Ask Auntie Web

Fotobabble

2011-11-22T15:15:00.023+01:00

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:

Create an account on Fotobabble.
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.
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.
Give your file a title, and save it.
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

2011-11-10T11:59:00.033+01:00

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.nets peak.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

2011-09-05T09:30:00.004+02:00

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

2011-08-21T04:40:00.007+02:00

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

2011-01-31T09:33:00.007+01:00

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.

BESIG

2010-11-22T21:13:00.003+01:00

Things are really popping at BESIG, the IATEFL special interest group for Business English.

Wiki: http://ibow.pbworks.com/w/page/31583454/FrontPage
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/iatefl_besig
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/IATEFLBESIG
Ning: http://iatefl-besig.ning.com/
For more links, see the Community Page on the BESIG website: http://www.besig.org/community/index.htm

Invitation: Come join me in this Bitstrip comic strip

2010-11-17T14:14:00.014+01:00

I presented Bitstrips as part of the workshop series last summer, but thought I'd just post, step-by-step, how to make one.
Step 1: Join the Bitstrips site and browse it.
Step 2: Create a character and make it look a little like yourself.
Step 3: Create a comic strip with yourself and some of other characters featured in the "library".
Here's a screencast with Jing that shows you how to handle the controls.

And now ... roll the drums...
Step 4: Engage in social networking through Bitstrips: Add a friend's character to your strip. Or copy a friend's cartoon and add yourself to it, and then let them know!

Short URL: http://bitstrips.com/r/G30WL.

I've set the editing on this strip so that friends can edit it. So come and friend me, copy my strip and put yourself in the last frame :-) Please leave a link.

I've never done this before, so I have no idea whether it will work. Don't be shy :-)

Do any of you already have Bitstrips accounts/ characters? Just let me know.

PS: My favorite review of Bitstrips.

Voki

2010-11-16T23:32:00.006+01:00

This is a Voki that I typed text into, and which turned my text to (robotic) speech. Create your own at http://www.voki.com/, and see what it does with the text you type in.
Then, below, I've made a second one using a recording of my own voice. You can either record directly into Voki, or create an mp3 using Audacity or (as I did) GarageBand on a Mac.

Caveat: Voki uses Flash, which is not installed on all computers and sometimes causes trouble.

iSpeech Player

2010-11-16T20:28:00.011+01:00

The simple text-to-speech app iSpeech Player Code lets you embed a player on a regular blog, but the embed code doesn't work on Ning or Posterous. Instead, you need to download the file as an mp3 and upload it to the site.

The app lets you share a link on any of the sites on the left.

For an excellent overview of text to speech spps, see Özge Karaoglu's blogpost.

List of links to tools and websites - ELTAS Tech Tools Day

2010-07-17T15:41:00.025+02:00

General:

ELTAS Sandbox http://eltas-sandbox.ning.com
internet terms http://www.techterms.com/internet.php

Carl Dowse's list
http://www.wiziq.com/
http://www.dimdim.com/
http://vyew.com/site/
http://www.elluminate.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/

Gavin Dudeney’s list
http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?theme=mag&docid=145587
http://www.xtec.cat/cirel/02/webquests/english/2index2.html
http://www.dudeney.com/WebquestsReading.pdf
http://www.mapacourse.com/webquestproject/WebQuestQuiz/webquest_quiz.htm
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr218.shtml
http://www.theconsultants-e.com/webquests/index.asp
http://webquest.org/search/index.php
http://questgarden.com/search/
http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/web_quest/
http://www.aula21.net/Wqfacil/webeng.htm
https://www.teacherweb.com/tweb/twquest.aspx

Anne Hodgson's list
Google image search http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en
Tag Galaxy http://taggalaxy.de/
Earth Album http://www.earthalbum.com/
flickr http://www.flickr.com/
TED http://www.ted.com/
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/
Vimeo http://vimeo.com/
Scribd http://www.scribd.com/
Tuxpi http://www.tuxpi.com/
BeFunky http://www.befunky.com/
Wordle http://www.wordle.net/
Tagul http://tagul.com/
Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/
VocabGrabber http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/
Google Docs Forms http://docs.google.com/
SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/
280 Slides http://280slides.com/
Prezi http://prezi.com/
Dvolver http://www.dvolver.com/live/home.html
Bitstrips http://www.bitstrips.com/landing
Make beliefs comix http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/
X-tranormal http://www.xtranormal.com/
Animoto http://animoto.com/
Wallwisher http://www.wallwisher.com/

Mike Hogan's list:
Johnny Lee TED 2008: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng /johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html
Johnny Lee’s webpage: http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
Smoothboard FAQ: http://www.smoothboard.net/faq
Smoothboard Wiki: http://www.boonjin.com/smoothboard/index.php?title=Main_Page
Infrared pen: http://shop.irpensonline.com/
Smoothboard: http://www.smoothboard.net/
Dabbleboard tour: http://www.dabbleboard.com/tour
Lesson plans using videos in the ELT classroom: http://www.teflclips.com
Free tools and resources for use with an interactive whiteboard:
http://www.triptico.co.uk, http://www.triptico.co.uk/resources/word_magnets/WordMagnets.html
Templates for teacher or student generated review games: http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/gameresources.htm
Making guesses/assumptions with students http://classtools.net/education-games-php/lights_out/

Heike Philp's list:
Virtual Round Table Conference http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/
CErtified Live Online Teachers, www.lancelot.at
Learning live Online, www.avalonlearning.eu

Petra Pointner
www.twitter.com

Byron Russell
www.english360.com

Karenne Sylvester's list:
Prezi (presentation)*
http://prezi.com/b4fdzxgbmx6p/blogging-chatting-discussions-online/
Prezi (student version)
http://prezi.com/929xhfxygtqe/why-do-we-write-student-exercise/
Animoto video http://animoto.com/play/h5Xz2Tmw0NRcIoq7veirhA?from=nc&utm_nooverride=1
Google Docs http://docs.google.com/
Delicious http://delicious.com/KalinagoEnglish

Shelly Terrell's list
Presentation Wiki with all the tools, http://technology4kids.pbworks.com/ELTAS
Leave an audio response on the Voxopop thread, http://www.voxopop.com/group/6b4aaf44-4a46-437b-9281-d692510f193d
Register on Voxopop, http://www.voxopop.com
Register on Vocaroo, http://vocaroo.com/newaccount.php
Voicethread http://voicethread.com/
Woki http://www.voki.com/
Glogster http://www.glogster.com/
Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Apple iLife Garageband http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/
Fotobabble http://www.fotobabble.com/

Andi White
A great website with videos that will walk you through web tools step by step:
teachertrainingvideos.com

Xtra: Barbara Sakamoto's Special PLN (Personal Learning Network) Quiz

What you can learn from my PLN (Teaching Village) http://bit.ly/a9cpYj

What's your favorite learning environment?

2010-07-16T14:44:00.015+02:00

Where's your collaborative learning environment these days? One thing is for sure: It's likely not all in one place! One of my one-to-one students has a Ning and a Posterous blog. My Moodle and home blog are my mainstay, but I'm not teaching anyone there are the moment. A test I wrote for another Moodle course is up and running very well. Then there's a company Ning. I'm learning myself on Twitter, and using all sorts of sites like GoogleReader and Delicious to organize my own learning.

Of all the all-in-one packages, I think Moodle is still the best solution for school and college courses. It provides students activities for higher order learning, like forum, database, glossary and wiki. It's great for blended learning. Much of it is presenting and collecting/ organizing student work (if you need that it's the only choice!), but you can also assign more productive roles to your students.

I very much like the integrated tests for self-assessment. This is a type of learning that may be underestimated. I've been building tests for Spotlight now for two and a half years, so I know a little more about tests than back when I was using Moodle only for collaborative learning. Students like doing interactive quizzes as long as they're short and sweet to keep on track. Moodle includes the most extensive feedback options I have seen anywhere. This is what feedback in a Moodle test looks like (just click these to view them large):

I'm a fan of the test-teach-test approach to learning some basics, and Moodle has all the tools you need for that. Ning and the various tools you could embed in a Ning don't come close. But creating good tests in Moodle takes much longer than you think.

Still, I'm currently going with Ning for company courses, and be it simply to share experience with more trainers, but I'm wondering whether I should switch back. Or look elsewhere.

What are you opting for these days, and why?

Take a snapshot of your screen

2010-07-16T13:34:00.022+02:00

Creating online snapshots is getting more important as we work online and want to save images of the processes to document or explain things. So: What do you use to make screenshots?

With Microsoft Windows, you press the Print Screen button.

I use Mac, and my favorite tool is the incredibly versatile Skitch that lets you annotate and resize pictures (tutorial). The most amazing bit: You simply drag and drop an image into an email. That has come in handy. I've also used it to prepare several of the images on this blog.

I often use it to take snapshots of Wordle and Tagxedo wordclouds. They're great to project on the wall for

predicting
remembering
highlighting and developing
spinning off new discussions
spelling
leading into vocabulary work (collocations, Visual Thessaurus)

Sometimes these wordclouds don't embed properly. I just saw, for instance, in Wordle that there were page breaks that kept the Wordle code from embedding when I copied and pasted it (see picture). To embed in HTML, you have to delete those empty spaces around the line breaks:

In Tagxedo, a "shapely" app, every word in the cloud is a hyperlink. The sophisticated software driving all of that means it doesn't work on some sites, like the Drupal site Spotlight runs on. If you don't really need all those hyperlinks but like the pretty image, you can take a screenshot and just link the image you have captured back to the original page (add the image, then in the rich text editor highlight the picture, click on the link symbol, copy in the original URL):

Handouts ELTAS Tech Tools Day 2010

2010-07-16T11:01:00.014+02:00

ELTAS Tech Tools 2010 Level 1

ELTAS Tech Tools 2010 Level 2

My two handouts are embedded here using Scribd. The first part of the tutorial below shows you how it works:

Games to play in your forum or blog

2010-07-16T06:09:00.012+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

What kinds of games do you play with adult classes?
Which games make them actually apply their language skills?

There are lots of low-tech, easy to set up games you can play using your blog/ comments or your forum.

Text-based games

Any kind of collaborative or prompted writing can be a game as soon as you set rules limiting what students can do, getting their creative juices flowing. They are developing something together, yet watching the others, which all by itself introduced a competitive element. You can set time constraints to raise adrenaline levels and create parallel tasks to increase the sense of competition.

Write a story simply by extending a sentence by a word. Rule: you're not allowed to delete what someone else has written! Here's a sample: Expanding Alice. Each person updating the story copies and pastes the last update into the comments and adds words.
Change a story by changing individual words (sample: Altering Alice).

This posting must happen assynchronously - students may get in each other's way if they work all at once! In Ning students can update their comments for 15 minutes, so they can correct any mixups. BUT you can turn this into a synchronous game by having everyone start their own story as a separate discussion and then having them go around adding to the others'.

You might want to link to Oxford collocations in your Ning or blog and have students refer to them when playing text-based games to keep the language juices flowing.

Picture-based games

Post a puzzling picture as a discussion and have everyone guess what it is. I really like the picture puzzles on Pixelio.de. Register and then just type in "Bildrätsel" into the search box there for free downloadable pictures. The photographers generally include a picture "solution" that you can share when comments start to run dry. Pairs include these:

Interactive games for adults: Fun, but not collaborative!

You can create your own games, and the range is virtually endless. But where is the line between a game and an exercise? Many ready games are Flash-based, which has to be installed on the computers you are using. You'll find interactive language games at Spotlight, designed by Macmillan.

Hat tip to Markus Brendel of Der Englisch Blog: Markus embeds in his blog is Sheepman, a German-English idiom translation game that has sheep biting the dust. The activities on Nik (Peachey)'s Daily English Activities feel like games. It's a big world of games out there (let's talk about it another day).

BUT all of these games can also be played alone. You can beam them up on a whiteboard, or use a projector and have someone type what everyone says.

But in a forum, you're playing together. Collaborating. Even if you're not in the same room.

Task:

Think of a forum game to play with a class of yours.
Write the introductory text.
Post as a Ning discussion.
Invite others to join.

Comix starring you: Bitstrips

2010-07-15T18:28:00.025+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

We live in the age of me (or "mi", to quote Beaker.) Agree or disagree?
Does self-portrayal or self-promotion play a role in your teaching/ your students' learning styles?
Brainstorm: What sort of stories could star your students?

Now, children absolutely love Bitstrips. It's by far the most creative and versatile for online comix.

Watch:

Bitstrips is a social networking site where you can connect with other Bitstrip makers. The site lets you

create characters of all kinds.
create a character that looks like you – your avatar.
give your avatar a role in a comic
find and add characters others have made to create dialogues
create strips of various lengths

Either embed the strip viewer (see below) or embed an image (and resize to fit your blog/Ning)
This is an old one:

Learning the ropes is clearly easier for children. But this is fail-safe. Make your avatar, make a solo-strip, then try including other characters in a new strip, and invite a friend to join. Even if you don't get all of it, it'll work. Go! With a class, just making the avatar will give you great language. The magic is in the process of creation - not necessarily in the comix produced! Caution: It's a time killer and quite addictive. Here's an idea of what the program does:

Very chatty: ubergeek Chris Pirillio says he's been waiting all his life for this type of software and explains how to invite a friend, creating his or her character...

Make your own comix with Make Beliefs Comix

2010-07-15T17:04:00.007+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

What kinds of exchange fit into a 3-4 frame comix format?
Would you prefer to have students make comix alone, in pairs or as a group?

Make Beliefs Comix
Make Beliefs Comix is an easy tool providing cute characters for "children of all ages".
The interface is self-expanatory.
You can create 2-4 frames and add characters, expressions, change position, add speech and thought bubbles... and when you're done you can print out (or print as a pdf) and even send as an email. Careful: Never go back using the back arrow, as you lose all of your work. I did!

Task:

Make a comic with Make Beliefs Comix + email it to yourself and your friends.

Storytelling: Tuxpi to edit a photo

2010-07-15T15:07:00.032+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

Every photo tells a story, they say. But doesn't it in fact usually tell several? It's all a matter of perspective.
So give your students two or more separate storytelling prompts made from one photo, using simple photo editing techniques.

While Gimp is a free program to download to edit photos properly on your computer, Tuxpi is an online app you upload photos to and add photo effects to. Crop it, add frames and effects and you have a completely different image. Each variation can be downloaded separately and again uploaded/ embedded.

Take that wonderful Blackpool staple, Yvette, the Headless Woman.

Task 1:
Give three pictures to three different parties and ask them, "Say, who is Yvette?"

Image protected. Find other pictures to use. Copyright of the National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield 2007.

Task 2:

Find a picture using Google Advanced Image Search (select "labeled for reuse with modification")
Edit it in Tuxpi. Download it.
Open a new discussion in Ning.
Upload/embed the picture. Formulate a task.
Respond to answers.
Respond to someone else's picture task.

Storytelling: A slideshow with Animoto

2010-07-15T13:09:00.014+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

How do you use photographs for storytelling?

Animoto is an audio slideshow application that, in its free form, allows you to show up to 12 slides and a short video and add up to 30 seconds of audio. You can also add a text intro.
Positive: This tool is free and easy to use, so good for students, especially for those who keep photos online.
Negative: You can't change the sequence of the pictures, or map the audio exactly to the individual frames.

The following Animoto slideshow was made using

photos I uploaded from my phone to Flickr and made into an album
an mp3 audio file I made recording myself and using Garageband (part of Apple) including a jingle. You can use Audacity (great freeware) instead to create mp3s.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com

Task:

Share pictures as a slideshow and either

add a short audio file in which you explain them
write a text about them to post along with the slideshow

Step by step:

Select or create an album on Flickr with pictures from an event (up to 12 pictures)
OR find up to 12 pictures online through Google Images. (Use "advanced search" to assure that the Usage Rights state that they are "labeled for reuse".)
Create a 30 second mp3 using Audacity
OR write a paragraph to go with the pictures.
Go to http://animoto.com
For "add pictures", connect to your Flickr album and select it OR select pictures online individually OR upload them from your computer.
Add a title and description to your first slide.
For "music", either upload your mp3 recording OR add a piece of music Animoto offers
Let Animoto complete the mashup.
Embed on your blog or Ning (along with any text.)

Wallwisher

2010-07-15T07:58:00.016+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

What are your first steps online with a class?
How can you engage a group to use the web to communicate with each other?
How can you make what people in your group say visible at a glance?
How can you collect and save ideas/links in one place when your group is connected by "nothing" but the Internet?

Wallwisher is an online sticky board. One person sets up, and anyone with the link can add notes. Notes are limited to 160 characters.

Task 1:
First, use this Wallwisher wall to post something you'd really love to try out. If you've seen an example you want to share, link to it in the bottom part of your sticky. This is our wish list ;). No need to register, just add your name so it's not anonymous. (If you're registered your name shows automatically)

The link: TechTools4AuntieWeb Wallwisher wall

Task 2:
Make your own wall.
What will it be about?

Collecting tips on places to go to keep cool?
Best songs out this year?
Favorite cities?

Now, down to business:

Go to http://www.wallwisher.com
Register (name, email)
Create a wall by selecting a title (at least 6 characters) creating a URL for your wall. Tip: Since the title will be your URL, it has to be unique. Many popular titles are already taken. Use numbers (like 2 and 4) in your title
Leave the default setting: everyone can post + view.
Select an image and background.
Click "done" to submit.
Post a sticky with text and optional link. You can edit you sticky.
Link to this page (URL) in your blog or Ning and invite stickies
OR, under "Do more", click "embed" an image of the wall and copy this code to your blog or Ning.

Please post your link so we can all post on your wall

In her tutorial below, Ana Maria Menezes (Twitter, Life Feast blog) teaches her students not only how to make a wall, but also how to publish it in a blog. A great way to get students creating tasks for their fellow students! For student blogs she recommends the ultra-simple http://www.posterous.com, and so do I.

Xtranormal to script a short animated film

2010-07-14T23:04:00.036+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

What do your students get out of listening to and writing out dialogues?
How is students having puppets or cartoon characters speak the dialogue different from speaking it themselves?
How important is it to your students to present the fruits of their learning to others?
Do you/ How do you correct dialogues?

Some uses for working with dialogues:

review the language of natural conversation
catch typical mistakes
practice functional language

Added value in videos:

become aware of body language and sounds in conversation

Added value in an easy-to-use app:

Fun and motivation! Varieté et surprise! Coolness factor!

Xtranormal is an easy to use "drag and drop 3D animation" program. The "Text-To-Movie" function lets you or your students set the scene, choose characters, type in a dialogue, add body language etc. and turn it into a movie.

Creating a movie and saving it as work in progress is free. That's all you need to have your students view yours and work on making one themselves.

BUT to publish an Xtranormal video, whether your own or your student's work, on a website to show it to others, costs $$. You have to buy points. How many does not become clear. Don't miss Darren Elliott's excellent rant about this new aspect of working with online tools.

Working with what we have:

In my video project, an assstant is being interviewed for a company magazine. As work in progress, I can only show it to you if I am logged in. We could work on it collectively on one computer, with one carrying out the edits the others suggest. For you to be able to access and simply view the video on your own, it would have to be published.

How to edit:

I've made a SHORT VIDEO of my editing this project inside Xtranormal.

Task 1:
We could edit my project together. (Link for me.)

Task 2:
See what other teachers are doing and comment on their ideas:

Ana Maria Mendez has a lesson plan for phrasal verbs using Xtranormal.
ESP writer Jeremy Day has used Xtranormal to present a script and do language work, and shows how (and how not to) in his blog, Specific English.
Kathy Niebuhr has guestposted on Shelly Terrell's Teacher Reboot Camp blog about how she uses it in elementary school, including a video announcement.
Note: The Xtranormal YouTube channel contains highly entertaining, completely inappropriate material. The Xtranormal site itself has more suitable videos.
Please add any ideas and blogposts you know of in the comments below.

Task 3:
Create a short dialogue using Xtranormal. Make it as natural as possible.

Go to http://www.xtranormal.com and sign up.
Use a showpack with two characters to make a text-to-movie video.
adapt the characters in the "Design the scene" area at the bottom of the page. Note that you can choose from a wide range of voices/ nationalities.
Write the script and "direct the action" by dragging in features and selecting options.
Preview and save.
Sorry: We can't share unless you buy credit. :(

Link + embed media to start a discussion

2010-07-14T13:55:00.020+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

What kind of media do you want to share with your students?
How do you think they will to respond to media?
How can you encourage them to respond?

The tech basics:

Online you can create a link from your site to any webpage containing the content you want your students to see.
You can only embed a file so it looks like an element of your webpage from sites that are explictly set up as filesharing sites for documents, games, pictures, presentations or videos. These sites provide you with the specific embed code.

Easy to use filesharing sites include:

videos on YouTube, Vimeo and TED
pictures on flickr
- use Tag Galaxy to find pictures for your subject on flickr
- create your own gallery on flickr to collect your favorite pictures
documents on Scribd
presentations on Slideshare
wordclouds on Wordle

You can

embed media others have made directly from such sites
embed media others have embedded on their sites
create such media yourself, upload them to the filesharing site and then embed them from there on your site

Embed media when you can, but link...

when you want learners to go to the site where you found them (to introduce them to that environment)
when the embed code doesn't work on your site (e.g. Google Docs in Ning) - and always check your page when you make other changes to see whether the embed code still works flawlessly
when the media is in context and you want to refer to that.
when copyright restrictions apply

Here is a SHORT VIDEO that shows how I use embedding and linking in a class log in Ning.

Work with two tabs open:

It's easiest to have both your and the other page open at once.
To open a second tab, press control +T.

How to link to anything:

Open your page.
In your second tab, find the page you want to link to.
Copy (highlight, press Control + C) the URL into your mouse.
Go to your text, activate "edit" to open the rich text editor
highlight what will be hypertext.
Click on the "link" symbol.
Paste in the code (press Control + V).
Some rich text editors let you chose between "open in the same page" and "open in a new page". These also let you label your link: the text that shows when you mouseover.
Save.

How to embed anything:

Open your page, click edit and create a line of empty space where the embed should go. Type a space marker, like XXX, to help you find this space again.
Select HTML mode (not rich text editor).
Open a second tab (pressing Control + T).
In the second tab, go the website/ document you want to embed.
Find the embed code for your document
Copy (highlight, then press Control + C) the code.
Go back, find your space marker.
Paste the code onto your marker (highlight, press Control + V).
Check the embed code for width. Change the width to 425 for most blogs.
Save. Preview.
Only after saving should you make any changes using your rich text editor, e.g. aligning your files or changing the size by dragging the edges.
Publish.

Task 1: Start a discussion using a picture

Find a picture using Google Image. Make sure you are allowed to reproduce it (advanced search) Find the URL.
Open a new discussion in the Forum on the ELTAS Tech Tools Ning.
Type an introductory sentence, for orientation and directions.
Below it, use the rich text editor to embed the picture.
Below that, type in a question.
Save.
When responses come in, respond to them.
Visit at least one other video and respond to the question.

Here's a SHORT VIDEO on how to create links and embed media.

(Thank you to Jo Westcombe for the article used in the video!)

Task 2: Start a discussion using a video

Find a short video (under 3 minutes) to discuss on YouTube.
Open a new discussion in the Forum on the ELTAS Tech Tools Ning.
Type an introductory sentence, for orientation and directions.
Below it, embed the video.
Below that, ask a question.
When responses come in, respond to them.
Please visit at least one other video and respond to the question.

GoogleDocs in Ning to collect vocabulary

2010-07-14T08:37:00.030+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

Does it make sense to keep a vocabulary list for the entire class?
Or does each individual have his/her own list that can not be generalized?
How do you collect vocabulary in your classes?
Have you tried other systems?
What are the pros and cons of each?
How does collecting vocabulary in digital form differ from having it in a notebook?

What I'm doing:
One of my company courses now has a Ning. We use this collaborative learning environment primarily to get organized, as the participants have rather demanding jobs that make them have to miss quite a few lessons. The Ning lets them check things neatly in our course log. I can embed any media we used, so that means fewer copies of handouts to pass on to those who didn't show up. We also organize our extra-curricular events there.

One thing they've asked me for over the years is a vocabulary list that they could fill in. We've used handwritten sheets and copied them, but that doesn't work well, especially when they are coming irregularly. So what I've done is to make a Google Docs Form using the questions:

English word
sample phrase/ sentence
sample phrase/ sentence
Definiton
German equivalent

Any user with the link to the live form can enter information into that form. They don't need a Google acount.
And any user can read (but not edit!) a Google Spreadsheet that has been published as a web page. When new content is added through the form, this web page is updated automatically. On the spreadsheet select the settings: Publish + Automatically republish when changes are made.

So all I had to do is get my students to sign up for Ning. Then I created a text box in Ning and added two links:

to the live form to enter new words
to the output spreadsheet to view our list.

The text box also contains some reference links:

Macmillan dictionary
Oxford collocations
Corpus Concordance English
American Corpus
Linguee
Leo

Now they'll just have to start filling it up!

The limits of Google Docs in Ning:
Unfortunately, you can't embed a Google Form or Spreadsheet in Ning the way you can in a blog or in Moodle. This is connected to internal formatting in Ning. Pity! It would be nice to have everything under our Ning URL. Adding a link is only second-best.

Task:
Create a vocabulary list template using Google Doc Form.
Create categories like:

word
sample phrase
explanation
translation

Give it a focus that other EFL teachers can relate to (e.g. words in the local dialect)
Link to it so we can add vocabulary.

Add a comment to someone's blog

2010-07-11T10:32:00.039+02:00

The ELTAS Tech Tools Day includes a workshop for online newbies introducing the basics of online communication. Those first steps can be daunting, and plenty of great teachers are a bit afraid of taking them. Here are a few

Pre-task questions:

Q: Why should I comment on a blogpost? I can send that person an email if I know them and really want to say something. And if I don't know them, isn't commenting just showing off?
A: This is a question of the changing culture in our profession. I look forward to a lively discussion with you!

Q: If I post a comment to a blogpost I have read online, the page looks different and the interface asks me to identify myself in some way, sometimes type in some letters from a visual code (a captcha, right?) or even add my email address. Won't I get lots of spam if I type in my email address?
A: No. Your email address is only published to the blogger and is visible only in the blogger's backend, the admin area. Seeing your email address tells the blogger that your entry is not spam to his or her blog. Since spam is a fact of life, though, you should activate spam filters on your email account(s) anyway.

Q: I wrote a comment, but it didn't show up when I looked at the blog. Why?
A: The first time you comment on a blog, it is put on hold. The blogger has to allow comments by you first. Patience is sometimes needed, as some bloggers do have a life, I've been told.

Q: I want to add a link to my comment. How do I do it?
A: Just copy and paste the link into the interface (include the http:// at the beginning!). Will it show up as a hyperlink?

Only if the comments function has a built-in converter from Rich Text (the formatted text) to HTML (the code that runs the websites). Some blogs do, some don't.
If your link doesn't show up as a hyperlink after you post it, don't worry. Next time, try adding the necessary HTML code to create a hyperlink. Here's a simple HTML table, and your HTML code for hyperlinks is at the bottom on the left:

Q: Can you just run through the whole process?
A: Yep. Here's a video.

Video made with Jing, a great screen capture tool.

Task:
Add a comment to a blog.... for instance, to this post!
Take the challenge and add a hyperlink to your comment!
For example, can you share a site you like to go to for teaching ideas?

Self-correcting quizzes with instant feedback

2010-07-10T10:11:00.029+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task

Pre-task thinking:

There are advantages to using Google apps for everything. If your students create a Google email account, all forms and other notifications map beautifully in the e-mails they receive.

So let's say you want to give your student a self-correcting quiz they can see their results in, and want to go with Google Docs Form. Your primary goal then is not to assess, but to give your quiz takers a quick fix for formative self-evaluation and motivation, with at least the minimal feedback whether they got the question right or wrong.

You can use Google Docs Form. I've doctored the assessment test (see last blog entry) to change it into this type of quiz. Try it out!

Loading...

Feel free to compare the test you've taken with its backend here.

Karenne Sylvester taught me how she creates these tests for a student of hers:

The questions are one to a page.
Picking the right answer takes the test taker to the next page.
Wrong answer? The test taker gets the message "Wrong answer! Please go back and try again."

Step by step:

Create your quiz using Google Docs Form.
After each question, add a page break. Page titles ="question 1" "question 2" etc.
Add two page breaks at the end, title = "Wrong Answer" and "Well done!"
Edit each question individually by activating the "go to page based on answer" box: For the correct answer select "Continue to next page". For all incorrect answers select "go to page X (Wrong Answer)". For the last question select "Well done!" Save everything.

Task:

Create a self-correcting quiz with feedback using Google Docs Form.
Please create a link to your document so we can try your quiz out.

An assessment test with Google Docs

2010-07-09T17:01:00.031+02:00

This is another task for the ELTAS Tech Tools Day.

Pre-task thinking:

Let's say you want to send clients an assessment test for them to do from home, and all the data should be evaluated instantly, without you having to correct it. You would like to have all of the data neatly in one table, easily available. This could be for a general assessement test that you use again and again.

I've got a very short test on Making appointments on the phone just to show what the front end of such a self-grading test could look like to the client:

Loading...

When you do it, you'll notice:

you get no feedback!

That's because all of the answers go into the spreadsheet and I have not included a correct/incorrect message. This may be a bit weird for the assessment test takers.
It's fantastic for you, though. Have a look behind the scenes at the spreadsheet, and you'll see:

the answers are neatly entered in a spreadsheet with a formula that evaluates the answer and gives points accordingly, which are added up.
Note that new data that has gone in needs to be formatted simply dragging the formula in each column down over the new data below.

Step by step:

If you haven't already, please study the Google Docs Form/ Spreadsheet entry on this blog first.
Then watch this video explaining the self-grading feature.
Finally come back and study the sample spreadsheet and its formula.

How the formula works:

The trick is to set up your quiz and enter the correct answers yourself through the form. Then go into the spreadsheet itself and add those answers as headers, or questions, at the top of new columns. Follow up by entering a simple formula in each of the columns below the answers to allow the correct answers you enter in the spreadsheet to be checked against the answers given by the test takers.

This is the formula in words:
If the student's answer is equal to your answer, then he/she gets X points; otherwise he/she gets 0 points

In our case, I've decided to give each correct answer X=20 points, adding up to a total of 100 for the 5 questions. Look at the formula:

In H2 you'll see "=if(C2=$H$1,20,0)"
In H3 you'll see "=if(C3=$H$1,20,0)"
In I2 you'll see "=if(D2=$I$1,20,0)"
In I3 you'll see "=if(D3=$I$1,20,0)"

...etc.

The $ signs before the correct answer field let you avoid changing that particular letter/ numeral in the formula when you drag the formula down the page.

Task:

Create a short self-grading assessment test.
Post a link to it so we can take it.

Dear teachers, this may look daunting at first, but never fear, try it out and you'll see it's doable and soon it'll be a snap. Any and all questions welcome!

A comprehension quiz using ProProfs Quiz Maker

2010-07-09T12:24:00.022+02:00

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task

Pre-task thinking:

Can self-correcting online quizzes motivate learners, and if so, how?
When would you refer to ones available online?
When would you want to write one yourself?
What would your students get out of creating a quiz and posting it for the others?

Barbara Sakamoto is using the ProProf Quiz Maker, a simple and free quiz-making tool, for her quiz series, "What you can learn from my PLN". (Last quiz here.) Each quiz features five blogposts on teaching, and you can even win Japanese sweets if you get the questions right! And now she's making a quiz especially on tech tools and using technology in time for the ELTAS Tech Tools Day.

So please do her latest quiz. Then come back and create a quiz of your own using the software.

Step by step:

Select a presentation or an article or blogpost online.
Formulate comprehension questions and possible answers, including one correct one and two or more distractors.
Register as a user on ProProfs Quiz Maker.
Go to Create a Quiz and select "Scored Quiz"
Type a quiz title, add tags and an introduction.
Type in your questions and add a comment containing a tip (but not the answer).
Edit your score settings.
Select your quiz category.
Press "Create a quiz".
Embed HTML code in your collaborative learning environment OR do what Barbara did, create a link to the quiz form.
Note that you can change your quiz after saving. However, all entries by quiz takers will then be reset to zero.
Please post a link so that we can participate in your quiz.

Google Docs Form/Spreadsheet for contact, surveys, quizzes and feedback

2010-07-04T08:44:00.023+02:00

On 17 July, ELTAS is hosting a Tech Tools Day for teachers of English. To prepare for it, I'll be posting tasks on this blog. The first task:

Make a survey or contact form on your blog using Google Docs Form/Spreadsheet. This form can also be emailed to users. It allows respondents to input information that is then collected neatly in one spreadsheet. Some possible uses for this function are:

Creating a general contact form
Providing a sign-up form for specific courses
Creating a needs analysis form for potential students
Quizzing your students on content taught (open questions, you will assess)
Feedback on student work published on your blog or Ning or other Collaborative Learning Environment by everyone in your class
Feedback on your teaching by participants in your course

To demonstrate how Form/Spreedsheet works, here is a survey made using the app.

Loading...

This is how Google introduces their app:

Step by step:

Go to docs.google.com If you don't have a Google account yet, follow the directions and create one
Go to "Create New/Form" or "/Spreadsheet". These two are simply different modalities to create the same questions. If you go through Spreadsheet, click on "Form" to edit the form itself.
Enter title, intro text and begin adding individual questions by clicking "add item".
Item title is the question, additional details can go in the second text box for each question. Item types include text (one line box), paragraph, multiple choice (only one answer), checkbox (multiple answers), choose from a list (only one item), scale (viz 1-5) and grid. You can also format headers and page breaks.
In editing mode, you can change the sequence of your items.
When you're done, save.
Select a template for your form and save.
To embed in a blog, go to "More actions" and click "embed" for the HTML code. Copy and paste this code into your blog.
To send by email to a selected group, Go to "Email this form" and enter the email addresses.
To see the results of your survey, go to "See Responses".
If you want to publish the results of your survey to a select group or to everyone, go to "See Responses" and select "Spreadsheet". There, in the right-hand corner, you will see the "Share" button. Select whether the sharing settings "Public on the web", "Anyone with the link" (your group only, whom you send a secure link to) or "Private" (you only). You can change these settings at any time. Then email your group, or publish the URL of the spreadsheet on your blog.

Your task:
Decide on the function your Form will have. Create the form and publish it to everyone on your blog. Please post a link to your Form here, under "Comments".

Blog carnivals to motivate you to share your ideas

2010-05-27T11:55:00.010+02:00

There are several options if you want to write a blogpost to join the online community, without committing to writing a whole blog.

1. First of all, there is an EFL blog carnival every two months. Larry Ferlazzo invites submissions and hosts. Anything related to the teaching of English as a second language, including student work, is welcome. Your writing is first published in a blog of your choice, and then the link is entered in the carnival.

What to do if you don't have a blog?

Open one using Posterous.com.The easiest solution around! Perfect if you want to post only occasionally!
Write in our group blog Ask Auntie Web, a blog with a techie focus.
Contribute a guest post to the most excellent http://www.teachingvillage.org/ run by Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, which currently contains a lovely article by Emma Herrod on using LEGO rods (the way you may have seen Cuisinaire rods used). Directions on how to become a guest blogger are here.

June 1st hosted by Mary Ann Zehr, Learning the Language

August 1st will be at David Deubelbeiss’ EFL Classroom 2.0

October 1st will be at Ms. Flecha’s My Life Untranslated: Adventures of a New ESL Teacher in New York City.

You can contribute a post to any of these by using an easy submission form.
If the form does not work, you can send the link to Larry Ferlazzo using his Contact Form.

You can see all the previous fourteen editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here:

EFL Carnival of Lessons

2010-05-02T12:47:00.019+02:00

Karenne Sylvester has just published the latest EFL blog carnival, dedicated to lesson plans. She's put the whole thing in a great looking presentation on her blog, Kalinago English.

I just had a look at them all (same order of sequence as presented) and took short notes on who did what:

Sabrina De Vita - reviews the Present Simple and Present Continuous with a movie segment
Mike Harrison - has students lipreading from a video, a new and interesting approach
Nightwalker - is teaching students how to brainstorm most effectively
Johanna Stirling - created a spelling code to crack / spelling puzzle to solve
Shelly Terrell - presents Tagul, a tagcloud builder, and vocabulary resources to work with
Anne Hodgson - uses 2 videos for business English (writing reports, small talk)
Jessie Voigts - a collection of icebreaker ideas for YL and teens
Larry Ferlazzo - does a class survey with activities about sleeping enough
Mr. Foteah - is awarding medals for words
Nick Jaworski - uses a video his students find funny to lead into creative writing
Diana Diodati Konrad - is setting up the framework for negotiating in business Engl.
Jeremy Day - is reflecting on how and how not to teach ESP
Vicki Hollett - her dictation is "similar but different" to the listening comprehension
Arjana Blazic - turns texts into Hotpotatoes gapfills, also has students writing
Natasa Bozic Grojic - has nine roles to play in an argument over children using mobiles
Barbara Sakamoto - uses the "sight barrier" information gap technique and realia with pre-intermediate adult learners
Janet Bianchini - explores how to teach ppt from her own learning experience
Eva Buyuksimkesyan - discusses the pros and cons of playing games in class

What a wealth of lessons! All the links here.

Past tense (irregular verbs)

2010-03-16T19:28:00.003+01:00

Here's a lesson that I put together for pre-int students which presents the past tense (irregular verbs).
Irregular Past Tense Worksheet

Preparing a Negotiation Role Play - Lesson description

2010-03-05T17:45:00.005+01:00

Aim: to practice negotiating skills and the language of negotiating
Resources: worksheet, Preparing a Negotiation Role Play
Download: worksheet pdf
Preparing a Negotiation Role Play
Level : Adult learners B2 and up
Length: 60 mins

Method: Preparation: The students are put into small groups and asked to think of a real or hypothetical negotiation. They complete the worksheet and hand it to another group.
The other group may ask any questions they have about the situation.

Task: The groups then role play the negotiation they have been given.
At the end of the role play each group writes a short report.

Analysis and feedback: At the end of each report the group which prepared the role play can comment; "Was the outcome the one they expected (if hypothetical) or the actual outcome (if real)?" "Were there other options which were not considered?" etc.
The trainer then gives feedback.

By Diana Diodati-Konrad

Share your lesson idea

2010-02-09T08:12:00.009+01:00

Do you have a lesson plan, a warmer, a game, a controlled practice unit that has worked for you?
Would you like to be part of a community of teachers who share lesson ideas?
Would you enjoy having your idea published for all of the interested teaching community to see?

Then join the upcoming 15th EFL blog carnival, the Carnival of English Language Lessons, hosted by Karenne Sylvester.
Here's how:

Write up your lesson plan.
If you have a blog, publish it there.
If you don't have one, publish it on Ask Auntie Web. Contact us at info (at) melta (dot) de. We'd love to publish it for you.

Then register your published post (or we'll register it for you) on the blog carneval site using Karenne's form here.

Deadline: March 21.
Publication: April 1.

With this focus, the 15th blog carnival is sure to be a winner. Come on, everybody, join in!

See the EFL Carnival Archive

What is a blog carnival?
A blog carnival is a tool used by bloggers to promote their work. In a classic blog carnival, one site is designated as the host or organizer, and participants send in permanent links, or "permalinks", to posts on the theme of the carnival. The organizer collects the links in a single post, which becomes the starting point to all of the participating blogs. Good for readers, because it gives them access to a wide variety of blogs; Good for bloggers, who appreciate the publicity. (Summary of this definition)

The 30 Goals Challenge

2010-02-06T09:14:00.006+01:00

If you missed Shelly Terrell's "The 30 Goals Challenge" in January, she has made the 30 posts into an e-book. She blogged about a professional development challenge with an essential personal element, each connected to an aspect of paedagogy, online marketing or social networking, every single day for a month. Reflective and integrative. If you're thinking about where you're going as a trainer/ English teacher, and are looking for focus, you will certainly find inpiration here.

Calling all collaborators

2010-02-01T04:19:00.014+01:00

Hello MELTA members,

Ask Auntie Web is our blog, the online sister to the column in our MELTA Newsletter. Like the print column, the blog is looking for collaborators, and seeking to revive old ones (you know who you are!). Would you like to contribute a blog post? It could contain tips, ideas, reflections, food for thought in the following areas:

online resources and tools to help build your teaching repertoire
your experience and questions re the teaching you have done using these resources and tools
upcoming teacher training in these areas, or reflections on training you've had
social networking to build professional connections with other professionals
gadget talk and computer tips that help you simplify or spruce up your life
the specific experience of trying to make it as a teacher in Germany in 2010
lamentos, rants, musings, exultations in general, just to have had the fun experience of posting something online for your colleagues to read

Please get in touch with me, Anne c/o info (at) melta (dot) de
or more directly on Twitter: http://twitter.com/annehodg

Özge Karaoğlu's Blog

2010-01-23T17:37:00.015+01:00

Many members of MELTA (our Munich English Language Teachers Association, which this blog "belongs" to) are getting more and more interested in teaching young learners. Next to Business English, YL seem to be our main target group.

Now, if any of you YL teachers don't know her yet, there's no time like the present to meet Özge Karaoğlu, a kindergarten teacher in Istanbul whose blog ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org is a trove of technical innovations for teaching YL. She won the MEDEA Award for Creativity and Innovation 2009 for Daisy and Drago, a series of animated films her kindergarten pupils made. She had them develop and draw the story, and speak the texts and record their voices, so it is absolutely do-it-yourself, using high tech to create something absolutely delightful and original. It's the second feature of the MEDEA Showreel, following right after the Overall Award Winner 2009 (from 2:23):

She guest-blogged on this project on Ken Wilson's great blog, and I'd like to send you all to her post there. She wrote:

I do enjoy being a kindergarten teacher; it makes me feel I am important for someone else and it is very rewarding. Children inspire me every day. You can do as many projects as you can do with older kids. This amazes you and others more, because they are so young and enthusiastic and can do great things in spite of their limited world, with their limited language. This is the story of how we filmed and fulfilled our dreams.

Also: Visit the Daisy and Drago wiki, which contains information on the book Özge wrote and based the project on, and the making of!

Fiction in action: Whodunnit

2010-01-22T13:02:00.009+01:00

From the website of ABAX, an independent publisher of ELT materials in Tokyo and San Francisco:

The World's first free-to-share commercial ELT textbook has just been published by Adam Gray and Marcos Benevides. Their new reading title, Fiction in Action: Whodunit, is available as an eBook for free under a Creative Commons license. The print book will be available this spring.

Download free eBook here

Fiction in Action: Whodunit is something not seen before, a textbook designed to act as a bridge to extensive reading. Over 12 units encompassing two original six-chapter stories, the book introduces students to the hows and the pleasures of reading accessible fiction in English. Fiction in Action focuses on extended and connected passages in one genre—in this case, the detective story—familiarizing students with the language, style and literary conventions associated with this form of story. A special feature of the text is tasks that are not merely supportive of but intrinsic to the stories.

I'm reading it through right now and really like the interactive elements. I've got just the course to use this book in: a company course that wants a bit of reading on the side!

If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online

2010-01-21T14:23:00.009+01:00

From the NYT:

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

... The report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students in grades 3 to 12 that was conducted from October 2008 to May 2009.

On average, young people spend about two hours a day consuming media on a mobile device, the study found. They spend almost another hour on “old” content like television or music delivered through newer pathways like the Web site Hulu or iTunes. Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them.

“I use it as my alarm clock, because it has an annoying ringtone that doesn’t stop until you turn it off,” Francisco Sepulveda said of his phone. “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep. It lets me talk on the phone and watch a video at the same time, or listen to music while I send text messages.”

Francisco’s mother, Janet Sepulveda, bought his phone, a Sidekick LX, a year ago when the computer was not working, to ensure that he had Internet access for school. But schoolwork has not been the issue.

“I’d say he uses it about 2 percent for homework and 98 percent for other stuff,” she said.

Continue reading here: New York Times, 20 January 2009

PS: Don't miss the readers' comments here, viz. the parents' side of the battle:

"If you define living as experiencing and interacting with your environment then these gadget lovers are not living. They deafen themselves to the world. They notice little, and experience a tiny fraction of the environment they live in. Their interpersonal relationships are mediated by gadgets and thus superficial. Without their gadgets, life is boring, and simply not worth living. The lives they lead are without any real substance and pathetic."

"Family reunion day last month with 23 members present. The five kids who were old enough to be interested in electronic toys (all girls, ages 9 to 15) huddled together in a corner of the living room with their camera phones and i-Pods and spent most of their party time that way. Socializing, to the extent there was any, consisted of the older girls teaching the 9-year-old (mine) how to operate them."

"As a parent I can report that this is NOT news. All of this stuff DOES tend to reduce a child's ability to pay attention and concentrate, and to prioritize the important (school, anyone?) and the unimportant. Problem is, you can't just take it all away once they have it - they go really nuts. It's like a drug."

Getting your students involved in the Read/Write Web

2010-01-18T12:46:00.010+01:00

At MELTA we have a workshop coming up on 27 February 2010 with Karenne Sylvester, who has been teaching blended learning courses using Ning, a social networking cum online course creation tool. She's started an online series on how to learn English on her blog. Her first post is on how she gets her students reading blogs, and includes the blogs she recommends to her students, and they include my favorites and introduced me to some new ones, especially Dominic Cole's, a blogger who keeps up not one but three very interesting blogs. Really cool. This is Karenne's list:

Dominic Cole's: http://alittlebutoften.blogspot.com/
Toby Crawley's: http://bite-sized-english.com/
Markus Brendell: http://www.der-englisch-blog.de/
Neal Chambers': http://www.englishspark.com/en/blogs
Berni Wall's: http://www.gapfillers.co.uk/
Nik Peachey's : http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/
Jeffrey Hill's: http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/
Clare Whitmell's: http://www.theenglishweb.com/
Chiew P Nang's: http://acliltoclimb.blogspot.com/
Sue Lyon Jones': http://esolcourses.blogspot.com/
Anne Hodgson's (yeah! thanks!): http://annehodgson.de/

I'd add Dominic Cole's main blog: http://www.dcielts.com/archive/
Karenne will be starting up her own blog for learners again, too.

And what about the Business Spotlight and Spotlight crowd, who write real blogs, and nice ones, too, but for a magazine? For some reason the blogging world hasn't accepted them as one of their own. I'm not sure why that is. Is it unacceptable to recommend a magazine blog? Or is it that they're not engaging on Twitter, or commenting on other people's blogs? I figure that might be a faux pas in the blogging community. Yet the blogs are clearly directed at a language learner, and are explicitly educational. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Debbie Capras's: http://www.business-spotlight.de/blogs/deborah-capras/
Ian McMaster's: http://www.business-spotlight.de/blogs/ian-mcmaster/
Eamonn Fitzgerald's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/eamonn-fitzgerald/
Dagmar Taylor's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/dagmar-taylor
Mike Pilewski's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/mike-pilewski

Teaching the generations

2010-01-17T09:25:00.009+01:00

Steve Corbett published a must-read portrait of the four generations learning today:

"Traditionalists (Born between 1920 - 1945). They are also called the Silent Generation, the War Baby Generation, or the WWII Veteran Generation.
Baby Boomers (Born between 1946–1964). They are also called the "Me" Generation because their Traditionalist parents wanted to give them a good life.
Generation X (Born between 1965–1980). This generation is the children of both Traditionalists and Baby Boomers.
Millennials (Born between 1981–2000). They are also called Generation Y, Generation ME, Generation WE, or Nexters."

He created a Venn diagram summarizing the generations' learning styles, saying that it's a generalization. But much rings true.

I recognize myself as a typical GenXer:

"the first high technology generation"
"independent. Will work in teams when absolutely necessary, but would prefer to work alone"
"Like to use technology as a means for access and sharing information."
"Entrepreneurial – Prefer to build portable skills. ... Prefer solving problems on their own."
"Informal Learners - Prefer to be engaged in their learning, instead of being passive recipients. Dislike structured environments."

The points of conflict I see with the Baby Boomers, our older colleagues:
Baby Boomers tend to be

"Team Oriented - Embraces a team based approach to everything"
"Competitive - Value peer competition"

The points of conflict I see with Millenials:
Millenials tend to be

"Collaborative - Team players with a capital T."
"Structure Driven - Prefer structure in the classroom and are accustomed to following rules."

How about you, do any of these issues ring your bells?

Thank you to Neal Davis.

Richard Wiseman

2009-12-31T10:58:00.003+01:00

Shelly posted Richard Wiseman's "Top 10 quirky science tricks for parties" on her blog:

...which led me to Richard Wiseman's lovely blog itself, with his "Friday puzzles", a nice resource if you're teaching people with an interest in science!

David Crystal: Which English?

2009-12-28T10:42:00.006+01:00

Are you familiar with the Macmillan YouTube channel? They've posted great interviews and presentations by their eminent writers. Some MELTA members enjoyed going to IATEFL together last spring and heard a talk and a reading by David Crystal. Here he presents the problem of choosing which variety of English to teach:

Which variety do you teach, and why?

I generally teach American English, my native tongue. But when I've been doing a lot of writing and translating for clients who have ordered British English, I am sometimes confused into using British English pronouns and expressions. Just last sumnmer, to my acute embarassment, I found myself saying "at the weekend", which to me sounds wrong, wrong, wrong. Does that ever happen to you? Any experience to relate?

Merry Christmas, allerseits

2009-12-24T03:48:00.002+01:00

This was sent by Joan, and I can't resist posting for our German-English teachers' community. :)

A little Weihnachtsgedicht

When the snow falls wunderbar,
and the children happy are.
When the Glatteis on the street,
and we all a Glühwein need.
Then you know, es ist soweit.
she is here, the Weihnachtszeit.

Every Parkhaus is besetzt,
weil die people fahren jetzt.
All to Kaufhof, Mediamarkt,
kriegen nearly Herzinfarkt.
Shopping hirnverbrannte things,
and the Christmasglocke rings.

Mother in the kitchen bakes,
Schoko-, Nuss- and Mandelkeks.
Daddy in the Nebenraum,
schmücks a Riesen-Weihnachtsbaum.
He is hanging off the balls,
then he from the Leiter falls.

Finally the Kinderlein,
to the Zimmer kommen rein.
And it sings the family
Schauerlich: "Oh, Chistmastree!"
And the jeder in the house,
is packing the Geschenke aus.

Mama finds unter the Tanne,
eine brandnew Teflon-Pfanne.
Papa gets a Schlips and Socken,
everybody does frohlocken.
President speaks in TV,
all around is Harmonie.
Bis mother in the kitchen runs,
im Ofen burns the Weihnachtsgans.
And so comes die Feuerwehr,
with Tatü, tata daher.
And they bring a long, long Schlauch,
and a long, long Leiter auch.
And they schrei - "Wasser
marsch!",
Christmas now is in the Arsch.

Merry Christmas, merry Christmas,
hear the music, see the lights
Frohe Weihnacht, Frohe Weihnacht.
Merry Christmas allerseits...

Edublog Awards, the polls are open

2009-12-11T07:42:00.003+01:00

Vote for the blogs of your choice from the shortlists here: http://edublogawards.com.
A great way to see where the education community stands at the moment.
A few distinct communities seem to be evolving, and it's exciting to try and find your feet in them. More hands-on techy? More critical theory of technology and society? More inspirational/ personal mental guru? More paedagogical-analytical? More community-building and sharing? As they say, it's all good. And I'm still stumbling through. Do you notice yourself being drawn more and more to any one community of blogs?

ELTons 2010

2009-12-08T14:20:00.006+01:00

Here are the British Council ELTon 2010 Awards Nominees.

Which of these resources do you know, use, like? How, why?

Nik's Daily English Activities – Blog – Nik Peachey
Vocabulary Matrix – Book – Heinle ELT, Cengage Learning
Teaching Unplugged – Book – Delta Publishing
www.teachertrainingvideos.com – Russell Stannard
Fast Track to Reading: Accelerated Learning for EFL & ESOL Students – Book – Garnett Education
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5th edition – Pearson Education
Teaching with Bear: Using puppets in the language classroom with young learners – Book, DVD, Bear Puppet – Oxford University Press
IH Online Teacher Training Institute – International House World Organisation Ltd (IHWO)
The Bell Online Delta – online training – The Bell Educational Trust
Primary i-Box – classroom presentation software – Cambridge University Press

Edublog Awards, take 5!

2009-12-07T17:23:00.022+01:00

I'd like to nominate the following blogs for http://edublogawards.com

Just keeping it very simple and on the ground, I've left some of the categories out. I'd like to express my deep gratitude to all who have networked with this blog and my home blog, the Island Weekly. There are so many bloggers around now that it's quite hard to keep up, and most of the blogs I read don't really fit into this grid; they're more personal and individual. Blogging isn't really about the best and the brightest. Never mind. Some of the main movers and shakers whom I owe a great deal to are:

Best individual blog:
Alex "I don't do Twitter" Case http://www.tefl.net/alexcase

Best collaborative blog:
It's his blog, but he invites many guest bloggers, so it seems very collaborative
Lindsay "Six Things" Clandfield http://sixthings.net

Most influential individual post:
Karenne "Here, There and Everywhere" Sylvester
http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2009/08/blogging-english-language-teachers-tech.html
Her blog carneval and her Ning for bloggers in EFL, BELTfree, kindly put little blogs on the map.

Best resource sharing blog:
Nik "Tech Tools" Peachey http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com
...but there are so many fabulous newcomers, e.g. Ozge Karaoglu
(for Young Learners)

Best individual tweeter:
Shelly "Reboot" Terrell http://twitter.com/ShellTerrell

Most influential tweet based discussion:
Teacher Tuesday, #edchat

Best teacher blog:
Marisa "Let's think this through properly" Constantinides http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org

Best student blog:
Markus "Englisch mit sch" Brendel http://www.der-englisch-blog.de

Best new blog
There are so many, so I'm saying, since September:
Darren "Lives of Teachers" Elliott http://www.livesofteachers.com

Best elearning / corporate education blog
Deborah "Wise Words" Capras http://www.business-spotlight.de/blogs/deborah-capras
and my great colleagues at Spotlight, especially Dagmar Taylor (whom I suspect I'm not allowed to nominate, but she's great.)

Best educational use of audio:
Sean "Listen a Minute" Banville http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com

Best educational use of video / visual
Jamie "Say hi, Dad" Keddie http://www.teflclips.com

Best educational use of virtual worlds
Nergiz "SLExperiments" Kern http://slexperiments.edublogs.org/

Lifetime achievement
Larry "Community" Ferlazzo http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org

Also see Shelly's shortlist - her blog is getting more populated and lively every day.

Looking at this list I'm a little dissatisfied. These blogs are great, don't get me wrong. It's just... So where are the categories that move me just a bit more, if I'm honest? The blog I read when I want to laugh? The one that has the songs I love? The one that has the news from a slightly different perspective and gives me the idea I need to jumpstart my lesson? The one that is charming and reminds me how different we all are? The one where there is sure to be a rollicking good fight? Or the one that is simply beautiful to look at? The one written by someone who really knows how to write (those are my favorites)? The one that has intellectual stamina that just reading it gets my brain into gear? The one where I find the best book tips? The one whose writer I'm secretly in love with? Or whom I'd like to meet because I think I've found a kindred spirit? Or the one who's been around the world and makes my feet want to go?

Do you read blogs like that, too?

Russell Stannard

2009-12-05T14:57:00.004+01:00

Russell Stannard has written with this request:

"I have been shortlisted for ELTons British Council awards
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-innovation-awards.htm
I need to send in some examples of what people think of www.teachertrainingvideos.com and why they like it. If you like the site and use it, can you just write a few lines explaining why you like the site and how it has helped you?"

Give Jamie Keddie feedback

2009-10-18T23:31:00.004+02:00

Jamie Keddie, now known to MELTA members through his recent workshop (which I, sadly, missed), is revamping his website and has asked for feedback. Can you give him some?

Which lessons have you found promising?
Which have been useful? To which effect?
Have you carried any of them out to the letter?
Or have you used them, but adapted them in some way?

I think we are probably all ready to move from the mere fact that YouTube videos can be used to using them to promote learning as effectively as possible. Jamie is at the leading edge here.

http://www.teflclips.com/?p=260#comments

What should we do with this blog?

2009-10-01T21:55:00.001+02:00

Any suggestions welcome. But do be polite ;)

Sue Lyon-Jones and esolcourses.com

2009-09-25T21:07:00.004+02:00

Sue Lyon-Jones heads a small team that is in the process of producing a complete set of free graded online self-study lessons in British English, and Unit 1 of her Beginners Level courses is now complete, at http://www.esolcourses.com/uk-english/beginners-course/unit-1/unit-1.html. To get an impression of what the other levels will be like, see the overall website at http://www.esolcourses.com, and the new lessons she rolls out on her esolcourses blog, http://esolcourses.blogspot.com. The icing on the cake is that she's just started a blog for EFL teachers, called The PLN Staff Lounge. If she's not a part of your PLN - or "Personal Learning Network" in newbie-speak, it's high time you hooked up! Follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/esolcourses.

What is a resourceful teacher?

2009-09-20T23:55:00.010+02:00

Scott Thornbury has led a course entitled "Teaching WITHOUT technology" using Moodle at SEETA. In his intro blurb, he posited:

"For many teachers sophisticated technology is not a viable choice in their context. Others have chosen not to use technology out of principle. What principle? That language is a social tool and that language learning is best mediated through the direct contact between real human beings." He asked "Are anti-tech teachers "in denial"?"

Visit the course and look back on the discussion here. The mere fact that this course took place in Moodle and brought together people from many different countries, including people with little money but great ideas, speaks for itself, wouldn't you say?

Marisa Costanides from Greece commented the wrap up with Neil Postman's "Six questions for every technology":

1 - What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
2 - Whose problem is it?
3 - What new problems might be created BECAUSE we have solved this problem?
4 - Which people and what institutions might be more seriously harmed by a technological innovation?
5 - What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained and lost by such changes?
6 - What new sources of economic and political power will emerge?

See the Neil Postman talk on YouTube (part 1, with links to the following parts) here.

Did you know 4.0

2009-09-17T14:06:00.003+02:00

This is another official update to the original "Shift Happens" video. This new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, please visit http://mediaconvergence.economist.com/ and http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/.

What does it have to do with teaching? Do you notice anything new over what was going on last year around this time? Your comments are welcome!

What's the digital divide? It's women against men

2009-09-10T10:23:00.002+02:00

James Clay has been named digital technologist of the year at ALT-C 2009. He was the voice of reason yesterday. Here's a funny video he and collegues made at the Digital Divide Slam at ALT-C 2008, referred to on his blog, http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com, today:

Hot debate on Virtual Learning Environments at ALT-C

2009-09-08T19:25:00.006+02:00

There was a hot dedate on Virtual Learning Environments (like Moodle) #vle at the ALT-C conference #altc2009 in a session entitled "The VLE is Dead" . With a good degree of inside cheekiness the first speaker summarized that the "e" in elearning stands for evil as a result of VLEs being the normal way education technology is run in schools and colleges. This, he said, is because:

1. One size does not fit all - but VLEs tend to homogenize
2. The student/user does not "own" the VLE - but users want to own the tools they use
3. The VLE is conning academics into creating content (not constructivist approach) which creates an unproductive learning model
4. The VLE is not helful for discoursive teaching, it prevents students from discussing with people outside their institution
5. Teachers can do most stuff with outside, free tools
6. The PLE (personal learning environment) is flexible, while the VLE is cumbersome

Martin Weller tweeted: "if a bomb went off in this room, the UK ed tech scene would be wiped out" - and he is one of the ones to have started the whole debate in his blog.

Yet schools and colleges have to deal with not all teachers having the necessary skills in alternative tools, and not all students using social networks like Facebook and Twitter that would make VLEs obsolete for most student work. (Noone seemed to be debating VLEs as a good place for quizzes and tests.) But the feeling was really quite strong that VLEs are more counterproductive than conducive to learning.

How to blog? Why Blog at all?

2009-09-08T13:34:00.004+02:00

In August Karenne Sylvester published what is called a "Blog Carneval", which is a collection of blog posts by many different people, answering her question, "What advice would you give to another TEFL teacher interested in becoming a blogger?" The results at http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2009/08/blogging-english-language-teachers-tech.html are organized under these headings:

On getting started
On blogging with students
On finding inspiration & writing great content
On the effect it can have on your career
On stuff to know about
On audience
On community
On commenting
Why I blog

The list of bloggers she was able to round up is really impressive, and Ask Auntie Web got in, too. Thanks, Karenne! But go and see for yourself.

English Language Teaching Blogging

View more documents from Karenne Sylvester.

ALT-C 2009

2009-09-07T09:07:00.006+02:00

The ALT-C 2009, the 16th International Conference of the Association for Learning Technology, will be held at the University of Manchester, England, from 8-10 September 2009.
The keynote speakers are:

Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor Designate at the Open University, UK

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, USA

Terry Anderson, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education at Athabasca University, Canada.

Other invited speakers: Jonathan Drori, Heather Fry, Diana Laurillard, Matthew McFall, David Kennedy, Richard Noss, Vanessa Pittard, Aaron Porter and David Price.

Wishing you were there? Watch most presentations, which will be made available in real time using the video conferencing service elluminate at http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/. The events calendar is here: http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/calendar

Storing your files on the www

2009-09-05T19:25:00.005+02:00

I know that most people are rather sceptical about the idea of putting their documents on the www, but if you think about it, the www is far less likely to disappear than your hard disk and nowadays you can store a lot of data on sites such as Box or Dropbox for free.

Why bother?

Well, as I've already said, the www is not going to go phut or disappear - you may back up your files on an external disk or USB stick, but external disks cost money whereas these sites don't - well, if you keep the size of the files stored there to between 1 and 50GB (ADrive will let you store and share up to 50GB for free).

If you have a PC and laptop or files that are stored on more than one beast being able to update and sync files can be really useful. Ditto if you work together with other people and need to collaberate on the documents you are putting together. If A updates the document, B automatically sees the latest version without A having to email it to B.

I've just co-authored a book for Longman and whilst we were writing it I uploaded my materials to the Box. Everything was in one place, my co-author could see what I'd written and the editor could access the latest version of the manuscript as well as earlier versions.

I lost about three units and a couple of weeks' work when my hard disk died when I was writing another book, so it was reassuring to know that everything was stored on my PC and the www this time round.

I dare say someone could crack the passwords and get at those materials, but then I dare say someone could also hack my PC if they wanted to, but I don't think the data they'd find there would be worth the time or effort.

Lingorilla wins 2009 World Summit Award

2009-09-03T14:11:00.015+02:00

The Berlin-based LinguaTV GmbH today won the coveted biennial World Summit Award (WSA), selected by the UNESCO, the UNIDO and the Internet Society, in the category 'eLearning and Education' for its multimedia language learning platform lingorilla.com. The jury called it a "state of the art e-Learning website combining all media as well as all functions of the web."

LinguaTV features broadcasts in several languages including English. This web TV station produces language training videos with subtitles and features vocabulary. Users can use professionally produced videos, dictionaries and lessons. Contents licenced by LinguaTV include travel reports and music videos. Interactive exercises allow users to study on their own.

A game-like point system shows how much progress a learner is making and invites learners to compare and compete with each other. The community idea is central to lingorilla.com, and learners are invited to find language learning partners from over 150 countries worldwide and to communicate using the integrated video chat function. Groups can hold virtual meetings here, too, e.g. to get together again following a language course or trip.

Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, German Minister of Education and Research, congratulated LinguaTV, saying, „Ich freue mich, dass LinguaTVs Bildungsangebot die internationale Jury überzeugen und sich gegen die Konkurrenz aus 170 Ländern durchsetzen konnte. Dies ist auch deshalb so herausragend, weil LinguaTV das mit einer kleinen und noch jungen Firma aus eigener Kraft erreicht hat.“

Lingorilla is currently relaunching their platform, which they have announced will be completed in the next few weeks.

I've signed up as http://www.lingorilla.com/eng/users/annehodg. Hope to see you there!

Electronic dictionaries

2009-09-02T00:20:00.006+02:00

Do you sometimes think your students think you are a walking dictionary and can translate all the words they need from German to English and vice versa?

Yes, you must have the same kind of students as I do, but I've now bought an electronic dictionary which is a lot lighter than a decent paper dictionary, in fact, the manufacturer claims the number of entries it contains are from paper dictionaries weighing about seven kilos.

I bought myself an upmarket model because I teach a lot of ESP courses and am often confronted with words that my students ask me for, but I've never heard of, e.g. entgraten (deburr) or Ducker (inverted siphon).

I've got a Hexaglot Attaché which costs around €200 (if you shop around for it). It is probably one of the most expensive electronic dictionaries on the market, but it does let me put my own 'dictionary' onto an SD card and I can also download other dictionaries. e.g. English - Portuguese, Portuguese - English onto the SD card which I've found useful for holidays.

If you're a freelance English teacher and running from one company to the next with bags full of heavy books, you might find you can reduce your 'workload' without having to cut down on the number of courses you teach.

Have a look at whether there's a good or free electronic dictionary out there for you.

Btw, I'm happy with my dictionary, but I wouldn't recommend/buy it unless you really do need to translate fairly specialised terms and on a regular basis. There are some really good electronic dictionaries out there that cost a third of what I paid.

Chatbots

2009-08-26T18:12:00.008+02:00

Shelly Terrell has recommended a great site where students can communicate with chatbots: http://www.eslfast.com/robot. Developed by Ron Lee, a Chinese artificial intelligence scientist working in LA, the ESL Robots Project creates online electronic tutors to help English language learners practice their productive English speaking and writing skills. Users study the conversations first by reading and listening to them several times, and then practice these conversations with the robot.

Learners can type in a question, and then click the SAY button or hit the ENTER key on their keyboard, and the robot will reply. So far I haven't actually managed to get the robots talking to me in direct response to what I'm typing in, they just respond in writing. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

If a learner has speech recognition software installed, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, he or she can speak into the microphone instead of typing in questions.

The robots are capable of learning. They are being trained by the users in response to the input they receive, so they are getting "smarter" with every "conversation". They have learned many idioms and proverbs. The robots can even point out some spelling and grammatical errors in a learner's writing. So they can also be considered a good tool for ESL students to practice writing.

This project is being developed at Pasadena City College, California, USA.

A second very nice site is A.L.I.C.E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation. While full membership is $99 for a year, you can chat with the D.A.V.E. chat robot for one month for $9.99. For more information on the project, see their blog, http://alicebot.blogspot.com.

Do any of you have experience with chatbots to share?

Quality in online learning

2009-08-16T08:13:00.003+02:00

Do you ever wonder about quality in online learning, and where we are headed? For a very sceptical and thought-provoking discussion see Jerrid Kruise's blog article "Concerning Online Education".

What are your favorite sites for interactive games?

2009-08-01T06:33:00.002+02:00

Help us collect your favorite sites for crossword puzzles, hangman, matching etc. in EFL.

Just to get this started:

The MacMillan games on the Spotlight website: http://www.spotlight-online.de/language/games
The English Club games page: http://www.englishclub.com/esl-games/index.htm
Activities for ESL/EFL Students: http://a4esl.org/
Taiwan Teacher Games for children: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/1979/games.html
TEFL Games: http://www.teflgames.com/games.html

Please do contribute by leaving a comment!

Top language teaching blogs to follow

2009-07-31T06:54:00.008+02:00

Bab.la has just published a top 100 blog list, and the top 10 blogs to read if you are teaching a language are:

Overall Top 100 | Language Learning | Language Technology | Language Professionals

1. Listen to English
Podcast and blog for learners of English. Topics include current events, items of interest and cultural quirks.
2. Inglês Online
Tips, experiences and websites for people learning or teaching English.
3. Grammar Girl
Blog with quick and dirty tips for better writing.
4. Angela Maiers
Putting Learners and Learning First
5. todo ele 2.0
Spanish as a second language, resources, lessons
6. Better at English
Real English for real people
7. English Spark
Putting a spark in the English learning community with tools to learn, share, collaborate and connect.
8. Confessions of a Comunity College Dean
Education and teaching blog
9. Kalinago English
Teaching EFL Teachers How To Teach Speaking
10. Tecla SAP
Blog created to help English learners with their studies focused on common difficulties that Portuguese speakers have when learning English.

Congratulations to one and all. I like competitions like this, because it's lovely to see bloggers you follow get the appreciation they deserve, and exciting to discover new ones. Spanish, anyone?

See Lexophiles, the blog project run by Andreas Schroeter, Thomas Schroeter, and Patrick Uecker, the managing directors of Bab.la, the language learning networking site based in Hamburg that ran the competition.

A networking natural: Karenne Sylvester

2009-07-29T08:05:00.004+02:00

I first heard of Karenne Sylvester through my colleagues on the Board at MELTA, coming back from an InterELTA meeting. "She's really active and savvy", they said, "and she could write a blog for all of us ELTAs." Unfortunately, setting up anything like that is a major challenge in many ways, and we really wanted to do something downhome and local first. But at least the discussion introduced us properly to her blog.

And what a blog it is. Frankly, she is already doing far more than providing a blog to an institution. She is an institution.

Based in the Stuttgart area, she divides her attentions between teaching on the one hand, and mentoring and training other trainers on the other, which she has built into being a one-woman networking hub. She's also the originator of the 27 hour day, as you can tell from her two blog setup, her network of EFL bloggers on the social networking site Ning, her activities across the blogosphere and world of Twitter, and her covert allusions to deadlines and projects.

She's on top of things and has everyone's attention thanks to her very punchy sense of humor, and what she calls her "rants". A refreshing brand of tough love. No tired old stuff here.

Friends, you can do no better than to join her network.

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/kalinagoenglish
For teachers: http://kalinago.blogspot.com
Her other activities and products: "About"
Her social network for ELT bloggers BELTfree explained here.

Applications for spaced repetition flashcards

2009-07-28T18:40:00.015+02:00

There seem to be (at least) three major good online flashcard providers on the market for EFL. They all work using the system of building your memory by review based on spaced repetition.

Phase 6: http://www.phase6.co.za/opencms/Homepage
This service has been around since 2002, and it's probably the most professional. It is basically an empty tool that lets you create your own content. Available for Mac OSX and Windows, but the Mac version is in Beta. The blurb says content includes English for ESL, Spanish, other languages and academic vocabulary and terminology (science, law, medicine, economics)

Their blog says that they have introduced "The “i-tunes of education” concept:

"As of June 2009, we’ve got the following (publishers) on board: Diesterweg Verlag, Klett Verlag, Cornelsen Verlag, Langenscheid Verlag, Springer Verlag, C.C.Buchner Verlag, Mentor Verlag, and Martin’s Little Helper."

Anki: http://ichi2.net/anki
This service is free and Open Source. Very friendly video introduction. Available for Windows and Mac OSX, for jailbroken iPhones and the iPod Touch. This is primarily for writing up your own vocab, but it seems to be geared to content sharing communities, so for example teachers can push contents to students.
I've seen this recommended on Das Englisch Forum.

AZ6-1: http://www.az6-1.de
This service was developed by a father-daughter team, and it now seems to be used with PONS content. Besides serving Mac, Windows and Linus, it has a mobile app, but only for phones running Java MIDP 2.0. The focus seems to be on ready content that you can buy in small topical modules, geared to content at German schools. You can add your own content, as with the others, too. A USP seems to be the colorful skins you can put on your learning environment, which appeals to the kids.

Do any of you have experience using any of these, or other similar flashcard applications? Thanks for sharing tips!

Personal learning environment (PLE)

2009-07-25T22:55:00.038+02:00

A buzzword is making the rounds in education, namely the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Basically it describes the digital tools you use to gather information, to connect with others and to produce content of your own as you engage in learning. It is sometimes mentioned in connection with a Personal Learning Network (PLN), which describes the people you interact with in learning and who enable you to make progress. Chris Duke (an educational technologist and instructional designer with over 15 years of professional experience in education) has developed a model as part of a survey which I think provides key insight into how technologies are being used today. Have a look at his diagram:
Chart by Chris Duke, www.cmduke.com

1. As you can see, Chris Duke uses Microsoft Office products, Blogger et al. to generate content.

2. He manages his information by surfing using Firefox and Google (both of which provide tools to help you categorize that information). I'm not familiar with the ATM or the Z or the blue logos - do you recognize any of them?

3. He connects with others mostly through Facebook, as well as through GoogleMail and Second Life (the eye). And he is an instructor in Second Life, so he has placed the logo close to the field for generating content.

Now, at the hub of all of this are his GoogleReader RSS feeds - the feeds of things he publishes, the feeds of blogs his contacts publish and the information he collects and organizes. And he also uses Twitter, which works very much the same way. These three functions seem to merge into one at the center.

My PLE chart looks quite similar:

1. For content generation, I'd add the audiovisual iMac tools I use, as well as WordPress and Drupal (the content management system we use at Spotlight). I create content in Moodle, too, (e.g. tests, discussion points for the forums, assignments) but Moodle is more about organizing and managing information and contacts in a specific course. (What I sorely lack are slidemaking and photoediting skills.)

2. I'd add Delicious (http://delicious.com/ahodgson) to the list of applications I use to organize my information (I don't really share links using Delicious, though you can). I use Moodle to manage courses, so that, too, would go under managing information. I'm not sure what the CMS system is called that we have at MELTA (our teachers' organisation), where I organize membership data. (I'd say that organizing information, or using these tools really effectively, is my weakest point.)

3. I'd add a few sites to the social networking list, especially Ning, which allows you to network with people who share your interests. Social networking has replaced email as my preferred mode of communicating. (Networking is time consuming and sometimes a little confusing, but as I am an interpersonal learner, it's proving to be my richest resource.)

It's really quite difficult to compartmentalize each of these applications, because when it comes down to it, most of them cross over into other categories. E.g., I find that I process information by reviewing it, so I learn by creating a mashup of the input I find on the Internet. This is called "remixing", and while it's making traditional publishers uncomfortable, it's standard practice in blogging and YouTubing (if that verb doesn't exist yet, it should). Also, any information you put out on the Web can attract people to your social network and be food for collaborative thought. Still, I really like Chris Duke's analytical and thought-provoking model.

Go visit his site if you are interested in taking part in his survey.

And write to us here at Ask Auntie Web: Which tools do you use?

PS: I've just seen the slideshow by Steve Wheeler from the Faculty of Education at the University of Plymouth (aka Timbuckteeth on Twitter, great person to follow) here, and he slices self-organized learning into "Personal space" and "Community space":
http://www.slideshare.net/timbuckteeth/self-organisation-and-virtual-learning

Kevin Spacey tweets with David Letterman

2009-07-23T21:01:00.010+02:00

This one is especially for John and a couple of other people I know:

Media Futurist featured on Tech Crunch and initially saw it via Heike Philp. Kevin Spacey on Twitter.

Young Learners: Unravelling how children become bilingual so easily

2009-07-21T06:48:00.009+02:00

We recently had an enquiry on this blog from Kira into how to teach children English. There is some GOOD news and some BAD news. First the GOOD news: Babies being raised bilingually by simply speaking to them in two languages can learn two languages in the time it takes to learn one. The brain tunes out the sounds that don't fit. More still, being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible:

"The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies."

The BAD news? "While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty." Meh.

Oops, but this is "Ask Auntie Web", right? So here is some more GOOD news: You can acheive similar success teaching elementary school children and even adults (!) by using "Motherese", the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies - and a computer:

"Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.
"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl."

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily, by Lauran Neergard (AP) 20 July 2009.

Thank you to Brooke Shanley-Hurtado (spkspanglish), who teaches elementary and middle school bilingual classes in Chicago, for this tip! Her blog SpkSpanglish is here.

Alex Case's TEFLtastic

2009-07-19T07:28:00.006+02:00

One of the really great blogs to follow is TEFLtastic by Alex Case, an experienced teacher-trainer and editor of TEFL.net with, I'd wager, a preference for Paul Simon and the number 15 ("15 ways...") who has worked all over the world (Turkey, Thailand, Greece, Spain, Italy, UK, Japan), now in Korea. A great mentor and motivator.
Recently he has begun publishing a lot of worksheets to print out, including these topics:

medical English
business/ ESP games
telephoning games
technical English/ numbers games
English for artists (!)
EFL exams
travel
writing games
vocab games
social English
videos/ films
songs
culture

He has listed them all very neatly for you and me here to download and print out. With all this great free materials production going on, can you please tell me what we still need coursebooks for?? And how do writers survive, pray tell?

Newbie in Second Life

2009-07-18T08:54:00.023+02:00

Shelly Terrell very kindly arranged a tour of Second Life's EduNation for a group of relative and total newbies last night. I went along, having missed the one she and Barbara Sakamoto had arranged the week before.

The way into Second Life is to create an avatar, which most people make to look like themselves at their very best ;). To do this, go to www.secondlife.com, and you will be guided through the process. Your avatar comes with "inventory", which includes everything from the body and clothes to any external things, like a house or a boat. The inventory is stored in files which you open and attach to your avatar. But just getting your avatar sorted out can take some time, and I was frankly pretty hopeless. Once you've got your basic avatar set up, you save it and its outfit like any set of files - and then you're ready to start out. You move using the arrows on your keyboard and, as you have probably heard, you can fly. Oh, and you can teleport to locations given on a map by coordinates.

One of the slightly disconcerting things about moving around in Second Life (SLife) to me was that I was looking at the world through the eyes of my avatar, so I didn't see what she looked like from the front - and she wasn't wearing anything under her sweater... *blush*. It was only when another avatar gave "me" a once-over that I "flicked the switch" and noticed my mistake.

So I was more than relieved to be in the company of Shelly, who has been a great all-round mentor and very patiently and kindly explained things not once but again and again as needed. I can warmly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the potential of SLife to follow her on Twitter and find out when she's ready to do another one. Or perhaps one of the other teachers in this steadily growing support network will arrange one.

How did the appointment work? SLife has a messaging service integrated into the interface which allows the organizer of an event to send out invitations including the coordinates of the destination. This includes a file that automatically opens in your iCal or Outlook Calendar and asks whether you want to save it. I found this very sophisticated and nice. At the arranged time you simply open that file which includes the link to the meeting point and click on a button and boom! your avatar teleports there.

Why am I trying out SLife? Well, I'd like to understand more about the quality of the learning experience using tech tools. Second Life requires a combination of written and oral skills (you speak into a headset or your laptop microphone and send instant messages on screen), and the more you move your avatar through its paces, the more you feel that you are actually a part of the world. SLife provides a platform that you can ad lib in, be it outdoors on a (virtual) beach or in an elegant villa. You can use regular presentation tools there, too, so it seems that anything you can do in a virtual classroom you can do in SLife, with the advantage that SLife is more attractive. It has its own rules of social interaction as you move around the vitual world, but once you "get" the culture ... and stop running into people and walls ... it's pretty much like the real world: being polite, allowing personal space, taking turns, making gifts.

SLife has places for you to practice, called "sandboxes", where you can set up things like houses or presentations for a limited duration without needing any special rights. On the surface SLife may look like a free-for-all, but in dedicated spaces and on properties that belong to people there are scheduled events and of course rules of civilized behavior. But being open to the web, it's full of anarchic and archaic surprises. It's a playground for adults, too, which means that you are bound to encounter sex if you gatecrash other people's parties. But if you arrange a meeting at a house you can agree with the other residents to - um - "behave". There are also protected spaces in SLife reserved for children that adults can't get to unless they have special permission, e.g. they are teachers. Did I mention the dragon slayer and the dragon yet? Or the guy with the guns? Hey, this is the Internet. You need to relax and take it in stride.

Yesterday Shelly took us to the EduNation "sandbox" and gave us gift packages with all sorts of clothes and things. My package contained a boat, which I promptly landed on people in the middle of the beach. In real life I'd be sued by the families of the deceased. My SLife social abilities are in their infancy, so I wasn't even able to offer anyone a ride in the boat. Live and learn. While I was trying to unpack my new gifts, including an "I voted for Obama" t-shirt, people were admiring Shelly's cat and Aniya's dog, and then suddenly someone suggested we go to the pet shop. So off we went! Pets can be bought for Linden dollars, and real transactions mean real money. I forgot what a cat or a dog costs. After that our adventures included going to a beach, where Carollain (spelling?) aka Brooke gave me some great bikinis and a cocktail. I set out to try windsurfing on my own but couldn't click things into action. Perhaps I was stealing something, I really wouldn't know. So I gave up and went back to the group, where I found Shelly had got a sailboat on the water and we all set sail with her. A silent stranger from France joined us on the boat and we had a trilingual text message conversation. And then Anyia, I think it was, had the idea that we could go for a balloon ride. The balloon navigated us around on its own and gave us a tour of the entire area, with its beautiful houses. I'm surely leaving out all sorts of information here, things I couldn't really register, like where we actually were, because I was just following dumbly. But there will be more visits to come, and next time things will be easier.

I think you're not supposed to disclose people's real names in Second Life, so while I'd like to share the "link love" (so you can find the people involved) I'm going to be cautious and not drop names. Suffice it to say that yesterday's trip included a large group of teachers, including Shelly from Stuttgart, Aniya from Italy, Brooke from Illinois, Burcu from Istanbul, Tyler from Missouri, Michael from New Zealand, Pascal from Manchester and Marisa from Athens. If you want to find their blogs, just ask on Twitter. You'll find me at http://twitter.com/annehodg.

SLife is free for starters. Aniya (aka The English Teacher), also a great mentor, explained that if you do decide to wade into SLife to set up classes, you can buy or rent a property and set up a virtual school. Or you can get together with others and rent space on a property for an event or seminar. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

New tools for teaching

2009-07-17T00:00:00.005+02:00

Just one little tweet for Larry Ferlazzo, but a great leap for EFL teacherkind:
There is a great new wiki set up by Joyce Valenza, a Library Information Specialist in Pennsylvania, containing a wonderful collection of links to tools currently available for free to use in education. This is clearly not the first, many people have put together great collections, but this is the one I find most accessible to a relative beginner.

It's all here, from tools for photo editing and podcasting and getting your ideas organized and visualized to building social networks. This latter point is really the one I would most warmly recommend you start looking into. I sometimes worry that my dear colleagues are missing the boat. This wiki, with its inviting front page, might just do the trick.

http://newtoolsworkshop.wikispaces.com

Free Moodle orientation course

2009-07-16T09:41:00.007+02:00

If you want to learn how to use Moodle in a well thought out distance course, two FREE courses are provided by Stuart Mealor, Managing Director of HRDNZ in New Zealand. He's also a Moodle Partner and Moodle Certification Manager. The same website also provides a series of teacher training courses called MoodleBites for a fee. These are the two blurbs:

Course 1: Understanding Moodle FREE introduction

This is a free course we created to help explain Moodle in 'context'; as a piece of technology, as a philosophy, and as a teachers tool.
This is a prerequisite self-paced course that can be taken at any time before starting the full MoodleBites course and explores: Moodle history and development, Moodle history and development, Moodle fundamentals, and comparing Moodle with other Course Management Systems

MoodleBites is unique in three respects:

1. It has a focus on how to use Moodle features in teaching.
2. Throughout the course indicators are provided to the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC) Skills Sets - so the course is ideal for MTC candidates.
3. The course development team is international and MoodleBites has been written to be accessible for speakers of English as a second or other language.

Course 2: Moodle, Web 2.0 and social-networking

Since the beginning of 2007 I've been working on how to use Moodle in a Web2.0 / social-networking context.
This course explores how to use how popular technologies with Moodle ...such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Flickr (photo sharing), social bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, etc.), Blogs (internal and external), RSS (in and out), Podcasting, tagging, and more.

The course also explores how to creatively use existing Moodle functionality in a Web 2.0 / social-networking way.

The aim is to develop a 'course' that is 'owned and managed' by the Learner, in which they can create their own space, sharing their content, controlling access, and linking to their wider personal web experience and presence. It is hoped this will help develop the learners Moodle skills, and also blur the boundary between 'learning content in Moodle', and 'social networking on the internet'. Some key criteria within this project are:

* Techniques used will not require administrator access - everything can be done by Teachers and Students
* A focus on Integrating popular applications external to Moodle
* Creating a flexible and dynamic space - or PLE (Personal Learning Environment)

I've signed up, and if you like come and join me. Contact course owner Stuart Mealor by e-mail: stuart (at) hrdnz (dot) com

Scholarship for Cert IBET

2009-07-15T13:43:00.005+02:00

An email arrived from Eric Baber, Joint Coordinator of BESIG, reminding members that the deadline for the Cert IBET course scholarship is this Friday, 17 July. The new Cert IBET aims to meet the needs of business English trainers to enhance their skills and expertise, to increase their employability prospects in the sector, and improve their ability to deliver a quality product to potential clients. The Certificate is awarded jointly by Trinity College London and English UK. For details on the online course delivered by The Consultants-E, which will give you practice in using ICT and is a way into blended learning courses, as well as the scholarship, please visit http://www.besig.org/certibetscholarship.htm.

Teens, Twitter and Facebook

2009-07-15T06:48:00.020+02:00

Vivienne Arnold has sent a link to a great article by Kevin Anderson in the Guardian PDA blog that summarizes research on how teens are using Twitter and Facebook, including the study by 15-year-old Matthew Robson that has been making waves.
Kevin Anderson: Twitter and teens: Challenging the idea of the young digital native, Guardian, 14 July 2009.

In brief: Matthew Robson provided a large number of anecdotes showing that while teens and young adults use social networking sites extensively, relatively few of them are using Twitter. This confirms other research showing that about 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, but only 22% use Twitter. Most of Twitter's 10m or so users are over 35. For more on Matthew Robson see Eamonn Fitzgerald, Spotlight Online, 14 July 2009

Now Kevin Anderson says that looking more closely at the way the generations are using social networking in fact challenges the whole concept of the "digital native". The same people who have general literacy problems also have digital literacy problems, and will use technology in a very limited way, while the older generation is more likely to embrace new media trends these days. Issues of cost and technical complexity are just as vexing to the younger generation. They shun Twitter because updating the microblogging service from their phones (their preferred networking device) costs more that IM (instant messaging). Older users, by contrast, tend to access social networking sites more frequently from their computers, so cost doesn't figure as prominently.

Nik's Daily English Activities

2009-07-13T16:37:00.009+02:00

Nik Peachey runs a nice blog for learners of English to encourage learner autonomy, and it's called Nik's Daily English Activities. It's worth exploring this site as a teacher starting to use online resources and tools. Experiment with his tips yourself to get a feeling for what online learning is before you and your students start exploring media for tasks and projects.

In one entry this past May, he recommended that learners subscribe to a poem a day and record it as a daily pronunciation exercise. Learners can check the pronunciation of words and phrases on another website and then record the poems themselves using software they download to their computer. I think this is a lovely idea for a short daily practice session. Here is the post, with all of the links you need: Poems for pronunciation.

The idea of students recording their own voices goes back to language lab days, doesn't it? But these days students can expand on this activity. Once they feel comfortable recording themselves, they can go on and actually make a podcast themselves for others to listen to outside the language lab and even outside their course group - thanks to Web 2.0.

Flip video camera review

2009-07-07T18:44:00.007+02:00

Here are a few comments about the Flip camera I bought a few days ago.

I am quite impressed with the quality of the video, but I'd recommend using a tripod because the camera is so small and light that it's quite difficult holding it steady when you're filming something.

I'm using a standard camera tripod at the moment, but Amazon offer a small tripod called a Gorillapod which looks very handy if you don't fancy humping larger tripods around with you.

The sound quality could be better. It's a shame that there isn't a microphone jack plug on the Flip because without an external microphone you are dependent on the Flip's... which could be better.

I bought a Flip Mino HD with 4 GB memory and a maximum recording time of 60 minutes which is fine for most of the things I want to do with it both in and outside the classroom.

There is another version, the Flip Ultra HD, which has a memory of 8 GB and allows you to record for up to two hours, but if you intend uploading a 8 GB video file to the Internet make sure you have a high speed connection, otherwise it could take week or so to upload a file of that size! As they say, bigger is not always better.

The Flip comes with some very basic video editing software which seems fine if you don't want to do anything fancy, but if you do want to do anything more than just basic editing, you'll have to look for some video editing software.

Finally, if you do decide to get a Flip make sure you have enough space on your hard disk for huge video files. It's probably best to use an external hard disk if you want to store lots of video files somewhere.

The Flip is so small that most folk don't seem to think you can actually be filming them, so it's a great little gadget for filming people who are camera/video shy.

If you are interested in getting some idea of what the camera can do, watch a clip of MELTA's tram party that I took with my Flip.

Overall, I'd give the Flip 7 out of 10 - it's really simple to use, easy to carry around, the built-in USB stick makes it kid's play to upload a video file to your PC or laptop and the quality of the video isn't bad for an HD video recorder costing less than €200.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2009-07-06T05:07:00.024+02:00

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When you write any page for the Internet, be it a page on a website or a blogpost, you're writing in a language that is searchable for a target audience. Your text should therefore contain keywords that surfers in your target group would be looking for. While I am by no means an expert and have a long way to go before I do things just right, this is basic conventional wisdom:

You should follow these rules in general:

Use the essential keywords 3 times in your text and once in the title. Using them more often will work against you.
Make your page or blogpost title long and telling enough to be a searchable phrase by itself.
The ideal amount of text is about 160 words, or between 100 and about 220 words.
In addition, your content should change frequently; this makes a blog a good marketing tool.
The more links you put in, the more Google will love you

Now, in addition to the text on the page, each page (including each blogpost) can contain meta tags, namely meta keywords and a meta description. This text is what a surfer finds in Google before the link to your page. You will see these when you change the view (Ansicht) on your browser to "sourcecode" ("Quelltext").
If you want to add meta tags you will need to install an SEO pack to your blog. My home blog uses WordPress, and I have a plugin called "All In One SEO Pack 1.5.7"
My (brand new) marketing page, entitled "Englischlernen mit Anne Hodgson"(http://annehodgson.de/englischlernen-mit-anne), contains the following meta text:

"description" = "Anne Hodgson bietet Ihnen Business Englischtraining mit Spaß, Niveau und aktuellem Praxisbezug im Blended Learning Paket. Und bloggen Sie auf Englisch mit."

Most search engines use a maximum of 160 characters for the description.

"keywords" = "englischlernen, online, business english, blog, praxis"

The ideal number of keywords is about 6, and you should have no more than 10, so I could in fact add a few. And will people really look for "praxis"? Hmmm....

I don't know how this works for a blog using Blogger, such as this one. Do any of you readers use an SEO plugin for Blogger? Is there one? Your tips and advice would be very welcome.

Also, since (as I said above) I am a newcomer to web marketing using SEO, if you have any tricks to share I'd appreciate your insight.

Thank you very much to Shelly Terrell for suggesting this topic!

A vision of students today

2009-07-02T09:23:00.006+02:00

A short video of 2007 summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University For more information visit his blog at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119

For Prof. Wesch's more famous film, see John's post of Friday, 26 June 2009.

Video project: I am everyone

2009-07-02T09:10:00.006+02:00

Found on http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/youtube.htm:
This wonderfully thought provoking video from Orange demonstrates the value of relationships and makes us think of the people who have had an impact on our lives.
Use it to create your own. Write your script, find images and music and use video editing software to put it all together.
Orange: I Am Everyone

Sheringdale Primary School 4C: I am who I am

2009-06-26T21:50:00.004+02:00

I think this video says it all....

Don't worry if you missed the Web 2.0 starting gun. I think most folk who are are over thirty did, but we can still catch up if we want to!

CLIL in the classroom

2009-06-25T12:45:00.006+02:00

Here’s a nice way for your business English students to practice their English, talk about their course/ jobs, and learn about a nice Excel application all at the same time. I recently played this video downloaded from YouTube in new class with a small group of business students. It shows how to make a rudimentary Gantt chart using an Excel spreadsheet. It’s very clearly explained in a step-by-step fashion.

Afterwards the group then made a Gantt chart to outline the stages planned/goals set for our course.

In order to do this in your lesson you will need a computer and a projector. If you don’t have YouTube access in your classroom – possibly due to a company firewall – you can always download the video to your computer at home first. See Anne’s post from March 19th on how to do this. http://askauntieweb.blogspot.com/search/label/YouTube

Finally, for homework, students make their own Gantt charts on business or personal topics relevant for them to present the following week. It was quite fun and the students not only learned how to do it, but also through English! :-)

Let me know how it works out for you.

The Flip video camera

2009-06-24T14:05:00.007+02:00

If you sometimes use a video camera in the classroom, you've probably hit the same problem as me, namely it takes quite a lot of time to set everything up and familiarise yourself with the equipment (especially if you teach in different companies and have to use different TVs and DVD players or video players).

If that's the case, maybe you ought to look into buying The Flip - a video camera that's simple to use - and easy to carry around.

I've decided to get one myself, so watch this space to find out more about using it in the classroom.

For ESP teachers

2009-06-23T19:23:00.005+02:00

Here's a link to blog written by an EFL/ESP teacher called Jeremy Day aimed at those of us who teach ESP (English for Special/Specific Purposes)

Specific English

It's a relatively new blog, but it already has some brilliant tips and links on it and I wouldn't be surprised to see it being 'followed' by many an ESP teacher in the not too distant future.

TEFLclips

2009-06-22T16:01:00.002+02:00

Here's a great site for EFL teachers who like to use YouTube videos in the classroom.

TEFLclips

The site offers videos and lesson plans.

The project was set up by Jamie Keddie.

Thanks, Jamie! It's a great idea and wonderful resource.

Twitter Search in Plain English

2009-06-21T13:07:00.004+02:00

Lee Lefever explains how Twitter Search creates new opportunities for business feedback, tracking news in real time and discovering trends.

Organizing your reading list

2009-06-19T11:45:00.009+02:00

I follow a lot of blogs written by EFL teachers, people in the media and political movers and shakers I find interesting. The easiest way to organize this reading list is Google Reader (http://www.google.de/reader). It lists the blogs in alphabetical order, shows you which posts have been updated since you last looked and allows you to read the posts in the reader window without actually surfing over to the site, then marking it as read. You can also scroll all the way through the Google Reader listing chronologically in a matter of seconds to find an old entry. I find it a very neat and quick solution. I used to subscribe to blog feeds through my web browser, but it slowed my browser down significantly every time the browser went off to look for feed updates. Using Google Reader keeps the updating process separate from your other online activities.

Take the Google Reader tour in English here.

Lindsay Clandfield poll: Who are the most influential people in ELT today?

2009-06-19T11:01:00.005+02:00

Lindsay Clandfield, EFL teacher trainer and author of the wonderful Six Things blog, is inviting you to vote on which authors have had the greatest influence on you as a teacher. The list is excellent. You'll find the poll here.

Digital storytelling

2009-06-19T07:10:00.025+02:00

Digital storytelling is the art of creating a story in multimedia using any of the myrads of tools currently available, and sharing it online. One of the most famous and inspiring sites was created by Alan Levine and tells the story of one man's relationship with his dog, Dominoe, in 50 different ways. http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/Dominoe+50+Ways

SlideShare, one of the best sites for uploading presentations (create source material in Powerpoint or other presentation software, upload for conversion to Flash. To include a soundtrack, record audio as mp3, store on external server, and link to create "slidecast", synchronizing audio to slides), and Fuze Meeting, an application for virtual meetings using a shared desktop, are currently running a Tell A Story Contest, the winner of which will get $5,000. Participants tell their story through a slideshow using 30 slides. (Contest information passed to us by ELTWeekly blog (India's first weekly ELT eNewsletter).)

Fuze Meeting & SlideShare "Tell A Story" Contest

View more Microsoft Word documents from Amit Ranjan.

Anyone can view the entries on the contest site. Registered SlideShare users help decide on the winning entry. Most of the entries are, quite frankly, disappointing. Hardly anyone used audio - pity!

you have a choice

View more OpenOffice presentations from Laura Vargas.

Update: Karenne Sylvester has posted a nice presentation entitled "Plenty of Fish".

Plenty of fish

View more Keynote presentations from Karenne Sylvester.

If you like it, vote for her here: http://tinyurl.com/myc7t3.

Simple picture + text presentations are something your EFL students could make. Caveat: Experience shows that your students will spend quite some time learning how to use the tools, and (at least in the first project) a relatively small amount of time on the actual production of English - which is why I haven't used it with my students. Still, if your students are interested in acquiring or developing their creative digital skills it can be very motivating.
Do you have projects to show and inspire other teachers to use SlideShare? Please add links to them to the comments below!

Twitter for teaching or for staffroom teacher talk?

2009-06-13T07:37:00.018+02:00

Twitter, the microblogging tool that allows you to relay short updates in real time and see what others are saying, has yet to really take off here in Germany. My own students (mostly business people whom I teach in small classes or one2one) don't use it, so I don't currently need to develop didactics for it. But if you are teaching at college and have classes with over 20 people, you should really think about using it to allow all of them to express themselves and to let everyone see what they are saying. Look at how Monika Rankin used Twitter at the University of Texas at Dallas in a history class of 90 (!) students, where "small class quality" simply is not an option (from Read Write Web; see Rankin's own summary here):

Burcu Akyol wrote a nice reflective summary on Twitter in her blog.

Shelly Terrell is setting up a free EFL discussion group called Twitter Discussions on EduFire and is discussing the procedure and her experience in her blog. Very interesting!

My colleagues here in Munich have expressed many, many reservations towards Twitter, primarily that it's a huge waste of time. I'll admit spending too much time on Twitter myself. In fact, I've already experienced Twitter burnout from getting too much valuable input that left me feeling totally stressed out by a huge to-do list. Yes, you read correctly: Too much valuable information. Because Twitter is anything but a medium for hollow chitchat. On the contrary, it is very dense communication, a few words and a link among people who have chosen to follow each other because they share the same kind of interests. It's very much like being at a perpetual Special Interest Group subconference. What turns me off is too much reciprocal back-patting and grooming. You tend to lose perspective when you keep reminding your in-group how brilliant you all are. But that comes with the terrain and you sort of need to filter it out. Once you've got that down you can concentrate on getting fabulous tips from colleagues, staffroom style.

Update: Nik Peachey wrote an article on building a useful Twitter network here: http://tinyurl.com/qzyfgo. He also wishes us good luck with the blog. Thank you!

Telephone training using a built-in video camera

2009-06-13T06:24:00.008+02:00

If, like me, you are married to someone who speaks English as a foreign language: Have you ever tried to teach them your native tongue? Until last week I would have said that it can't be done. But then we had a brainchild:

My husband is a bit of a ham. He's had video training to gear up for TV interviews, and is interested in learning how not to make a complete fool of himself when they home in on him and ask unpleasant questions. I was trying to make a "talking head" video for a project of mine on cellphones, and he saw me and said, "Let's do it together. You call me, and you'll film yourself and I'll film myself using the cameras on our laptops, as we speak on the phone." And that's what we did. We thought up a phone scenario together and scripted the dialogue. Then we went into separate rooms and each of us set up our laptops. Each of us had a cellphone in hand and told the camera what we were doing, and then I called him and we went through the moves, and he called me back. We then compared the two films (and laughed our heads off) and then did it again (he actually put on a tie to make himself feel like he was at work), and this time he had some food for thought about his expression and tone of voice. After that, satisfied, we decided to call it a day. But if we'd wanted to create a "product" and not just a "learning experience", we could have recorded the scenes until we and they were perfect, then cut them into one film using moviemaking software (we have Macs with iMovie; on a PC you'd use Windows Movie Maker), and then published the finished film to YouTube. I might just do that with a class one day.

Anyway, he's hooked, we had lots of laughs and a good think, and I think we'll be doing this again. Oh, and I've got a new shtick for one2one classes :)

Russell Stannard

2009-06-12T22:59:00.005+02:00

Russell Stannard is a teacher trainer who runs a very helpful site where he presents videos on how to use tools for teaching English, like creating and editing audio files, using photos and working with mindmapping tools. His site is here:
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/

He also sends out a newsletter where he updates you on his latest videos, which you can subscribe to by writing to him at russellstannard@btinternet.com

Thanks to Andi White for this tip.

Online teacher training to boost your tech skills

2009-06-11T15:06:00.009+02:00

Nicky Hockly at The Consultants-E has just sent out an email update on the teacher training courses she and Gavin Dudeney run 100% online on their Moodle platform. Each course lasts 2 weeks (10 hours), costs 135 Euros and focuses on a different free ICT tool: blogs, wikis and podcasting.

In each 2-week course you:

a) learn what the tool is and how it works
b) discuss and create projects to use with your own learners
c) create your own sample blog/wiki/podcast for your learners

BLOGS [15 - 30 June 2009]
http://www.theconsultants-e.com/courses/blogs Participants set up their own blogs during the course using web-based blog software, such as Blogger. Also examine RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and learn how to use this to subscribe to blogs.

WIKIS [1 - 15 July 2009]
http://www.theconsultants-e.com/courses/wikis By the end of the course you will have set up a wiki to use with your own students, using web-based wiki software, such as PBworks and WetPaint.

PODCASTING [15 - 30 July 2009]
http://www.theconsultants-e.com/courses/podcast Participants will create their own podcasts during the course, using web-based podcasting software, such as VoiceThread and Audacity.

Become an online teacher

2009-06-11T13:09:00.021+02:00

I hadn't looked at the classifieds on the www.melta.de website for a long time, but just noticed that there was a job offer for an online teacher a few months ago - the first I'd seen there. Well, if you're not getting enough face to face classes you may really want to consider becoming an online English teacher. There are many services to choose from. Read this blogpost in German by Ibrahim Evsan, the founder of the video platform Sevenload.de, who summarizes many of the services. Then have a look at them in detail. It's quite interesting to check them out to get a better sense of how language services in general are becoming globalized.

Tech basics: You need to have a video camera installed on your computer to give real-time lessons and you'll be using a service like Skype, with video and text messaging. Other tools such as Twitter can be very good for students tasks. But have a look at the sites first and try applying for a job - you'll be far wiser after that!

Shelly Terrell recommended Myngle, Edufire and italki. These are social networking sites that allow people who are looking for a teacher to find you, based on the information you post. The sites take a service charge out of your fee, but really it's up to you to state your conditions. So there is no middle man here. Schools providing blended learning, such as the ones advertizing on the MELTA website, will of course have to take a larger chunk out of the fee they charge the customer. Follow Shelly on Twitter and read her blog Teacher Bootcamp to find out more about how she teaches online.

Also have a look at The English Teacher and read Aniya's post on The Art of Teaching Online. You can also follow Aniya, who currently teaches online through Myngle on Twitter.

Karenne gives the the Luddite teacher a dressing down

2009-06-09T22:56:00.007+02:00

Karenne Sylvester tells it like it is in her guest article on Alex Case's blog (revisited in Karenne's own blog here), challenging

"ELT teachers who are simply too chicken to try out some of the new media and technology tricks in their classrooms while the Digital Natives progressively enter the market... A lot of them are whining about whether or not it’s good teaching practice or just flash and dash. However while they continue to be afraid, they’re missing out on what’s on the other side and in the end, consoling themselves with friends who are equal Luddites, will find themselves replaced by the those who can."

She goes on to tell you exactly where to start - right here in her article. Follow her advice. Time waits for noone.

Questions? Comments? Just click on the "comment/s" button below.

Learning tools

2009-06-04T18:00:00.001+02:00

Here's a link to a site which lists and has links to almost 3,000 tools (most of which are free) 'for learning'.

Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies

I'm not sure all the tools are for learning, but many of them are very useful for teachers.

And here's the site's top 100 learning tools for 2009.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

VocabGrabber

2009-06-02T10:58:00.012+02:00

The VocabGrabber, part of the Visual Thesaurus, is a nice resource for presenting and building vocabulary. Just copy in any text and the system will:
show the number of different words used
sort them by relevance
sort them alphabetically
class them according to subjects
show a thesaurus word web for any of the words you choose
present the sentence(s) the word appears in.

All of the words are hyperlinked, so your students can really explore meaning and collocations. I put in text from a blogpost of mine:

Using the Visual Thesaurus online is free. If you want to save and download wordlists, you must be a subscriber.

The Auntie is in

2009-05-26T10:22:00.002+02:00

Have a question? Ask Auntie Web, we'll be delighted to see what we can find out for you.

PrintFriendly works with Blogger

2009-05-25T21:52:00.004+02:00

Want to read and print out a post on Auntie Web on a white background, saving ink and not worrying about reformatting? True to their word, PrintFriendly has updated their service to work with Blogger. Yeah!! Just have a look at decline and fall's latest post in PrintFriendly. Do it yourself by going to http://www.printfriendly.com and pasting in the URL you want to print out.

Update June 10: PrintFrendly does NOT work with Blogger when a blog post has a comment.

Getting it up (3) - the trouble with browsers

2009-05-23T00:26:00.006+02:00

The story so far: If you want to get a proper website up, you need to know about how the text, pictures etc. on web pages are organised. Web pages are text with tags. The tags are bits of text inside pointy brackets which tell a program (the browser) on your computer how to display the page and, most importantly, what parts of your text are links to other pages. The tags are bits of code inside pointy brackets, as in the example that Anne included in another post:

Interestingly, there are problems with most or all of the tags in the graphic. ("b" and "i" are no longer regarded as the best way to achieve these effects; the "p" tag is a problem in an html editor if you try to use the carriage return to start a new line, as in a word processing program; the "br" tag written like this will cause a line break at the beginning of the line, not the end, and will probably generate an error; putting "text-decoration" inside a "span" tag would be a bad idea if you're doing it more than once on a site, and so on.)

The reason for the trouble is the history of html.

It started off as an academic research tool, to organise the cross-references between texts and avoid all that tedious business of ibid and op. cit. and passim and cf. and q.v. and librarians hating you because you dropped biscuit crumbs in their card indexes. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy, and should be at very least Lord Berners-Lee of Cyberspace if you ask me). He was a researcher at CERN, a big atom thing, on (or more precisely under) the Swiss-French border. Around 1990, the new-fangled internet was being used by nerds and soldiers to send messages to each other. St. Timothy realised that it would also be handy for distributing scientific documents. So you would store the text, illustrations and the references to other documents on your server, then others could call up the document using his clever system of addresses (URLs), read the thing and, gloriously, add to it, resulting in an explosion of collaborative human knowledge, progress and happiness.

Mr Berners-Lee (now the Earl of Url) then made three decisions which, with hindsight, appear unfortunate. First, he called it the "World Wide Web", giving the system (and hence the addresses) a tongue-twisting twelve-syllable abbreviation in English. Second, he didn't use his invention in a way that would make him fabulously rich. And thirdly, he didn't give serious attention to the browser issue.

Recall that all that was stored on Mr B's subterranean servers was essentially the elements of a scientific text on paper: the text itself (organised into headings, paragraphs, lists, tables etc.), the references (now in the form of handy embedded links), and the illustrations. To read the stuff, users needed software that displayed the text, lists, tables, illustrations etc. in a readable format, and had some mechanism to call up a new page from a coded link. Plus - the really tricky bit - the software had to allow you to edit the text - add new references, comments etc. - and save your edited version back onto the server.

The vital requirements for a browser were, then, 1) it had to be standards-compliant (i.e. respond to the agreed set of tags to display reliably any text written in html), and 2) it had to work as an editor. After a while, vital requirement 3) became apparent: the browser had to avoid being a means for the writers of the webpages to access a user's computer via naughty bits of code.

The first decent browser was created at the University of Illinois. Under a succession of names - Mosaic, Mozilla, Netscape, Mozilla again, and Firefox - it's been around ever since. It was the first attempt to monopolize the web. Visiting the NCSA in Illinois in 1992, Berners-Lee was dismayed to find "that the people at NCSA were attempting to portray themselves as the centre of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic. At NCSA, something wasn't 'on the Web', it was 'on Mosaic'". This meant that the Illinois people felt no obligation to comply with the html standards. And they were uninterested in the more difficult requirement of a browser: that it should also be an html editor. As Berners-Lee puts it, they "were more excited about putting fancy display features into the browsers – multimedia, different colours and fonts – which took much less work and created more buzz among users".

The most flashy design feature was a tag which drew a horizontal line across the page. So as the web grew, initially in America, into a mass consumer activity, browser designers started increasing their market share by inventing their own tags, effectively inviting the writers of web pages to write html that would only work in particular browsers. What didn't help was the approach that U.S. companies took to the commercial development of the internet. The model was that of a TV network: people would pay a monthly subscription to companies like America Online, Compuserve or Prodigy, and in return the company would provide a full internet service: email, newsgroups and all the web-style content you would ever need – weather, news, entertainment, local information and so on. Since the content was produced by the internet provider, there was no reason to make it compatible with the international html standards. Users installed the provider's software from a CD. The less standards-compliant the "browser" part of this software, the more differentiated was the provider's product.

The next few years are known to infamy as "the browser wars". With a business model that staked everything on market share, the Netscape browsers introduced a succession of new tags. Some were useful, some unreliable (they didn't display properly, or crashed the browser), and some – notably the "blink" tag – were so hideous that web designers distained to use them. One – the "font" tag – seemed like a really good idea at the time but has had disastrous effects on the ability of non-specialists to create workable web pages.

Microsoft's influence on this process has been surprisingly benign, though this has been more a result of bad judgment than philanthropic instinct. Initially they failed to notice the web. Then, as Netscape got worryingly popular, Microsoft produced its own browser. Aside from the occasional silly tag – "marquee" to scroll text rather than blink it – Internet Explorer was less whizzy than Netscape, but thereby more standards-compliant. After the failure of a half-hearted attempt to rival providers like AOL with their own "network", Microsoft settled into a strategy of bundling its dull-but-sensible browser with the Windows operating system. They were subsequently expensively punished for this decision, but it had the effect of accustoming the world to receiving web content in standardised form from any source, as part of normal computer use.

By around 2000, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had become dominant, and Netscape's browser had collapsed under the weight of its own idiosyncrasies. By then, the battlefield had become online security, with rivals to Internet Explorer claiming that their browsers offered less openings to hackers. As to html, everybody now claims to be 100% standards-compliant (and everybody lies).

Apple, by the way, has generally stayed aloof from the browser wars: its strategy of modifying an area of computer technology to create a local monopoly didn't seem to apply here. Until 2003, Macs used Netscape or Internet Explorer. Since 2003, Apple has had its own browser, Safari, which is pretty standards-compliant but apparently dead insecure. Fortunately for Mac users, malicious hackers seem to expend most of their energy on attacking Microsoft's browser. Presumably the cybercriminals reckon that it's not worth targeting Mac users because a) there aren't enough of them, and b) those that there are have already spent all of their money on flashy digital bling.

Illinois eventually redeemed themselves by electing Senator Obama.

The browser wars continue, but in a less destructive form, as the surviving belligerents converge upon full standards-compliance and bicker about their relative security. The legacy is that it's always been tricky to create html that will work in all browsers and on all main computer systems, and that will continue to work in a few months when the next security parches are issued, and next year when the new browsers are released.
The other resultant problem is that it's never been easy to find a program to edit html – i.e. to create web pages. More about that in the next post ...

Zapdramatic

2009-05-21T18:45:00.008+02:00

Zapdramatic is a web-based interactive game and simulation series for developing life skills with a focus on Negotiation, Dispute Resolution and Ethics. It was founded in 2000 by Canadian filmmaker Michael Gibson and negotiation experts Allan Stitt and Frank Handy. Recent productions range from a University Certificate online course on Negotiation to the online murder mystery game Ambition which has attracted hundreds of thousands of users world-wide.

Zapdramatic has won the Excellence in Learning category at the Canadian New Media Awards and the Vortex Prize in New Media at the McLuhan International Festival of the Future. Now Gibson is planning a relaunch. Zapdramatic is subscription-based, costing 35 Candian dollars a year. I have used them extensively in my business English classes, so I find they are a really good deal. Many of the games are available for free: The Zapdramatic negotiation games for adults include The Raise, The Print Shop and Interview with a Vagabond.

A new game, Sir Basel Pike Public School, is in the works. It targets bullying among boys and girls age 10-14 and will be launched on 1 October. Part one of the game can already be previewed at www.zap.ca/pike.

To use these games in class you must be online, have Flash installed on the computer(s) you are using and have audio set up. I generally play the game / do the simulation as a whole class activity (using a laptop with internet access and a projector), brainstorming the situation up front, and then designating a player, with the rest of the class as advisors discussing every step and reviewing and analyzing the strategy. In a media lab with a number of computers you can do these simulations as group work. Like most interactive games, they also lend themselves to writing summaries and reenacting elements in live roleplay or simulation. Since the games have word-for-word subtitles (for the hearing impaired) they are great for EFL work on phrases.

These games excel because they force players to empathise with someone who thinks very differently than they do. As the player must invariably fail, they force learners to overcome their fear of failing in order to reap the reward of winning. They appeal to a generation that has grown up playing games, moving up competitively, level by level. And they are psychologically interesting enough to appeal to women in particular.

Try them out and let Michael Gibson (michael@zap.ca) know what you think.

He has just been featured on the Interactive Ontario website with this video interview:

Mark Powell introduced Zapdramatic as part of the LCCI CertTEB course I attended a few years ago.

Dogme ICT and their "Vow of Flirtiness"

2009-05-21T16:40:00.020+02:00

Fans of the Dogme school of teaching promoted most prominently by Scott Thornbury will know that in fact it is a movement of like-minded souls/teachers who believe in working with what is there on what is relevant. The original film movement around Lars von Trier took a "Vow of Chasity" to do without the unnecessary trappings that would distract from the heart of the matter, and that has translated into the classroom, most basically, as "come as you are".

I was sitting next to a guy at IATEFL and asked him, "So what do you think Thornbury thinks of using all of those games and gadgets in class?" "Oh, that wouldn't work with Dogme, now would it?" he said

But in fact it does, and quite well. The dogmetists and the Second Lifers (there seem to be far more of those in EFL than in the world at large) have got together to found Dogme ICT (as in Dogme Information and Communication Technology). They extend the idea of "coming as you are" to "coming as you are and letting the students use the hot gadgets in their pockets". In his blog Gavin Dudeney has announced that they are taking a "Vow of Flirtiness". As for the manifesto, these are the truths they hold most dear:

"Teaching should be done wherever possible, taking advantage of the affordances ICT offer - props and tools should be brought into the class when they encourage learners to engage in meaningful conversation with people they actually want to talk to.
Teaching should be done using any resources that the learners find interesting and useful, and using any technologies to hand. If a particular piece of equipment is needed, ask the learners - they probably have it in their bag or coat pocket.
Recorded listening or viewing material (podcasts, vodcasts, YouTube, etc.) should be used when the learners find the material interesting and where it has some relevance to their lives. Learners should be encouraged to produce as much as they consume.
Temporal and geographic alienation are what you make of them. Don’t be afraid to take your learners in to Second Life to a fantasy island, or to Curitiba using Google Maps. Look for the good and useful in each location rather than writing them off piecemeal."

Much of that sounds reasonable to me. We're moving into a time when technology won't be "in the way" anymore, where we'll be savvy enough to be able to use gadgets, tools and the Internet as easily and creatively as we now use bits of paper, pins, pens, props and realia - moving into the aesthetic worlds our students inhabit and are more comfortable in. Their world is where learning should happen: Pretty much anything that captures their interest can be a vehicle for learning, can't it?

Gavin Dudeney's article is in his blog, That'SLife.