VocabGrabber

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

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

PrintFriendly works with Blogger

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

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

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"

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.

Mark Powell on Web 2.0 technologies in language training

Mark Powell will be coming to the "Sprachen und Beruf" Conference in Düsseldorf (15-17 June 2009) where he will be delivering the keynote speech. In an advance interview with the organizers of the conference he was asked: "How are you using technology yourself at the moment?"

"Mark Powell: I am a huge fan of online video. YouTube is just the best thing on the internet and a gift from the gods to language trainers, as far as I am concerned. Because so many companies have firewalls and restricted internet access, it is vital to be able to download what you are going to use, but the range of business interviews, news features, presentations and movie clips is now so enormous, there is no need to buy a cheesy language learning DVD ever again! The secret, however, is having an equally broad range of techniques for exploiting online video without too much of a time investment on our part. Otherwise, at worst, it is just video for video’s sake and, at best, a huge amount of extra work for a tailor-made training session we may never be able to use again.

I also do a lot of one-to-one training, so for me it makes sense to work on things like e-mail writing and telephone skills using internet telephony like Skype. Coupled with a webcam, you have got the cabability to reformulate client output as they write, whilst multi-tasking in a semi-teleconference environment. Online whiteboards that allow you and your client to write on the same electonic document simultaneously, such as Skrbl.com, are also invaluable here. And free video e-mail like Eyejot.com is just great for phased role play activities, sending short video messages back and forth. What is more, all this kind of stuff is pretty much disaster-proof. I am no technological wizard, so if I can get it to work, it has got to be good.

(...) If we take the analogy of the language trainer as a personal fitness trainer, then online self-study (perhaps using quiz-making software like Qedoc, Quia and Quizlet) would be the food supplement regime and in-class technology (podcasts, video clips, PowerPoint slides, digital recording devices, etc.) would be the exercise machines themselves. But it remains the trainer’s job to put the clients through their paces, motivate them, fine-tune the exercise programme and assess progress."

The complete interview is here.

PrintFriendly

You want a printer friendly version of an online article to take to class? Go to http://www.printfriendly.com and enter the URL of the website or article you want to print. It gives you just the content and inline images in a very readable font. The ads are removed automatically. You can choose to remove any images, or leave them in. When you're ready you can print it out or download it as a PDF.



Note: It doesn't work on articles that contain in-text widgets (little programs), and it doesn't work with Blogger blogs, so unfortunately it doesn't work on Ask Auntie Web. If you want to print out our tips, I'm afraid you'll still have to copy and paste into Word. Sorry!

Found on Mashable.

HTML first tags

HTML may look daunting at first glance, but it's quite logical once you get your head around the idea of tags, which decline and fall explained so well. The opening tag comes in pointed brackets and the closing one has pointed brackets and a slash. Put in "b" and the text becomes bold, "i" is for italics, "p" stands for paragraph and "br" for break. At a glance:



Add the code for tables and you're almost there.

Getting it up (2) - learning about HTML

Last time (Getting it up (1) – simple ways to start a web presence) we talked about easy ways to get a basic website online. If you want to go beyond basic, you need to learn a bit about html. Writing html documents is in no sense rocket science. But it's a bit like setting off fireworks: nothing to it, but things can go disatrously wrong for no obvious reason.

The best introductory book I've found - by miles- is this one:

If you're a teacher, you'll find their way of presenting information somewhere between thought-provoking and inspiring. I did, anyway.

Here's the link to the book at amazon.de: Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML.

And here's the link to amazon.co.uk, where it's a lot cheaper at the moment cos the pound is not very well: Why do I need to learn about html? And what's CSS?

When you call up a web page, the server at the website sends text to your browser, formatted as html. HTML is text with a few added comments inside pointy brackets. The comments are called "tags" and they look like "<h1>", "<p>", "<i>" etc., to tell the browser to format a bit of text as a main heading, a paragraph, or in italics. The killer tag is the "<a>" one, which marks a bit of text as a hyperlink to another page. Think about how it's changed your life, and agree with me that it's one of the towering achievements of the human intellect, right up there with moveable type and cricket. And it's British. (And hence currently under American control.)

So it's just text with tags, like this:

In that case, why is it so tricky?

The problem is: when you write, say, a Word document, you know pretty much how it's going to look for anyone who puts it on their screen or prints it out. But an internet server doesn't send a formatted html document: it sends the text with tags saying "this next bit is a heading /paragraph / list / table etc." or "put a border round this picture". Then the software (browser) on the computer of the person who called up your webpage puts it on the screen in the way that the software decides will look nicest. So an html page looks different on a PC, a MAC, a big desktop screen, a "beamer" projector, a laptop, a little netbook computer, a Blackberry, a mobile phone, your next television, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera ... Then people can resize their windows, resize the text in a window, and generally muck up your pages even if they look all right when they first arrive on their screens. And when you've written tidy pages that look nice on all current systems and browsers, somebody issues a new browser that scrambles them.

Things are sorting themselves out a bit. The current approach is to keep html for the structure of the text (headings, paragraphs, lists etc.) and put all the style things (fonts, colours, backgrounds, boxes etc.) is a separate file using a separate system: a "style sheet", which is the "SS" in "CSS" (the "C" is for "cascading", but isn't as cool as it sounds). This system sort of works. Mostly. Ish.

So the thing is, you'll never make web pages of any complexity if you don't understand at least a bit about what's going on. The book above is great for explaining this.

Next: the trouble with browsers, and the programs you can use ( and can't) to help you write html that works. Mostly.

Webinars for beginners

We already pointed out that Classroom 2.0 (the social networking site for teachers on Ning) provides webinars on a wide range of online applications for teaching. Now Steve Hargadon, the founder of Classroom 2.0, has announced a new Classroom 2.0 webinar series for beginners:

"While our beginner series focus is helping educators new to web technologies learn more about how they can use these tools with their students it will also provide 'takeaways' for the more experienced users. All sessions will be recorded and archived at http://live.classroom20.com."

It kicked off on Wednesday at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time ... or today, Thursday, at 2 am our local German Time. Yawn! Fortunately, the Classroom 2.0 team do a great job of documenting their webinars:

The first session was one of three dedicated to wikis, facilitated by Sue Waters of Edublogs (she's from Perth; her blog is here). For an mp3 recording of the session, the chat log and further information on the series, visit Classroom 2.0 Live!


Visit Classroom 2.0

Wordia

Wordia is a free online video dictionary where "real people" define words. You can watch - or make and contribute - videos, which the editors go through to select to provide a "word of the day". The videos are uploaded through YouTube, but cannot be embedded the way YouTube videos can, or downloaded through www.savevid.com. But if you do a search on YouTube with the name and the word, you'll find the video you want. I really enjoyed watching Scotswoman Jenny Colgan defining "expatriate". Gin at 10 in the morning?


The site claims:
"We're redefining the dictionary.
1. Think of a word that has a special meaning for you.
2. Record a video defining the word
3. Upload your video."
I might want to define "Weißwurst" ;)

The team running this project collaborates with HarperCollins, The National Literacy Trust and The Open University, among others.

Found through Nik Peachey's Wallwisher wall, "Web 2.0 Tools for teachers" - a must-see collection where you can add your own favorites.

Bitstrips

One of several websites that allow you to make comics with your class is www.bitstrips.com. What I like about this one is that you can personalize the character to look a little like yourself or some famous person. Then you can change the expression, posture and gestures in each frame. With low-level learners you could use these little avatars to practice describing people and their expressions. And then, of course, you can create little stories. It gets a lot more fun when everyone in your class has created a comic avatar and then invite each other as "friends" (this is social networking, after all) and can then use those "friends'" avatars in their Bitstrips. Bitstrips can be embedded in a blog or shared by email.

Getting it up (1) – simple ways to start a web presence

We assume you need some sort of internet presence – to impress potential clients, to put on your business card, and so you and your students can communicate with each other. But you don't know how to build a website, and haven't time to learn. You want something you can have up and running in a few hours.

Your options are: blog, bulletin board (or forum) and a template-based website.

Blogs:
Originally just a way for people to write an online diary, blogs are now often used as substitutes for normal websites. This is because it's easy to add or change the contents: you don't need to buy or install any software. You use your web browser, and it's no more complicated (well, only slightly more complicated) than writing an e-mail.

To get a blog, there are two main sources: Blogger aka Blogspot, and Wordpress. Both of them offer free hosted services. ("Hosted" = the database containing the blog is on their servers. For a non-hosted blog, you have to have a web server, or rent space on somebody's server, and install the blog software on it. You probably don't want to do this: it only really makes sense if you want the blog to be part of an existing website.)

Blogger/Blogspot is part of the Google empire. For the hosted part, go to www.blogspot.com/ and set up your site. For instructions, try this video tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb4VPSmKuo.

If you don't want to live your entire online life as a citizen of one Google satrapy or another, try www.wordpress.com/. Wordpress has a more community, less big-businessy feel than Blogger. For a video tutorial (long, but very clear and helpful), see www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWYi4_COZMU. YouTube is, of course, also a subsidiary of Google.

Why a blog might not be a good idea:
Blogs make the most sense for publishing your latest comment. If you want a site that gives, say, a potential client a quick idea of who you are and what you can do, a blog won't work so well. Anything you wrote in the past will get lost in the links and archives in the sidebar: it's hard to get people to click there. And if you want to interact with your students, it's hard to organize a discussion into a coherent sequence on a blog: bulletin boards work much better for this. And there's an extra step (and some expense) involved if you want a nice personal url (e.g. your very own dot com address).

Here's a successful attempt to make a full website using blog software: www.badscience.net/, using WordPress. The blog format is suitable because the site is a succession of reports.
And here's an example (posted on the www.tefl-germany.de forum) where the attempt to use blog software to make a site didn't work: kid-learn-english.blogspot.com/.

Bulletin boards (forums):
Much better than a blog for running joined-up discussions on particular themes, so the best choice if your main idea is to interact with your students. Apart from anything else, a visitor to your forum can start a topic, which is not possible in a blog. But a forum is not as good as a conventional site for presenting yourself as a business to prospective clients.

If you go for a forum, you'd better be sure that enough people will contribute. The lists of topics ("threads") in forums usually include counts of the number of people who have viewed and replied to each topic. Too many zeros here can be deeply embarrassing. (The trick is to contribute yourself under lots of different names, at least at the start: if you find that you're still doing this after a couple of years, you'd have been better off with a blog, or perhaps a household pet to talk to.)

As with blogs, forums can be hosted by a provider or can run on your own server. Unless you're a business with an IT department that knows about databases, you want a hosted service. Typically, they are free if you don't mind the provider putting ads on your page. Otherwise, you can pay them a bit (maybe $5 a month) to keep the ads off.

The www.tefl-germany.de/ forum uses the provider Yuku: www.yuku.com/. It's worked well for us since 2001. ("Well" here meaning: the site is hardly ever unavailable, and the posts don't get lost in the cyberwilderness.)

Websites:
I mean, a conventional small-business website: a homepage to say who you are and why you're good. Another page or two with references, a c.v., something about the methods and the courses you offer. A page with some clever tips for your students, or links to other sites if you can't think of any clever tips. And your contact details.

Much better than a blog or forum if you don't desperately want input from your visitors. And after all, it's bad enough having to interact with language learners while you're getting paid for your time. The problem is: it's more complicated to set up a website than either of the other two options (which is why a lot of people go for blogs and forums).

What you need is:

• a server
• a url (www...............com or .de or .co. uk etc.)
• your content, formatted as html
• some software to upload your content to the server.

Fortunately, there are hosted services that meet (or get round) all four needs, cheaply or for free. They provide server space, let you register a www name, and provide a selection of page design templates for your content. You access these templates through a web browser, which removes the need for special uploading software.

The first place to look for such a service is probably your internet service provider. T-Online, for instance, at homepage.t-online.de, offers a free service to existing customers, with a "Design Assistent" to create your pages (up to three), one .de domain, a blog function, etc. For € 4.99 you can have a lot more pages, and more stuff to put on them. Otherwise, the biggest (and, it seems, most reliable) provider in Germany is www.1und1.de, which offers similar packages from € 3.99 up.

Incidentally, when Germans say "Homepage", they usually mean "website", not "home page". When they say "Website" (pronounced "vepzide") they usually mean "web page", because of a confusion with "Seite". This can cause endless amusement when you're teaching English to web developers.

So there's no excuse for not getting an online presence immediately(ish). To make anything posher and more creative, you'll really have to learn a bit about how html works. Nothing about html is intellectually demanding: there are no obscure concepts. But it's rather like the offside law in football, or the use of the present perfect continuous: there are a lot of exceptions and fiddly details. In my next post: the easiest way to learn all about html.

A video to make you think about using Web 2.0

Here's a lovely blog about technology and learning called Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts by a teacher called Dave Truss.

Have a look at this video David put together about teaching and using Web 2.0. technology:

Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

Classroom 2.0 is also a community you might like to consider joining. You'll find me up there!

Can RSS feed help you?

If you look at the top of this screen where the url for this blog page is displayed, you will notice a little icon on the right of the blog url that looks a bit like this - only it's smaller:

Maybe you've even wondered why it appears after certain urls and not after others.

Well, the reason for that is that it indicates whether a site has RSS feed or not... and our blog does.

Whoopee!

OK, so what is RSS feed?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

'Ah-ha!' I can hear you all saying.

And what on earth does that mean?

Don't ask me...

I don't know why anyone called it that either, but basically RSS feed can be used to get information that's on a site - and it's particulary useful if the information on a site, blog or forum is updated regularly because you can subscribe to the RSS feed and get that information sent to you (by clicking on the RSS icon in the url) - don't worrry you won't be asked to pay any subscription fees!

Once you've subscribed and added the RSS feed to your personal homepage (see previous post for information about how to set up a personal homepage), the RSS feed will automatically update the information displayed there if/when new posts appear on the site you have suubscribed to.

This little video clip gives you all the information you need to get started.

Creating your own personal homepage/RSS feed reader

If you are like me you probably find that you don't really have time to check all your favourite websites for new posts/information, so maybe you ought to think about creating your own personal home page which you can set up so that it automatically gets any new posts or information using RSS feed and displays them there.

To get a better idea about what a personal homepage is all about watch a training video by Nik Peachey, a learning technology consultant, writer and teacher trainer or read his blog

If you'd like to see an example of someone's personal homepage, check out Glady Baya's Pageflake site.

Here's a screenshot of mine:

Finally, here’s a site which compares the most commonly used personalized home pages: www.mashable.com

P.S. If you don't know what RSS feed is, watch this space!

Using TED in the classroom

The annual TED conference brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers to give short and concise talks about their work to their peers. It's an invitation only event, but luckily for us the best and most popular talks can be seen and downloaded (as audio or video files) for free.

The talks range in length from around 3 - 25mins and can be used in a number of ways in class.
One of my favourites, as it's short but also very interesting and relevant is this one by Richard St. John. In 3mins he gives us the 'Secrets of success in 8 words'.


Here's how I have used this in my lessons > level B1+:

1. Get your students to brainstorm what they think leads to success. This could be done as a pair activity with reporting to the whole class or as a whole class brainstorming activity.
2. Depending on the technology available to you, play the presentation in audio format only for students to listen for the key words. Play it 2 or 3 times if necessary. At this stage though, tell them to listen only for the key words. He speaks quite fast. This talk can be downloaded in MP3 format to you computer. From there you can either play it directly from a laptop, from an MP3 player, or burn it from your pc to a cd and play it on a cd player.
3. Compare St. John's tips with those the students brainstormed and discuss. You could also have a few comprehension or questions based on his content.
4. Show your students the video. This can be downloaded separately and shown on a laptop or using a projector, or viewed directly on the website, depending on which technology you have available in the classroom. If none of the above options are available you can get students to watch the video at home before the next lesson.
5. Conclude by discussing the power of presentation visuals, body language, and being able to see the person you're listening to. Your students will understand more from the video than from the audio version of the talk. In this sense you could change the topic and lead into the topic of presentations with your students, if they're Business English students, for example. If not, I still think this video/presentation is relevant for all students as success is not merely confined to business.

If you try this with your group(s), please post a comment and let me know how it goes or if you can recommend any variations to the suggested lesson plan.

Moodle yourself

We had a nice Moodle 101 course yesterday at MELTA in Munich and I realize that many people who didn't take part might also want to have a look at a Moodle course to test the waters. If you are one of those, just get in touch with me. The link to the site is http://annehodgson.de/moodle.

The workshop was planned as a one-off event, but there are materials and a few YouTube tutorials for self-study, plus a couple of courses I've put together.

Fun sites

Here's a site that is fun, but not essential:

Tag Galaxy

If you put in a search word (it could be the name of a city, a product, a flower, or your postman) into the 'Tag' box and click 'Go' and Tage Galaxy will select photos from Flickr (a site full of photos) and put together a world showing you the images it found.

Here's an example of an image the site will create if you put in the 'tag' Munich.

And here's what Earth Album put together for Munich... which is another fun, but not essential site.

Earth Album is a mixture of Google Earth and Flickr.

Have fun!

And if you have a fun, but not essential site to add to the list, please post the details up here.