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BYKI French was one of the first iPhone apps I bought. I’d known of the online software which has been around since about the early 90s. The BYKI website promises you’ll be able to ‘learn it fast, know it forever’ using their system. If only!

The BYKI French app aims to teach you 1000 words and phrases with their 3 step process, which involves:

1 Look through flashcards with images and text.

2 Test yourself – look at the French and see if you can get the English

3 Test yourself – look at the English and see if you can get the French

4 QUIZ

Yes. It’s actually a four-step process. Three steps must sound less intimidating.

In step one you see the text, an image and hear the French spoken. Steps 2 and 3 show you the French/English and you tap to reveal the answer, telling the app whether or not you got it correct. If you did, the app remembers this and progresses. If you didn’t, the app throws the card straight back at you.

This is doesn’t work for me. If I didn’t remember the word first time, I know I’m going to remember it when the app throws it at me straight after I’ve admitted I was wrong. I’d prefer the app to bury the card and throw it up again later, to test me properly.

Finally, there’s the quiz. I use this as a test quite often – I go straight to the quiz to see how I do. If I’m awful, I’ll do the set from scratch. If I’m 100%, I’ll mark the list off as learned. I also use this to quick revise lists I learned a while back.

Problem 1 – the lists
BYKI’s language lists are frustrating. You only get to download a maximum of 91 lists – with about 10 words in each. That’s sort of fine, I guess, except that there’s no real reason for this limit. And the lists are not always grouped the way I would group words – e.g. You might be asked to learn the word ‘Merci’ in the ‘at the bank’ list. It’s not that I might not want to say ‘merci’ at the bank – it’s just that I’d rather learn that word in a list of ‘polite stuff’ and learn another money word or phrase in the bank list. You can’t really tell what you’ll get in a list.

Problem 2 – Learning what you already know
You can’t delete words you know and keep words you don’t. So if there’s a list of 10 words and you already know ‘bonjour’ and ‘au revoir’, you’ll still have to sit through repeated exposure to ‘bonjour’ and ‘au revoir’ when you’d rather be pushing your brain with new stuff. EVERY app I’ve used has this problem, so it’s not a big BYKI failure – but still – being bored when learning is death to the retention process.

GUI
BYKI is not the prettiest app in the store. It does the whole sophisticated grey background thing which smacks the coder having too much influence over the GUI. It’s not bad, it’s just not attractive. The flashcards are, however, clear and generally legible. Just doesn’t compare to the lovely uTalk French app, which I’ll review later.

Other useful features on BYKI French
Twitter search
Real-time Twitter search of words and phrases from within Byki for iPhone. I loved this feature – it’s so interesting to get random real-life usage of French phrases.

Download User Language Lists
I know you can donwload lists from over 5,000 user-created lessons, but this feature never seemed to work for me – kept crashing and I gave up. Perhaps it’s more stable now, but you’ve still got the problem of figuring out which of the 5,000 lists are any good. Would be better if BYKI would either create new lists for us to download, or star extra-good or popular lists from the user-generated lists.

Extend your app with BYKI deluxe
If you buy BYKI deluxe (currently about £35) you can create your own language lists and download them to your phone. There’s a free trial for this – and it’s a similar feature to Mental Case, which I’ll be reviewing later. Great feature, I guess, if you’ve the time to sit and make your own lists. I certainly don’t.

Neat controls
BYKI offer great settings control – you can turn off the English voice that so irritates a lot of users, so you just hear the target language. You can change the scores, either to mark off word sets you know and don’t need to learn, or to cheat and make yourrself feel better. You can change the quiz settings from French-English and vice versa (I prefer the harder English-French setting).

Stats
It’s got a nice little stats option, which will tell you how many sessions you’ve had (I’ve had 78), number of learned cards (722), number of learned lists (57) and total time spent learning (7 hours and 47 precious minutes of my life).

VERDICT?
I highly recommend BYKI as one of the best language apps I’ve found. It could do better, but few apps compare. It’s well worth the money.
Costs: £4.99 sterling

Want to try BYKI before you buy? I can’t find a ‘lite’ BYKI French app, but I found 15 BYKI languages – a free app that introduces you to different languages using the BYKI system.

Congratulations to Irish eLearning Company Aurion Learning and their client, the Family Planning Association (FPA), for winning a prestigious eLearning Age Award!

Aurion designed a groundbreaking sexual health and well-being e-learning programme for people with learning disabilities. Having spoken with Fiona Quigley throughout the development of this programme, I know that the challenges the whole team faced when producing such a great piece of learning. It’s a masterpiece of tone, timing and delivery – and deserving winner of the ‘Excellence in the production of learning content’ category.

I’m really delighted for Fiona Quigley, who is Director of Learning and Innovation at Aurion. Fiona’s one of my favourite girl geeks – one of few people I know who is keen to meet up of an evening and talk e-learning for a few hours. However, I’m sure the awards ceremony at the Park Lane Hotel in London’s Mayfair was a bit more glamorous than our meet-ups in the Errigal Inn, on the Ormeau road in Belfast.

You can buy a copy of the programme from the FPA’s website and you can see a demo of on Aurion’s website.

Get more details on the Awards ceremony here.

Alanna Mitchell asks the big question in this article.

So is school

- for the transmission of culture and potted knowledge, akin to filling a CD-ROM?
- for fostering skills that will serve society down the road, or make dutiful employees?
- a strategy to make sure a nation’s gross domestic product keeps rising?
- a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land?
- a way to encourage upward mobility?

She asks if school should it build character or endow morals? Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don’t?

As Mitchell rightfully points out, you could write a library full of books on this stuff. However, 2 issues stand out to me as big red flashing signals alerting us that a schools’ reform is necessary:

1 Neuroscientific findings shows that the brain learns – or forms strong neural connections – when a child is in a calm, emotionally regulated state.

2 Neuroscience also shows that the brain is a platform on which intelligence can be built, rather than the determinant of a fixed intelligence.

I feel many schools fail on the first point, most particularly when children are taken from the much smaller, intimate primary school setting to an overcrowded secondary school.

As for the second point, it seems to me that education hasn’t changed much from my days at primary school, where the emphasis was on figuring out who was ‘brainy’ and who was ‘thick’ and streaming us accordingly. While being streamed into the ‘brainy’ group worked for me and kept me from being bored at school, I’m not so sure it was so great for the children in the ‘remedial’ stream. Maybe the problem was that the kids in remedial seemed to believe that’s where they’d be for life – not just for short-term special support in a specific area.

Mitchell quotes Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Winchester in England, who argues that the brain as an organ is expandable, something to improve rather than prove, In theory, schooling should help that expansion happen. I don’t think the system encourages this.

Read the article here.