New free sociolinguistics iPhone app, "Valuable Voices"

Dear colleagues and friends,

We are so pleased to announce our latest educational outreach initiative, "Valuable Voices" -- a free iPhone app for teachers!

The app provides 12 ready-to-implement exercises for students and educators -- one a month, for a year's worth of teaching -- to build awareness of language and culture. The teaching exercises are geared toward middle/high school English but can easily be adapted for elementary or even college, in a variety of content areas.

To download the app, go to the App Store on your iPhone and type in "Valuable Voices" -- attached is a screenshot so that you know what to look for. To our knowledge this is the only sociolinguistics app of its kind. Hopefully one day we can expand to create more apps -- and hopefully expand to make the apps available to Android users, too.

We would love to hear any feedback you may have, and please pass this along to any teachers or students who may be interested. We’ll be presenting on the app and some of our other educational initiatives at several conferences coming up, including at the Linguistic Society of America/Society for Linguistic Anthropology as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and we plan to incorporate insights from those who have used it.

We couldn't have done this work without our team of undergraduate and graduate student assistants, as well as our many teacher consultants and their students, who are always our inspiration!

Thanks to all of you for your support!
Christine