Virtual You

                                                                 Virtual You; vyou.com
What is this.............?
Yes.......It's true!!!!
 Now you can create your own Virtual personality and join an on-line broad community that you can talk and react with all over the world. Just sign up for VYOU and you can ask and answer questions to different people all around the world......
Then, you can embed the interview, share your profile on Facebook or  Twitter account...
Go ahead and ask me whatever question you've got on your mind:




Not only you can ask questions to friends and people from all the world, but you can also open one of VYOU channels to talk to famous figures and high-profile authorities from the fields of business, music, politics and more..... . Take a peek at some of these channels available:

Why to use it............?
The reasons are abundant, but to mention a few:

• Teachers can communicate with their students outside the physical borders of the class. Therefore, they will enjoy it and get intrinsically motivated.
•  Students can tear down the wall of anxiety by face-to-face conversation and start expressing themselves freely.
• They can assign students online homework and tasks for those who are introvert or dis-inhibited from Speaking in public.
• Students themselves can create their own profiles and start talking to each other.
• Getting students familiarized with the multi modalities of speaking and listening virtually on the net make them more comfortable with technology and they gain a new literacy........

Limitations:
Students might go around wasting their time doing trivial things online. However, with teachers' supervision, clearly-defined goals and fixed timelines, learning objectives can be fully fulfilled!
Have a look at Kimberly answering my question about her perception of the perfect man...
Look at her stumbling and trying to think deeply of a logical answer because she's aware of the audience she's addressing to:          
Observe how teachers can focus on many grammatical points in her answer...the number of adjectives...false starts... colloquial expressions...

ELLO- 1050 Listening Recordings

                                       English Listening Lessons Library Online

What is this?

Elllo is an opulent source of free listening materials that combines images with listening transcriptions. It has seven versions, quizzes, and various exercises to evoke variety for the user. One common feature amongst all of them is that you can show or hide the transcripts and download them along the exercises you want to test your learners on.

Why is it important?

As teachers, we have always suffered from lack of listening materials in general, and authentic ones in particular. Not only does Elllo have native speakers, but it also has interviews and a variety of dialects and accents from different people around the world. These listening transcripts are rather authentic because although they are made for the purpose of teaching, they are of high quality and can be considered rather authentic in general.

How to use it?

·        A wide variety of tasks could be chosen from Views, Mixers, Games, News, Songs, Videos, points.

·        It contains American and British English that is displayed on the shape of a flag to the right-hand side of the screen.

·        After digging deep, I found some of them are quite useful and can be used efficiently and come are not that smart. Therefore, I will be talking about the use of Views, Mixer, Game, and Points.

·        I will start with the most interactive ones, Points, because it displays snippets of the listening with some visual aids and stops automatically for the learner to answer the question. Learners have the liberty of repeating and choosing the right answer from a list of different options and they get a point as they go along.

The second type of tasks that intrigued me is Games.

·        It is a series of interactive quizzes that use very nice visual aids and stops automatically to display the question which comes from a picture. According to the theories of SLA and multimodalities, learners pay attention to the pictures and the content rather on answering the question itself. Therefore, acquisition occurs unconsciously by use of a realia type of flashcards. If answered incorrectly learners can repeat or move on to the next question. By giving this option, it removes the general anxiety hallmark of quizzes and helps the learner focus on learning rather getting well in doing an exercise.

The next one is called Mixer and it prepares learners to listen to people from all different countries sharing their opinions on a specific topic or issue. It facilitates learners’ tolerance for different accents. In that sense, this type of tasks can be considered authentic:

The last one I want to talk about is a Views which is a collection between an interviewer and people that come from all walks of life including business, banking, scientists and professors.  

·        A common feature among all of the previous tasks is the Language Notes part that gives a special focus on special phrases, idioms, and phrasal verbs with appropriate listening explanation and different uses of the idioms. This kind of exercises reinforces the use of colloquial and natural day-to-day English that is different from the artificial one in the course books. As you can see in the image:

In every task there are downloadable sets of exercises that focus on vocabulary, comprehension, and the overall meaning. In other words, they reinforce, listening for gist, for the specific details, and for intensive details with the specific focus on phrases and idioms that revamps English to a near-native levels.  

Limitations:

Some of the recordings are a little fabricated in the sense that they cannot be considered completely authentic. In addition, some of them have poor recording quality, especially the Songs and the News that are not very successful in terms of the design, too. 

Earth Hour- Help Save the Planet

                                                           Earth Hour; Turn off the Lights



Teaching English is not only about the language itself, but also about raising people awareness of the global and environmental issues....


As a project that started as a personal initiative in 2007 to save energy by turning off the lights for an hour in Sydney, now it has become an international world movement to compete for the Green City Capital of Earth. It's simple.....A;; you have to do is turn off the lights from 8:30 tonight and start making changes to your life style. Biking to work and putting recyclable materials in their designated bins can be a great start. You can protect your city from global change and help aid hundreds of thousands of lives by doing so....
So, what are you waiting for...Save your planet EARTH.

International House Podcasts- IH

                                                       LAD & SLA with Scott Thornbury
                                                              Chomsky vs Behaviourism
                                                                   Speaking in Tongues



This tool offers  a series of short English-language radio programmes, produced and recorded by the International House,  IH Barcelona. The 25-programme series is broadcast on Saturday mornings by Radio Free Barcelona on 107.7 FM.



Why to Use it?
It's great for both learners and teachers to raise their awareness of how language is learnt and offers reliable high-quality materials for listening too...

How to use it?

Very simple!! Just choose a programme, click on it and listen to a podcasts of your own choice!

ESL Listening Lab Randall's

Randall’s ESL Listening Lab:   

         
One of the most common problems and complaints you would hear more often is the lack of
listening materials for practice in class or even for testing. Another one I
have heard repeatedly is that all recordings are not authentic. Although it
seems that there is a large number of resources online, Randall’s ESL seems to
be the most reliable and diverse one amongst them.

What is this and why to use it?

This is a very rich source of listening materials that can be used in class extremely
diversely and it gives teachers a wide range of levels and a variety of topics
to choose from. It divides its exercises into pre, while, and post listening in
addition to offering the choice of choosing from general listening materials,
for academic, life tips, quizzes and vocabulary learning as you can see in the
image below:

How to use it?

After spending a long time looking carefully into the listening materials, I would
suggest the following:

·    Use materials for general purposes for different levels and only use the ones for academic purposes for higher levels.

·      Download the recording transcripts using the player that is compatible with your computer, namely Windows Media Player, or Real Player.

·    After that, you can print out the exercises and choose
the ones that you’re interested in and that respond to your students’ needs and
level of proficient.

·     That’s it then! Just play the recording and do the
exercises with your students.

·      Theirs is a special part focused on the use of the new
idioms used in the recording which teaches informal American idioms like the
ones used below:

Limitations:

There are quite a few:

·    Due to the not-so-sophisticated interface of the
website, it is not appealing for students. Thus, it’s better for teachers to do
them using pen and paper rather than computers.

·   Some of the recordings are fabricated and unnatural
which activates the teacher’s role of choosing the most appropriate among
these.

·  The most part of the video recording are of a poor
quality and not natural too. However, picking from these is the most
appropriate solution.

Wetoku

On-Line Conferencing & VLE:

Just another amazing tool by Russell Stannard. You can now give Live Lectures to students and Chat on line by using Wetuku.com. Teachers can record their lectures; give after-class feedback, record homework, and maybe online tasks. On the other hand, students can make the use of the best
audio-visual quality while interacting with their teachers and benefit from
paralinguistic features that don’t exist in other Virtual Learning
Environments, VLEs.  You can then share your broadcast on Facebook &Twitter. Watch this video of me and Russell stannard:

How to use it:

      · First create an account.

·  Then, click on Showtime and create your online room.

·   Type your name and the other persons’ names and start
your online lectures.

·      You can then grab the special URL or the embedding link
and paste on your website, browser, or just email it to your friends and
students

Another use is that learners can record themselves, too to have an online forum with their
friends practicing and doing tasks and homework. The most salient feature of
this tool is that users can use the recording in two ways:

·     They can Copy and Paste any recording or Broadcasting
they make.

·       Teachers can grab the HTML for each of these
recordings and EMBED it in their Blogs or websites for learners to use.

·       This tool extends the physical boundaries of typical
classrooms to the Virtual space that increases learners’ autonomy and
motivation.

·      When learners see their teachers and interact with
them by exploiting gestures, smiles, and face expressions, they can learn
paralinguistic features.

·     It will also increase their sensitivity of the audience
who are watching them in addition to careful choice of language and speech
features like prosody, intonation, connected speech.

·    It is a great
tool for reflection for students to look back and improve their mistakes and
observe their progress and performance.

All users have to do is create an account and start broadcasting, copying and pasting,
and embedding their own videos by naming their own virual room as well as the guests as you can see below.

DOTSUB Podcasts-Vodcasts

DOTSUB


Much research has proved the importance of combining both audio and video, namely multimedia, in the learning process so that learners can develop multi-skills in a world of technological advances. The term multimodality has signified the importance of audio-visual materials for learners who grew up used to harness the power of computers to get all the information they want, or Digital Natives. Let's have a look at how different videos for kids, adults, and ones that keep up to date with the international affairs.

What is this and why to use it?

DOTSUB is a great tool that has dowloadable embeddable videos on various areas of science, interests, and latest up-to-date affairs accompanied with the related transcripts. These come on the form of downloadable Podcasts and Vodcasts.

What sets this tool apart from other video tools are these factors:

• It has transcripts from more than 30 international languages.

• Moreover, it displays the videos with translations to all the previous languages.

• Not to mention, it acknowledges the original author’s of the name with video durations.

• It also classifies videos into different Genres like, comedy, news, dramas, documentary.

• It takes great care of the CLIL aspects and other domains of education.

• This tool also gives the year and type of English used whether American or British.

• It’s censored in that learners can report videos that are offensive or inappropriate.

• A large part of these videos are focused on humanity issues and areas of global interest like desertification, global warming not to mention economics and finance.

• There are special groups of videos that correspond with different ages and needs like children and adult learners in addition to the ones most watched.

• It is a great repository for authentic videos that are not intended for language learning and develops autonomy because learners can Upload their own videos and produce their own transcripts of the videos.


Watch this live video that gives a live feedback of the latest unrests that have been happening in Egypt and notice the subtitles in English in addition to the huge number of languages that it could be translated to. Learners can watch the video with subtitles and translation at the same time:  




How to use it?

Teachers can play the videos after brainstorming ideas about a certain issue and learners can check their predictions on a topic and develop their skills to listen for gist regardless of the new words they don’t know. They can also be used as a part of the lesson to reinforce an idea and create variety of teaching materials in the classroom.

As a later stage, learners can view these videos at home and write down all the new words they didn’t understand and look at the transcriptions or the translation of new words. Not to mention that this tool promotes intrinsic motivation because it caters to different ages and levels which will subsequently lead to great enjoyment.

Limitations:
I might be an avid supporter of this tool, but it is free, easy to use, up to date, has more than 30 languages in it and you can upload your own video and transcribe it, too.
The only point that teachers should be aware of is to keep a pedagogical purpose in mind while viewing these videos and give constant support and guidance while using them to keep learning focused with a purposeful meaning.