When we speak about influence of new technologies on our lives, may be the first thing everybody is thinking about is mobile devices. We use them in many different ways; they are always in our pockets. So, I believe they make ubiquitous learning much more accessible and easy. The key idea of ubiquitous learning is not to limit studying process by classroom walls and school schedule. Of course, it can be done without any gadgets, but it is doubtless, that mobile devices provide teachers and students with significantly wider possibilities.

I’d like to focus on mobile learning as one of the part of e-learning environment. Mobile learning is learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic device. So, all types of apps for studying math, languages, training literacy or other skills can be treated as mobile learning programs.

Let’s see on LinguaLeo (https://lingualeo.com ) – special n-line service and app to study English, which is very popular in Russia.

First of all, it supports an idea of ubiquitous learning as you can use it everywhere and anytime. It also provides students with an opportunity to move in their own pace and repeat exercises as many times as students need to be perfect at particular topic.

The second trait is multimodal content. The app offers to watch films and TV shows (with subtitles or even translation, if it is necessary), to read texts, for instance, popular books, to listen favorite songs or inspiring TED speeches. It is possible to mark unfamiliar words and train them using many different exercises. So such trainings, sometimes very tedious in usual school practice, become conscious and obtain the goal and purpose.

The third very important characteristic is gamification. Students play with words, win prizes, competing with other students. Although there are not much cooperation or communication with peers embedded in the process, but nevertheless there some places for chats and comparing results.

The fourth feature will be very useful for teachers. The service has complicated analytical reports about student’s time allocation among topics, regularity of lessons, weak and strong skills and progress in every field. These statistics are accessible for students, teachers and parents.

To conclude, LingvoLeo is one of many examples of mobile learning, which has all important characteristics of this approach.