Professor John Moorfield tells us how learning the Maori language has become even more mobile with a downloadable dictionary you can even view on your phone.
The way we learn and teach languages has fundamentally changed. Today new technology offers attractive opportunities to improve classroom learning and provides ways to learn away from the classroom.
Computers and now iPhones and iPods are the norm for downloading the resources you need, enabling students 24-hour access to what they need, when they need it.
Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of Maori Development, at AUT has a reputation for being cutting-edge, through the establishment of its digital learning platform. Te Ara Poutama was intuitive enough to recognise the way of future learning and has already digitised its entire range of te reo learning resources to enable its students to learn the language via computer, iPod and iPhone technology.
The digital resources for learning te reo have been created by AUT University's Professor John Moorfield who is a professor of Maori innovation and development at AUT. For 25 years Prof Moorfield has been developing the Te Whanake series which now forms the largest set of free to access resources for the teaching of any indigenous language in the world.
Prof Moorfield says preserving and recording the Maori language is important, as are the people who are teaching it.
"Ensuring that Maori is a vibrant language used in a wide variety of contexts is important for Maori identity and the preservation, understanding and development of Maori knowledge."
Te Whanake is a set of textbooks, study guides, CDs, teachers' manuals and a dictionary for learning and teaching Maori language.
One of the most recent developments with the Te Whanake series is the Te Aka Maori language dictionary. Developed initially as a hard copy dictionary, it was then improved as an online dictionary and index, now receiving more than 100,000 visits per month. As an application for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, it is now also downloadable so that users with the application are able to access it anywhere without the need to be online.
"This latest development means that Maori language learning is even more mobile. Students of the language already have podcasts of language learning activities available for downloading, but now they also have that facility for the dictionary."
The content of the new application is similar to the online version and there will be regular free updates.
A mobile website- www.maoridictionary.co.nz - has also been developed for viewing the Te Aka online Maori dictionary free on a mobile phone or small screen device.
"You don't need an iPhone for this! This is important as we want to make the resources to learn and teach Maori language as accessible as possible to people."
Professor Moorfield says the university had little choice but to invest in the digital platform. "It's the way the world is going and if we can use this kind of technology to help encourage more people to learn and speak te reo then we would have been foolhardy not to have utilised it.
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