It's just a figure of speech, but this app is, in a nutshell, bursting at the seams with idioms. In just two shakes of a lamb's tail, learners can study, search for, and test their knowledge of the included expressions.
Concepts
Additional Tags
App Overview
Understanding idioms is an important aspect of learning or mastering a language. Support your youngsters and English language learners by providing this app for study and practice.
To Master Idioms:
- Scroll through an alphabetized list of idioms; view definitions and sample sentences by tapping on an expression
- Search the list of idioms
- Quiz yourself by topic (seven categories of 100 are included here)
- Assess understanding of all the terms with a quiz for the entire app
Assessing by Topic:
- Quiz is 50 multiple choices questions at a time
- No feedback is provided during the quiz, but you can review all responses by correct, incorrect, and skipped at the end of the quiz
- Share your results with the share button in the top-right corner
- After you're finished, tap the red section of the pie chart to retry incorrect answers, correct answers, and skipped idioms
Assessing All Idioms:
- Tests you on 50 figures of speech at a time taken from the entire list
- You must master the first 50 before moving on to the next 50
- Share your results with the share button provided
- Provides a bar graph to show progress over time
Curator Rating
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Adherence to task
The app provides plenty of idioms to study and a few ways to test your knowledge. More idioms could be added to make a more complete collection.
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Worth the money
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Fun factor
There are quizzes available, but they are all multiple choice. Learners will like the graphs that show their progress, but may wish for more interesting games.
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Scaffolding of learning
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User safety
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Control and feedback
There is some nice progress tracking put into place; however, if you want the results to be accurate, this only really works in a single-user situation.
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How techie do I need to be?
Novice
Instructional Ideas
- Provide this for your pupils as a sort of dictionary when they are reading a new text
- Set aside some time for students to practice in small groups or at classroom stations
- Use the app at the end of the day as a bellringer activity
- If learners have their own iPads, assign them to work through idioms for homework; you can check their progress on the app or have them e-mail their scores to you
Classroom Considerations
- The information you get when a user shares their score with you is only so useful; it takes a screenshot of the score page, so you can see the score, percentage, and time spent taking the quiz (but not any of the idioms they identified correctly or incorrectly)
- If only one person is using the app, the progress tracking will be effective; if more than one pupil tests their knowledge on the same version of the app, the results may become a bit mixed up
- The way the idioms are alphabetized is a bit strange; for example, all the verbs are under the letter T because they are in infinitive form (To give or show quarter, To kill two birds with one stone)
- Note that you can only search by idiom, and not by definition
Pros
- Includes a huge library of idioms that learners can study and search through
- Provides two ways to assess understanding of the these idioms
Cons
- The share button after the test is a bit buggy and doesn't always show options (shows up as a blank white box)
- While hundreds of idioms are included here, there are still quite a few that could be added to the app