I believe the services the software included will be one of the important elements for choosing a CALL material. Nowadays many services providers provide online learning packages for language teaching. They always provide service hotline to students for solving technical problems. Therefore, parent's IT skills can be a less important factor.
Getting students to login the software may already be a problem to some schools. Some service providers will give a constant progress report to teachers to notify their students' performance. It would be a useful tools for monitoring students' work outside lessons. Some even phone students' parents if they find that students do not login the software at all. Parents can then monitor their children's performance.
These are what I believe 'user-friendly'. The users of CALL materials is not just students. Teachers and parents are also crucial for the success of CALL materials.
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Hi Christine,
You've made some interesting observations. I especially agree that one needs to take account of the context in its entirety in evaluating CALL resources. I didn't realize that there were service providers who were willing to telephone parents to make them aware of what their children are doing!
It is not really clear to me how this is a response to the article you read. What was it about the article that led to these reflections?
Christoph
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