The Benefits of Technology in Language Learning

Nikos is an active and curious 6-year old boy from Minnesota. Like many boys his age, he’s interested in ice-hockey and basketball and dreams about growing up to become a star player in both, although for some strange reason he can’t think of any player who’s famous at both sports (he makes a mental note to ask his mother why that is). However, it’s something else that’s captured his imagination recently; two months ago, his uncle Stefanos and auntie Anna from Cape Town, visited the family and brought him a set of stuffed toy animals including a giraffe, an elephant, a lion and a zebra.

Pen and Paper vs Internet and iPad

Quick to observe young Nikos’ interest in jungle animals, his mother picks up a pencil and starts drawing an oblong shape with four feet and a long nose and asks him “Νικολάκη, τι ζώο είναι αυτό;” He looks at it and although he knows his mother has drawn an animal, it doesn’t remind him of any animal he’s ever seen before…actually, the 2-dimensional black and white drawing reminds him of an ice hockey rink and his mind starts to wander off.

Then his mother goes into the other room and comes back with her iPad (Nikos gets excited because he hopes he might be allowed to play his favorite racing game). His mother shows him a colorful animation of a happy elephant on her iPad and asks him the same question again: “Tι ζώο είναι αυτό;” Young Nikos smiles as he knows that the Greek word for elephant is very similar to the one in English, just a tiny difference towards the end…he pauses and replies “elefantos”. “Elefandas”, his mother corrects him, and then he also repeats, “elefandas”. After getting it right he asks his mother whether he can play his favorite game now. She agrees to let him play his racing game after he gets another 3 animals right.

Nikos loves learning about animals, what does your child love learning about? Let us know here.

The Difference Technology makes

Same teacher, same pupil, same subject, yet a completely different outcome; what made the difference in capturing young Nikos’ attention and inspiring him to learn? In a word: technology. The paradox (nice Greek word right there) is that technology enables teachers and parents to capture children’s attention by portraying ever increasingly more natural and realistic representations of the subject being taught.

How Ellinopoula implements Technology

We understand that for children’s learning to be effective, it must be vivid, interesting, playful and immediately relevant to children’s lives. This forms the foundation of everything we do at Ellinopoula. This is because children are not really hard-wired to learn only by looking at a sheet of paper with words written all over it; on the contrary, children are predisposed to learn (fast and effectively) within a social context through trial and error. Technology allows us to accomplish this through colorful animation, carefully designed audio material, and social contexts tailored to children’s learning needs. With the new series “The Underwater Mission” coming soon, we’re accomplishing just that - beautiful animations, carefully designed Greek audio, and interesting content on the underwater world for our children.

Technology helps identify Strengths and Weaknesses

That, however, is only half the picture. Technology is increasingly enabling teachers and parents themselves to learn more about how their pupils and children learn. This takes away a large part of the guesswork and wishful thinking associated with teaching methods of the past (think frustration, wasted time and money). A modern day educational app/platform should provide real-time objective feedback about the extent of your child’s vocabulary and the rate of their learning progress. At the end of the day, at Ellinopoula, we want our technology to inspire young Nikos to go to his mother and ask her to go to the zoo to see an “elefandas”, a “tigris”, and a “leopardali”.