Multilingualism is one of the phenomena of the modern world, prompted by economic and cultural globalization. According to recent research there are more multilingual than monolingual people in the world. The situation when individuals are using one language at home, another one at work and yet another one while socialising with their friends is becoming a norm rather than an exception.
The European continent, with its fluid national borders in the past and growing economic and cultural integration in the present, is one of the places where duo and multilingual teaching systems are no longer a dream, but a reality and a strong necessity.
Many European countries have more than one official language with Serbia being an absolute leader of the continent in this respect, recognising seven official languages; Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland following closely behind. Luxembourg has a unique educational system using three languages as the main instruction languages during the span of twelve years of schooling. However, even those European countries that only recognise one official language often have minorities that are either allowed to learn exclusively in their mother tongue or in both the official language and their native language. For example, there are plenty of Hungarian schools in Romania and parents can choose whether they want their children to be schooled exclusively in Hungarian or bilingually.
Luckily enough, the modern education system gives even those children who were not exposed to a bilingual environment from the cradle an opportunity to become fluent in a foreign language. Languages are seen as one of the most important disciplines in many European schools and are taught from the first grade. Students in many countries also have an opportunity to learn a second foreign language at no additional cost.
Despite this continuous and truly impressive progress of expansion of the bilingual population in Europe, teaching languages remains a very challenging task. Although language teaching techniques have definitely advanced a lot in the last two decades, it seems that no one has yet found a golden technique that would help make every single student fluent in a foreign language. Some argue that no such technique can be developed when it comes to language learning. Instead, the main task of the teacher is to get off the beaten path and show students all the opportunities that speaking a foreign language offers.
mozaBook is a powerful educational tool whether it is used for bilingual classrooms or to support the study of a foreign language. mozaBook is translated into 20 languages and the MULTILANG mozaBook license allows for the interchangeable usage of these languages. It is possible to switch the operational language at any point while running the software. mozaBook also contains educational tools that were specifically designed to help students learn foreign languages. For example, our Word finder and Lan(g)game tools are a fun way for students to learn new words, while our Spelling tool is a bottomless resource of spelling exercises to use in class. If these are still not enough, our 3D models can run in two languages simultaneously and become the center of attention in a bilingual classroom.
If you would like to incorporate fun and interactive language tools into your language classes or at your international school, you can learn more about MULTILANG mozaBook in our webshop.
Mozaik 3D scenes have been proven to be very effective in visualizing objects, phenomena, processes, and rules which are hard to illustrate with static images and hard to capture on videos, let alone imagine them. (For example, Cosmic or microbiological occurrences, or long destroyed historical landmarks. My personal favorite: the Van der Waals interaction on a gecko’s foot).
But to give support in other, not so 3D-friendly fields, our developers went a step further. For unusual topics such as probability, logic, or advanced spatial geometry, they have invented the 4th dimension by creating puzzles and exercises to be solved within our 3Ds.
One good example of all the innovations claimed above would be our Constructing shapes 3D (above), in which the user is challenged to reconstruct a spatial object when we already know the front, side and top views.
In another model, Light and shadow (below), the user can experiment by placing a light source near different spatial shapes in a room which is actually a 3D coordinate system. Depending on the type of light source, its placement and its distance from the shape, the shadow cast will differ dramatically. There are 8 different objects and two types of light to choose from in the coordinate system and the ability to rotate the 3D model and view the objects and shadows from different perspectives provides a great demonstration for students of art and physics alike.
For statistics and probability (besides the best tool in the world (probably!)), our Dice 3D model (below) offers great support. Here the user can roll with different numbers and colors of dice and, as they roll they receive a statistical chart summing up the results, showing us the essence of the rules of chance.
With our inbuilt exercises, our developers are doing their best to make sure that teachers receive sufficient help in explaining all topics for students with interactive digital tools. Register on mozaWeb to try out our 3D models for free, including the human skeleton!
What is the digital textbook market like in your country? Are digital textbooks easy to find in the average classroom?
With the growing use of new technology in classes like interactive displays, tablets, smartphones and interactive projectors, decision makers in many nations have started investing and making digital textbooks available to educators and students. In some countries, textbook publishers are even required by law to provide the digital version for each of their textbooks in order to stay in the market. This is a drastic change - not only for publishing businesses, but also for teachers and students. That’s why it is important to provide solutions that make digital textbooks easy to use and easy to teach with.
Mozaik Education was founded in 1990 as a textbook publishing house and nearly a decade ago Mozaik began developing digital solutions in an effort to offer a new product which would add to the educational value of its printed textbooks. These digital education resources were built to be used alongside traditional teaching methods - not to replace them. The idea behind mozaBook was to create a software which would foster a better classroom dynamic and offer interactive educational content which would provide new insight to students that paper books and still images could not. Mozaik continues to print and license textbooks, but now offers a range of digital solutions for use with textbooks and separately.
mozaBook Exercise books are wonderfully suitable for making classroom presentations and lesson plans. Along with text content we can use our own photos or images from the Internet, the image bank found in textbooks, the built-in drawings, illustrations from the mozaBook Gallery, videos as a material source for presentations. However, we can also insert the mozaLibrary 3D models and the mozaBook tools.
If all this was not enough for raising pupils' interest, the animation is still to come. All the items of an exercise book can be animated. We can choose from entrance and exit effects and other exciting playful schemes. We can set the speed and direction of animations and we are able to adjust the timing of the appearance and disappearance of elements. We can start the popping out of 3D models, videos and tools, and after having finished their use, we can continue with the animated presentation.
This is for all the statistics freaks out there! The tool we are showing you today, called Probability, was created by one of our developers who is a mathematician from Cambridge University.
The beautiful and practical design of this app make it so that the teacher can always display the charts and the equations behind these charts simultaneously - this really helps students see how the two connect and therefore grasp concepts more swiftly. What’s more, if you change the equation, you can automatically see that change translated into the diagram.
For years, the exercise books that we prepared at home could be saved to our school computer only with the help of various data media, furthermore, we could bring school exercise books home merely on a USB drive. In the latest mozaBook version there is already the possibility to synchronize exercise books through the Internet and save them automatically into our own on-line account. We can also manually upload exercise books from time to time as to this account then open it when logged-in at the last updated point.
A more comfortable solution is to authorize automatic saving. With this, after closing our exercise books, the modifications performed within them are automatically saved into our on-line account. Consequently, the latest version of the desired exercise book will always open on each and every computer on which mozaBook is installed.