The Acorns project enables language teachers to create a wide variety of language lessons that students can execute to enhance their language learning experience. These lessons work on all computer platforms, including tablets and phones. Lesson types are grouped into categories, meaning that one can copy a lesson of one type and paste it into another type of the same category. Related phrase lessons support subword morphology, which helps students learn word prefix, circumfix, and suffix modifications that occur when words are combined into sentences.

Acorns works with the same philosophy as Microsoft's Power Point application. Instead of creating slides, ACORNS is used to create lessons. A single file can contain a number of different lessons. Lessons can have multiple layers; each layer can contain a particular dialect, or it can contain different levels of difficulty.

The following list provides a brief description of the lesson types that are supported

Multiple Picture Lessons

• Multiple Choice: listen to audio and select the appropriate picture
• Flash Cards; listen to audio and select the corresponding sentence
• Pictionary: select a picture and corresponding audio and descriptive information displays
• Moving Pictures: pictures display and move about the display. Selecting a picture plays audio and descriptive information

Related Phrases Lessons

• Magnet Game: the student drags magnets together to form sentences. Selecting completed sentences plays audio and displays descriptive information
• Translate: audio plays and the student constructs the sentence that they heard
• Missing Word: audio plays and a sentence displays with a missing word, which the student enters
• Questions and Answers: The student hears a guestion and types a valid answer to the question

Story Lessons

• Hear and Respond: A portion of a story displays until encountering a missing word. The student enters the missing word which, if correct, the playback continues
• Story Book: Each page of a story shows with a picture. The student can then play the audio corresponding to the page. The program highlights the words as the playback proceeds

Miscellaneous Lessons

• Hear and Click:An audio plays and a series of pictures display. The student must select the correct picture when the playback pauses
• Picture and Sounds: A picture displays with acorn icons scattered about. When an acorn is selected, an audio plays and descriptive information displays relating to the portion of the picture where the acorn resides

The ACORNS application is designed to work with any language and is easy to learn and use. It is freeware, and you can freely install the software on as many computers as you wish as long as it is not sold for profit. The author, Dan Harvey retains full copyright privileges, so please feel free to send your questions or comments to harveyd@sou.edu