patterns and identifying characteristics of certain words.  Our junior school regularly use this site in their literacy sessions and I would highly recommend it to others.  Check it out here.

Digital Literacies Task - Unpacking a Seed

Thanks to Mark Muldoon and Cindy Armstrong for their assistance in putting this together this is a great 90 minute lesson about unpacking a seed.  Unpacking a seed essentially means using an image or an object to inspire your students to delve really deep into the concepts related to that as a group and produce a great piece of writing based on the ideas which come from that.  You can  directly download the full PowerPoint lesson plan here or simply use the slideshare below.  Enjoy

Digital Literacies unpacking a seed

View more presentations from Kevin Cummins.

Microsoft Teacher Tools - Great Resources for Windows Users

Microsoft doesn't really push the promotion of its products in the classroom considering they are the single biggest supplier of educational software in the world if you take into account their Office Suite, Operating System and Student Software so I thought it was worth taking a look at what they had on offer for teachers to support education on Windows.

Well the good news is that for the first time in a long time I found some resources from Microsoft that teachers may actually get some use out of.  Teacher Tools off lesson plans, tutorials, How-to videos and community forums.  It is not bogged down with promotional content and has a search filter to help you find what you are after.

Obviously this is not going to use to people who use a Mac but for the the other 95 percent of us I think this might be worth a look ( Just for the record before I get abusive emails I use both).  Check it out here.