Review of educational applications on the Google Play Store
There are several educational applications in the market offering different services and features: vocabulary applications, learning applications or social learning platforms. We tested some of them to see what the market offers:
Babbel:
This application is well structured and very professional. The layout on both mobile and desktop version is very clean. The teaching methods offered are mostly based on simple exercises where the user will have to match pictures with text and translate from one language to another. The application offers only a free lesson as for the others the user will have to pay a monthly subscription.
Busuu:
This is some sort of social network and learning app. It is possible to invite friends, become friend with other users and comment on other exercises. It also offers a simple way of learning by matching pictures with text and translating from one language to another. Although it offers many functionalities this application is not very clean, users can get easily lost. The applications offer some free lessons while most of them are for premium users and can be unlocked with a subscription.
Duolingo:
This application offers a really nice and intuitive way of learning a new language. It is possible to ask questions to the community and answer to questions from other users. For more advanced users, this application offers also the possibility to translate real articles increasing the difficulty of the task. Their mobile and desktop applications are very clean and fresh. All the lessons are completely free.
Edmodo:
This is a social learning platform which offers the users the opportunity to register as a teacher or as a student. As a teacher the user can create groups and invite students so to assign them homework’s through this application. Students can then send back their answers and works through this platform and get a mark from their teacher. Teachers can also share their knowledge, works, and informations through a newsfeed. The GUI is very clean and professional as it aims to be used by teachers. Another positive aspect of the application is that it is completely free.
Phrasebook:
As the name suggest this application offers a list of common words and sentences in different languages with the opportunity to hear them and eventually record our pronunciation. It doesn’t offer a desktop version while the mobile version offers a simple interface, easy to access, dividing words and sentences by category. Only some words and sentences are available for free and to unlock the others the user has to pay.
Whats is missing:
After testing the applications we made a table to summarize the avalable features:
While these applications offer different solutions, none of them has a video feature where the user could watch a conversation between two people on a specific vocabulary, language or accent. In real life people may need to use a more rich vocabulary than the more generic offered in these kind of applications.