Four apps for students to learn English

    Quizlet

    Quizlet is a learning app—a computer program you use on your mobile device. It can help users build and test their knowledge of English words and terms. Quizlet has word sets for millions of subjects. And, it is quickly becoming a useful mobile tool for language learners.

    Socrative

    In Socrative, teachers can create timed learning games. In class, students compete individually or as part of a team against classmates. One game students love is called space Race. In this game, if a team answers a question correctly, their rocket moves forward. This team whose rocket gets to the end first wins. Also, teachers can use Socrative as an “exit ticket, ”a question they can ask students about what they learned in that day's class. Students write their answers on their mobile devices. Then, the teacher can show the answers on a shared video screen.

    QR Codes

    AQRCodeisakindofsignthatasmartphonecanreadwithitscamera. When your phone camera reads a QR code, it takes you to a website, image, video or anything you want to share. For example, one will take you to the VOA Learning English website.

    Evernote

    Evernote lets users store and share notes, images and recordings in one place. Teachers can also use Evernote to give homework.

    Anki has introduced Cozmo, a little robot powered by an advanced artificial intelligence. Cozmo promises to be for more interactive（互动的）than any toy robot.

Cozmo, which can lie in your hand, has a “brain”—technically its CPU—that can process data amazingly fast. In addition, Cozmo has a playful personality. He's designed to react to emotions and even ask users to play with him.

    Cozmo is not the first interactive toy to reach the market nor is it the first robot toy. What sets Cozmo apart from the other “smart toys” is that it has greater play value than those toys, which can become repetitious all too quickly.

    “Every interaction with Cozmo is different, so you do not put up with repetitive play patterns and responses typically found with other preprogrammed robots,” explained Anki spokesperson Peter Nguyen. Because it has functionality that is similar to that of video games, Cozmo also can receive regular updates, which could extend its playability. Still, Anki has designed this toy to be just that: a toy. It's not an advanced computerized robot. Its software is app-based.

    Cozmo lacks the “traditional” human-like robot form factor（要素）of legs, arms, and a head. But Cozmo does have an OLED screen/face with blue eyes, which in fact were designed to help it connect with its user.

    “I'm glad my kids are already raised,” said Roger L. Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. “Otherwise, they might become more antisocial if their relationship with Cozmo is more satisfying than those with real people,” said Kay. “Cozmo might encourage kids to learn more about technology or even inspire them to try programming and similar studies,” said Charles King, analyst at Pund-IT.

    Yet this technology does promise to be more than a toy. “It's a pretty cool invention and might have further applications, for example in elder care,” suggested Kay.

    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home—our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal (多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence—the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox—and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

    I just celebrated my 95th birthday last week, and people always ask me about my secret. Of course, it's important to eat right and exercise, but that's not much of a secret. I actually have quite a few friends over the age of 90, and we all say the same thing: laughter. Are we telling jokes all the time? Not necessarily. Are we watching funny movies around the clock? Of course not. Do we take the time to laugh at ourselves and generally try to keep things light as much as we can? Certainly. One of the best ways to make sure you laugh every day is to be around children or pets because they just can't help being funny! And what about those polite little laughs when your neighbor tells a joke that isn't really funny, but you laugh anyway? Those are fine, but the ones where you laugh with your whole body and mind are the ones where you end up tired and out of breath, where everyone around you starts laughing, too. My “senior” friends and I even came up with a nice round number: For each full “belly laugh” you have, you'll live one extra hour in your lifetime. Now that might not sound like much, but if you have one every day, you'll live an extra three or four years. I try to have between five and ten of those laughs every day, and so should you.

    “At almost any given age, most of us are getting better at some things and worse at others, ”Joshua Hartshorne, an MIT cognitive(认知的)science researcher and the lead author of a study looking at how intelligence changes as we age, told Business Insider. His team quizzed thousands of people aged 10—90 on their ability to do things like remembering lists of words, recognizing faces, learning names, and doing math. Their results suggest that no matter your age, there's almost always a new peak on the horizon.

    The human brain has a remarkable capacity to recognize and identify faces, and scientists are just beginning to learn why. On average, we know that our ability to learn and remember new faces appears to peak shortly after our 30th birthday.

Having trouble focusing? The study suggests that our ability to maintain attention improves with age, reaching its peak around age 43.While younger adults may excel in the speed and flexibility of information processing, adults approaching their mid-years may have the greatest capacity to remain focused.

    Dating is tough. One of the reasons could be that we're generally bad at reading other people's emotions until we reach our late 40s.That's according to one component of Hartshorne's study, which involved showing thousands of people images of faces cropped tightly around the eye area. Participants were asked to describe the emotion the person in the photo was feeling. Performance peaked for people aged around 48.

    Many people believe that their math skills decline after they leave school and stop practicing arithmetic. But the next time you try to split up a check, keep this in mind: your ability to do basic subtraction and division doesn't reach its apex until your 50th birthday.

    Ever wonder why you always lose at Scrabble? Good news: Your best days may be ahead. According to people's scores on multiple—choice vocabulary tests, most of us don't reach our peak wordsmithing abilities until we're in our late 60s or early 70s.