Gojimo is an education app for Apple and Android devices. It offers some language learning material for French, German and Spanish. So far it has some exercises for GCSE level, categorised by the areas vocabulary, grammar, reading and writing. Exercises are also broken down by exam board and by a few topic areas.
The app, like others, gives you right/wrong feedback with some explanation. It also keeps your score and progress. Navigation is clear, presentation sober - a bit dull, to be honest.
The vocabulary tasks are simple one word translations, grammar consists of conjugation/translation at a verb only level. Writing involves sentence level translation both ways. You don't type out any answers, just choose from a list. All of these tasks are pretty dull and similar to ones found on other apps of this type.
The reading tasks are better. Each one has a short, accurate passage followed by a series of multi-choice questions in English. The textual content is uninteresting, but at least these tasks work at something beyond word or sentence level.
I find this app hard to recommend as it stands. Exercise types are dull and predictable, material limited for languages (apparently more extensive for other subjects). Some listening content would be welcome. Like other apps of this type it may suit some students who are motivated by working at word and phrase level, but like other apps the algorithm which scores and records a student's progress is so far not matched by the quality of the content. The stress is, alas, very much on getting better exam results rather than inspiring any real interest in the subject.
I have yet to come across a killer content/input-based app for languages and would love to hear of one. What we need will not come free, but I'm sure there is room in the market for a low cost MFL app with high quality interactive reading and listening content.
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The app, like others, gives you right/wrong feedback with some explanation. It also keeps your score and progress. Navigation is clear, presentation sober - a bit dull, to be honest.
The vocabulary tasks are simple one word translations, grammar consists of conjugation/translation at a verb only level. Writing involves sentence level translation both ways. You don't type out any answers, just choose from a list. All of these tasks are pretty dull and similar to ones found on other apps of this type.
The reading tasks are better. Each one has a short, accurate passage followed by a series of multi-choice questions in English. The textual content is uninteresting, but at least these tasks work at something beyond word or sentence level.
I find this app hard to recommend as it stands. Exercise types are dull and predictable, material limited for languages (apparently more extensive for other subjects). Some listening content would be welcome. Like other apps of this type it may suit some students who are motivated by working at word and phrase level, but like other apps the algorithm which scores and records a student's progress is so far not matched by the quality of the content. The stress is, alas, very much on getting better exam results rather than inspiring any real interest in the subject.
I have yet to come across a killer content/input-based app for languages and would love to hear of one. What we need will not come free, but I'm sure there is room in the market for a low cost MFL app with high quality interactive reading and listening content.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Steve, thanks for sharing your thoughts on Gojimo. We'd never intended Gojimo to be a revision tool for languages. Like you, we didn't feel our current assessment mechanisms serves languages particularly well - it's better for subjects like Science or History. However, so many students ended up asking for languages that we didn't feel we could ignore their requests any longer.
ReplyDeleteWe've been discussing your post this afternoon as a team and you'll be pleased to know many of the suggestions you've made are already in the product pipeline. Hopefully in the long run we can make Gojimo an extremely effective tool for language learners!
Thanks for commenting.. I understand what you say about the effectiveness for different subjects. MFL is quite hard to do well and to do it really well takes a big investment.. Good luck with your future development. There is room for good app resources for languages, ones which get beyond basic vocab recognition and verb conjugation which are well served elsewhere.
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