Fotobabble

Pre-task thinking:

• For assessment, do you prefer recording unprepared or prepared (practiced) statements?
• How would remote recordings change your students' performance?

I am currently working my way through student videos, and processing the actual video files. That takes a lot of time. Online audio recordings are so simple and effective by contrast, reducing the speaking task to very essential oral production, and encouraging preparation and repetition that you don't get in a live performance. Since the files are processed online, you don't have any technical hassle with them yourself.

One site that is excellent for such a task is Fotobabble, a website that allows voice recordings to accompany a photo the speaker uploads.
Here is an example.



Task:

• Create an assignment for your students.

Step by step:

1. Create an account on Fotobabble.
2. Select and upload a picture (it must be a PNG, GIF, or JPEG) from your computer. Tip: If you want them to comment on something you have in a different format, take a screenshot of the document and save it as a JPEG. - You can also use an online picture, e.g. from the eltpics photostream on Flickr.
   
3. The site will ask you whether it can access the microphone on your computer. Click yes, and make sure the microphone (built-in or headset) is on. Then press the "record" button. Listen, and re-record as often as you like.
4. Give your file a title, and save it.
5. Select the link to send it to your students, or embed the code in your class blog.

In your Fotobabble, give your students the task to respond in kind by following the above instructions themselves, creating their own Fotobabble, and then sending you the link. Caveat: These Fotobabbles can be seen by anyone who has the link. Make sure your students have access to a computer that goes online, with a microphone. There is also a Fotobabble app for iPodTouch/ iPhone.

For more on Fotobabble, see Ian James's blogpost on it from March 2010.

For another excellent app to use for online recording, see my post on Voki - follow this link and try the other apps listed below, too.

Fotobabble http://www.fotobabble.com/ - upload pictures and comments
Voki http://www.voki.com/ - create a talking avatar and record yourself
Voxopop http://www.voxopop.com - join a talk group
Vocaroo http://vocaroo.com/newaccount.php - make a simple, embeddable voice recording
Voicethread http://voicethread.com/ - allow others to add comments (text, audio, video) to a photo

Exploring collocations online

Pre-task thinking:

• How do your students currently register and explore collocations?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Google to determine likelihood?
• What sorts of information do your students need to be able to use the word?
  

Here is a series of sites to explore, with a discussion of their merits.
I've made a SCREENCAST VIDEO to walk you through them. (5 minutes)

1. LINGUEE: Linguee http://www.linguee.de/ is an online translation lexicon that shows you how German, French and Spanish is being translated into English online. Trawling the net, it picks up parallel pages, the original and its English translation, and scours them for direct translations. Parallel excerpts are presented side by side, and the translated word or phrase is highlighted, with each excerpt visibly linked to the original website, showing the context. To the left is a lexicon extracted from the database for the words in the search. A nice site to start noticing how collocations are often flavored by L1.

Drawbacks: All too often the translations are sub-par – after all, they are no better than the cross-section of translations we find on websites. However, the translations are highly contextualized and reflect actual useage "on the ground" (English as a Lingua Franca). Also, the site allows users to assess the quality.

2. GOOGLE FIGHT: You and your students can explore collocations by trial and error, guessing two possible or likely collocations and comparing them using Google Fight http://www.googlefight.com/ to assess which one is more frequent.

Drawbacks: The online selection you browse is not curated and edited, nor does it give you the context of each collocation. Likelyhood is across all of the genres present on the web, so the context your students need may not be afforded.
Google itself automatically offers likely collocations as you type in phrases during a search, suggesting ways to complete them.

3. GOOGLE NGRAM: Drawing on all the works published to the internet and dating them by original date of publication, Google Ngram http://books.google.com/ngrams/ creates a timeline of word usage, and is also a good place to compare how collocations have changed over time.

Drawbacks: The selection is decontextualized across all genres. Though you can follow up the sources, this is an item-by-item research project.

4. NETSPEAK: Being developed specifically for learners/users of English, Netspeak http://www.netspeak.org/ is a set of tools built around a search engine that allows 4 modes of search for collocations: one word, several words, alternatives in in the phrase (so: a better synonym), and word order. Collocations are presented showing their relative online frequency compared amongst each other. Press the + sign to the right, and sample sentences are presented. How this site can be used in the writing process is shown in this INTERACTIVE VIDEO.

Drawbacks: The corpus is the uncurated web, with all its genres. (More information.)


5. JUST THE WORD: Based on the British National Corpus, Just the Word http://www.just-the-word.com/ (Sharp Laboratories of Europe 2005-2011) allows you to study word clusters in combination with their grammatical functions (colligations), combining the functions of a thesaurus and a dictionary. Clicking on a given collacation gives you examples of how it is used from the BNC. (More information)

Drawbacks: Rather than a simple comparison of frequency, the system gives you a wealth of potentially distracting information. Still, the site is neatly contained.

6. LEXTUTOR: Originally set up in the 90s, The Compleat Lextutor http://www.lextutor.ca/ from the University of Quebec at Montreal has tutorials (including a lexical grammar test, Corpus Grammar, and the Concord Writer, where you can check collocations as you write); and research apps (including Vocabprofile, to copy complete texts or selected corpora into as .txt files to analyze, with analyzed words then color-coded according to frequency/ corpus). Each app comes with an introduction on its own page.

Task:
Select a collocation issue you want a class of yours to explore. What are your aims? What will the students do with the outcome?
Which of these sites would you use? Defend your choice.
How would you word and run the task?

Your ideas and reports on your experience are most welcome!

PS Anthony Elloway has collected these and similar sites and discussions in a Scoop.it page.

The state of digital education

Here's a fascinating graphic depicting the state of digital education that shows that elearning saves money compared to instructor-led training. That's a sad and misleading statistic. Just having completed an e-learning course, I think that those two types of instruction are very different, requiring different learner skills and providing different learning opportunities. One of the findings of the past years in education is that one size does not fit all. Any educator worth his or her salt will use digital technology very judiciously to empower learners and allow them to access materials and social learning contacts they wouldn't otherwise have.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

LessonWriter

LessonWriter was recommended to me by Louise Kennedy. It does what its name suggests, letting you copy in a reading text and then creating a sophisticated mix of tasks, from vocabulary and morphology to phonology and grammar, and supplying prompts for questions based on Blooms Taxonomy and the needs you detail. The free version lets you output a document, while the premium one has a wide range of applications in blended learning, including colaborative modalities that allows a team of teachers to work on the lesson, e.g. to address matters of differentiation that may arise in CLIL, mixed L1 or mixed ability classes. The latest video shows how team lesson prep works:
No Administrator Left Behind 2011

Vocabee - free vocabulary learning tool

Vocabee is a learning tool built on the Leitner system, the method of repeating new imput in 5 cycles at increasing intervals. Designed for learners of any subject and language, it lets you repeat the content you enter in one of two modes:

Using the "gezielt lernen" mode, study a selected unit to prepare for an exam, storing the content in your short-term memory.

Choose "langfristig lernen" to study using the 5 cycle method, to store the content in your long-term memory.

This tool, launched in January 2011 and currently in beta, was developed by SeitWerk. The makers promise that vocabee will remain free, and they guarantee that what you store there will still be available in 10 or more years. They also promise that they have a lot of ideas up their sleeves to improve on the app.

There is currently a lot of nice free content already available for English and Business English. It was collected by an advanced learner of English (whom I know), who got most of his input from studying at Language World in Starnberg.