'The Dead'

No 18 in a series of occasional reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching. 

The UCD Humanities Institute has recently released an iPad app of James Joyce's famous short story (the last in Dubliners), 'The Dead', called 'An exploration of Joyce's short story through text, sound and images.' It's free, and well worth downloading. Best of all is a full audio reading (1 hour, 35 minutes) by the great Barry McGovern, and there are also commentaries on elements of the story, a walking tour with McGovern, a slideshow of Joyce's Dublin and, of course, the full text of the story itself.

Download it from iTunes here (there are some comments on the pause button not working - it does for us).

iPad Apps for English

The iPad is making plenty of waves in education, and certainly for teachers, for whom its portability and handiness for display is just right. So here are some recommended apps for English teachers (and pupils). And plenty will suit teachers of other subjects too, of course. Many are free, few cost much.

Join in the comments section if you'd like to recommend others...





 
Notes:

• Notability: top class app for taking notes (including audio) and using for class demonstration and annotation of texts.
• Simplenote: excellent simple note app which syncs with apps for other operating systems (the Mac app has just been released - needs Mountain Lion). Searchable, with tags.
• Notesy: another simple and elegant note-taking app (backup through Dropbox).
• Paper: beautiful drawing app for displaying your own notes to class (in-app purchases for more tools).
• WorkFlowy : excellent versatile outlining tool, with perfect syncing on other devices - our review here.

Admin:

• SugarSync: similar to Dropbox, but in some areas even better - bring all your notes and English documents to class with you.
• Numbers: there are lots of grading and specialist teaching apps out there, but this standard Apple spreadsheet app does the job well. So ditch the paper markbook and make sure you backup via iCloud.
• Quickoffice: now free from Google, with Google Drive integration. Allows you to work easily on Microsoft Office files 
• Attendance: well designed and easy to use app for taking attendance records - our quick review here.
• Edmodo: Facebook-like app for connecting with classes, accepting essay submissions, storing class documents and more, all within a safe private environment. And you can connect with other teachers around the world too.
• Good Reader: possibly the best app for reading and annotating PDFs. Well worth the modest cost.
• Phoster: creates attractive posters for noticeboards easily.

Classroom:

• ShowMe: excellent demonstration app - check out our own video/audio annotations of texts such as The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Hamlet and Macbeth here.
• MarkUp: from the people behind ShowMe comes this simple and very handy marking app. Take in pupils' work via email, mark it, send it back.
• Haiku Deck: classy and dramatic presentations.
• TED: there's a wealth of material on TED for classroom discussion, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'The Danger of a Single Story'.
• Story Cubes: great app for prompting ideas about story-telling and narrative structure. See our review here.
  

The Usual Suspects
Everyone recommends these, and everyone's right

• Dropbox : still the best way to save and share your files across all devices. Our own Department 'filing cabinet' now exists in Dropbox, with a shared folder of administrative documents and teaching materials.
• Google Drive : the best medium for collaboration between pupils and between staff. And more besides.
• Evernote : some swear by it, some don't really get going. At its best, a great place to store notes, pictures, projects and more.
• Skype : connections with educators and classes all over the world - see Skype Education. 
• Twitter: essential Personal Learning Network, with resources and support from all over the world. See #engchat for English teaching matters.  We recommend Tweetbot for using Twitter.

Reading

• Instapaper: English teachers and pupils are (should be) 'text maniacs'. Instapaper is a terrific service that saves long articles from the web, strips out the 'gunge' and allows you to sit back and read them on your iPad at the end of the day. Pocket does the same job.
• Kindle: the original and the best. Plenty of annotation and note-taking opportunities, and you don't need a Kindle for reading.
• Zite: excellently designed aggregator for browsing items of interest.

Literature

• The Waste Land: more 'expensive' than most apps, but worth it - a stunning teaching and learning resource on Eliot's complex poem.
• The Sonnets: all Shakespeare's sonnets beautifully presented in text, audio and video, with plenty of notes. See our review here.
• Cambridge Shakespeare: excellent resource for Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Twelfth Night.

(see a related and sometimes overlapping series on iOS apps here).

Workflowy

No 17 in a series of occasional reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching. 


This is one of the very best apps we've come across (and, as with several others in this series, it'll be just as good for teachers and students of other subjects).  At first sight it seems to be a straightforward outlining tool, and indeed that's one of its virtues, but the more you use it the more useful and flexible you realise it is. Using its zoom, indenting (and 'outdenting') and note tools expands the basic minimal opening page as much as you want.  Each page becomes a separate document, and very handily you can share each one separately. There are plenty of handy keyboard short-cuts and strong search functions, and you can export all your lists easily. The Help section has plenty of good short videos to explain the different functions.

One of the most impressive features of Workflowy is its virtually instantaneous syncing across devices, and this makes it not merely an iOS app. English teachers will probably use it most on their laptops, and then check up on the data via the (free) iPad or iPhone apps.
 
Workflowy is a very good app to recommend to students for note-taking and organising. For teachers, here are a few ideas:-

• course planning, with individual units and lessons
• brainstorming about future teaching
• class lists 
• resource lists
• sharing any of the above with colleagues and pupils
• using collaboration within the Department to design courses, exams and more

The basic service is free, and you can 'earn' more use, but there's quite a big jump to the paid version, which comes in at $49 annually, and Workflowy might well earn more money if they reduced this charge, since this a tool users are likely to become addicted to.

Markup

No 16 in a series of occasional reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.
 
Markup has just been released by the team who created one of our favourite tools, Showme. 

Designed for the iPad, it is a neat 'paperless grading app' which is simplicity itself - you open a document from your iPad (using the familiar 'open in'), or by emailing it to a special address, use the writing tools to mark the piece, and then export it as a PDF by email back to the pupil. The developers have plenty of interesting plans ahead for the app, and it's available at a modest cost from the iTunes store.

This is truly handy for the increasing number of essays, projects and assignments coming to English teachers in electronic form.

New Sonnets App

No 15 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.


A recent outstanding app is The Sonnets, from some of the team who created another outstanding resource for students and teachers, The Waste Land.

Here, all 154 poems are beautifully-presented, and all performed by a variety of academics and actors. You can follow these performances as video, audio, or simultaneously with the text (each line being highlighted in turn). 'Perspectives' gives both video and text of comments by Don Paterson, James Shapiro, Katherine Duncan-Jones and others on topics such as 'The order of the Sonnets' and 'Shakespeare's Sexuality'. There's also a Facsimile of the 1609 Quarto, the full Arden introduction, and notes from Arden and Don Paterson on every poem (with room for your own notes).

This is a superb production, and immediately becomes the best single resource on the poems for teachers, well worth the cost of €10.99. Next up? Paradise Lost? Great Expectations? The Great Gatsby?


[Above, Sonnet 90 read by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett].

Attendance app

No 14 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

This one is of course useful for all subjects. A basic common need for teaching is taking a roll in class. Attendance is an impressive and reliable one, which works fully on the iPad as well as iPhone. You can import data via CSV, but it really doesn't take very long to enter your classes manually. Once they are set up, it's very easy to take a roll (defaulting everyone as present), and there's good back-up via Dropbox, as well as plenty other functions which some teachers won't need. Recommended.

Image to Text

No 13 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

 

An impressive free app that could be very useful for both pupils and teachers is Image to Text (click here for iTunes download) from Ricoh Innovations. It's an efficient and accurate OCR scanner using your phone. Take a picture of a page of text, email it off and very quickly it's returned as an email with the text scanned and ready for use. Definitely recommended.

The Poetry Now app

No 12 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

We start our final term of the academic year today, and it's going to be a very busy one for us, and for this blog, with a lot crammed into a shorter summer stretch than is normal.

First up is a quick review of an app that may help all those Leaving Cert candidates preparing for the exams in just over a month's time. One of the best poetry textbooks around is Niall McMonagle's Poetry Now, and for the first time this is available as an iPhone app, made by RavenSense. It is also available as an iPad app, and is likely to be more effective in this format, but this review only deals with the iPhone version.

It seems that pretty well the whole text is available on the app. It appears in landscape view, and each poet's poems are available, with a glossary, commentary, biography, notes and exam questions. You can also access the poems in their own list. It will be handy for candidates to carry around the poems on their devices. The only downside is that the text renders exactly as on the paper page, and is not enabled for mobile view (as, for instance, this blog is). However, it is good to see a publisher starting to use this powerful technology, and we look forward to further developments.

Rory's Story Cubes for English class

This review of Rory's Story Cubes covers two products: the physical box, and the iPhone app - click here for our series of apps useful for English teaching and learning.

The idea is simple: nine 6-sided dice with, instead of numbers, icons/images on each face. As the packaging states "9 cubes, 54 images, 10,000,000+ combos, infinite stories." Some of the images are: a magnet, a speech bubble, a flower, a lock, a bee... The instructions are very simple - create a story using all of the images. One of those ideas: why did no-one think of this before?

The age recommendation on the packet of is "6+". But this is in fact a brilliant idea for secondary school classes of any age, too. I've used it recently for classes to think about 'the shape of a story' (a useful short talk by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut is at the bottom of this post: show this first as a way of introducing the concept). Divide your class into three: the first group provides the set-up by choosing the first three cubes and linking them (starting, of course, 'Once upon a time); then the second group takes over with three more cubes covering the middle development, and the final group has to provide the resolution with the last three cubes. [Another tip: in class, use a visualiser/document camera and zoom in to project the cubes large-scale on the screen.]

This is a simple idea for a really effective class, particularly in working out and arguing about the nuts and bolts of a narrative arc. One example: Leaving Cert candidates can learn a lot about Vision and Viewpoint when they get to the final three cubes and decide on the nature of a resolution. They can also be inventive when developing metaphors (A magnet: the character is drawn to something. A bee: a character suffers pain, or a realisation). It's also just great fun.

The app (right) costs a mere €1.59 on the iTunes Store. You shake your phone to roll the 'dice' (the phone makes a pleasingly convincing chunky sound doing this). You can move the dice around on the screen, and particular rolls can be locked.

Highly recommended.
JMG

Kindle App

No 10 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

This review should be read in conjunction with our recent review of the latest generation Kindle from Amazon.You don't have to have a Kindle to use the mobile app, since you can just read on your iPhone, or more realistically an iPad. When you buy books via your Kindle account (which can be direct from the Amazon website), they show up on the app.

As with the main e-reader, your annotations are backed up, and the neatest trick of all is that each copy will open at the final page you reached on any device you were reading (a pop-up will query you if you wish to 'Sync to Furthest Location', telling you what location you're at on the other machine, and what time and date you got there, asking 'Go to that location?')

Amazon are plainly most interested in selling e-books, which is one reason why the app is free, and why apparently rival devices such as the iPad can use this app.

The Apostrophe Song App

No 9 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

Yesterday we posted a video called 'The Apostrophe Song' under our latest CREEP. We do have a bit of an obsession with apostrophes, as can be seen from many posts in the CREEP series. We then got an email from Shaun McNicholas of Cool Rules, of Adelaide in Australia, who in their own words "are dedicated to creating innovative, effective and entertaining learning resources for adults and children. We believe that learning can always be enjoyable, and that the most effective learning occurs when multiple senses are stimulated." Shaun pointed out that The Apostrophe Song is now an app, available from the iTunes store for €0.79.

We've tried it out and are very happy to recommend it, especially at that reasonable price. You can play the Apostrophe Song to your class in various forms:- Pop/Dance, Rock, Hip-Hop or Acoustic, or best still enter the Cool Rules Schools' Challenge and record your own song and try to get your version included in the App. There's also a self-test on apostrophes with dinky noises for success or failure. The website has downloads of advice and guidelines for teachers.

Cool Rules has used App technology to produce a very useful and entertaining way of learning, and we look forward to more from them.

The Poetry Foundation app

No 8 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

The 'Poetry App' from the excellent Poetry Foundation is a fine free addition to your mobile device. You 'spin' it by tapping or shaking, and perm your poem from two different categories, such as (pictured) Grief and Love - or, say, Nostalgia and Love. Then tap on one of the poems' titles. You can share the poem via Twitter/Facebook/email and save favourites. You can also browse by mood and subject


Some of the poems are from the Poetry Foundation site, some are older out-of-copyright ones. All are high-quality.


A neat facility for English teachers: you could ask pupils to choose their own 'flavour' of poetry, or even trust them to spin the device by shaking it and reading out one of the results.

Instapaper App

No 7 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

English teachers (and, we hope, our pupils too) are text maniacs: we want to read all the time. We've always devoured books - whether sitting down at night, lying in bed in the morning or standing in the bus queue. Now mobile devices can help quench this thirst, such as the Free Books app that was number 6 in this series.


One of the very best apps around is Instapaper, a superb way to save and read longer articles from the web. It's available in a free version for trial, but you can trust us and just go and splash out €3.99 for the full version straight away. Saving an article on your computer by way of a bookmarklet (or on your iPhone which, despite the maker's caveat, is easy enough to set up) means that the article appears on your iPhone in a readable text version (complete with tilt scrolling on the paid app). The process is slick and reliable, and you can store up to 250 articles in folders. 

No better way to catch up on good writing whenever suits you best, and when you don't have a book to hand, or when you want to read out something in class without sitting at a computer. Strongly recommended.

Free Books App

No 6 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

The Free Books app boasts no fewer than 23,469 classics for download (the app costs €1.59, the books themselves are out of copyright). An English teacher can have virtually ever imaginable classic on tap, and a pupil can carry around copies of texts being studied. It's very easy to use, with simple flippable pages; we'd recommend the sepia colour scheme. And of course tremendous value. Coming later in the holidays: the experience of re-reading Jane Austen's Emma (left) via this app on an iPhone.


Download it from iTunes here.

Audioboo app

No 5 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

Audioboo is a very neat service that enables you to make short recordings on your iPhone (and via the web) and then post them. We've tried this out with a couple of 'Boo's already - on our summer reading list, and on a new Simon Mawer novel. The app (and indeed the service itself) is free, and very easy to use (go to Audioboo to download it via iTunes). The 5-minute limit imposes a good discipline, and the recording can be done 'on the hoof', unlike longer and more formal podcasts.

So below, appropriately, is a two-minute description via the Audioboo player, including some quick suggestions on how English teachers might use the service. Thanks to James Michie for the original tip.

Dictionary App

No 4 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

A pretty obvious reference facility for any device is a dictionary, and Dictionary.com's free app is highly recommended. It's extremely comprehensive (over 500,000 words), with a pronunication guide (for which you need to be online), reliable definitions from the Random House Dictionary, etymology, encyclopedia references, a thesaurus and a recent searches list. It won the "2009 Best App Ever Award for Primary and Middle School Kids." All very impressive, and for no outlay!

Download it here from iTunes (free).

Dropbox App

No 3 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

Dropbox is a clever service that seamlessly links files on your iPhone, computer and the web. It's easy to use, and the app has lots of possibilities for pupils and teachers: write notes for your exam, and keep mobile copies on your device ... and an easy way for teachers to refer to files in class without using a computer. It's impressively slick.

Of course, as with many of these reviews, this would be useful for lots of other subjects, too. Full list of features here, including sharing folders. The app can be downloaded for free via the link here.

Shakespeare App

No 2 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.

PlayShakespeare.com's Shakespeare App is a great addition to your device if you're studying the plays, or are an English teacher. It comes in a free version, but it's well worth spending a modest €2.39 on the Pro version for some very useful features. The app includes the entire corpus with a variety of useful tools. Pupils/students usually study a single play, but the purchase is still definitely justified: the Pro version includes line numbers, bookmarks to return to key quotations, and, impressively the most powerful new feature of Shakespeare Pro is a searchable glossary based on the bestselling lexicon by David & Ben Crystal, Shakespeare's Words. You can also activate the inline glossary to see all the glossary entries while reading the text. Simply tap on a word to see its meaning.

The search function (like our favourite Shakespeare Clusty site) is also very useful; if you're studying Macbeth, look up all the instances of 'blood' or 'sleep'. There are also features on portraits, facts, and scansion (nice but nothing you can't find quickly on the web).

Leaving Certificate candidates preparing for King Lear this June would certainly find it handy. You need to keep looking at the play, keeping it fresh, checking on individual lines and characters. So here's a way of using that downtime in the shop queue, the dentist's waiting room, waiting for that favourite soap opera to start...

Buy it here on the iTunes store; the free version is here (lacking some key features, but still has the entire text).

iPhone/iPod Touch Apps

We're going to start reviewing and recommending apps for use on the iPhone/iPodTouch platform (henceforth, just 'iPhone', for neatness), in tandem with our science friends over on the Frog Blog. Obviously, we may overlap at times, especially about general educational utilities: read their post today on 'My Homework' - "This excellent, easy to use, iPhone application is useful for everyone, pupils and teachers alike and at all levels, from primary to third level." (We may have to have a high-level secret summit meeting to discuss pooling recommendations in one place. Coffee later, lads?)

But mainly we'll be looking for apps of particular use in English learning and teaching.

First up, and of course of general educational use, is the distinctly obvious, but no less useful, Google Mobile App (free), which gives you easy access to many Google services. This school, like many others, now uses Google Apps on its own domain, and here's a simple way to get to your online Gmail, Reader, Tasks and so on. In school, perhaps the greatest use is Google Docs - access those essays, notes, revision material...

Download it (free) from iTunes here.