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.

WebQuests

The first one to devise these is Bernie Dodge who is a professor at San Diego State University. Webquests are inquiry-based projects that are done for short-term or long-term purposes with the main sources of input from the internet. That does not mean that they cannot be extended to real life by means of surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. Plus, they can be created by either by teachers or learners. While doing our course in ELT at Warwick University with Tilly Harrison & Russell Stannard, we were divided in groups of four students, two at each computer. Every group is responsible for creating different quest for a specific target group of learner within a particular context. Then, we were given grades according to how well and engaging our quests were done. Have a look at the next WebGardens I made by using WebGardens which has invaluable number of quests to be used for teachers with absolutely brilliant ideas:

Their main importance is that they develop higher skills of researching, analyzing, and reproducing pieces of information rather than typical exercises of matching and filling in the gaps.

Points to keep in mind while designing Webquests:

• They should be individually-tailored to respond to particular students’ needs and their relevant contexts.

• Instead of sometimes wasting a substantial amount of time devising them, teachers can search the database of these quests to find some that serve teachers’ pedagogical aims as well as students’ needs.

• There are language-based and content-based quests or a little bit of both. Content-based quests might focus on developing research, skimming skills, critical analysis and evaluate different sources of information.

• Before teachers start their quests, they should ask their students about their preferences in order to choose a quest that is of main interest to all of them and engaging at the same time.

• Once the aims have been defined, the task should be laid out clearly so that students know what is exactly required of them. Here is the task I put for my students:

• Teachers then can give stage guidance by assigning different tasks; add certain images and links in order for the tasks to be attractive and interesting for the learners as seen in the task I devised myself for my learners:

• The final stage is the evaluation which should be based on the points asked for them during process stages.

• So in short, do needs analysis, choose a topic, identify your focus according to learners gap, assign different stage guidelines, and finally evaluate the work done.
• It is always an interesting idea to include real-life feedback from colleagues, teachers, and friends outside the class to help the learners to make the quests more interesting and engaging.

Limitations:

• It could be sometimes time consuming to design these tasks, but you can always use them again.

• There could be some technical problems with the way these work. For example, they should be saved every once and a while or you will have to repeat some parts of these quests.

• Uploading some photos and images could take a very long time. Not to mention, that Bernie and his partner Tom made the structure of these enquiries relatively long, but you can always skip some of these points.

Common Craft

                                                      Blogs; Podcasts & RSS in Plain English

One of the troubling concerns that face today’s language teachers is their inexperience in teaching a certain area of education or education that they are not familiar with, which is the case within CLIL environment . In addition, they could be asked to teach ESP in a Business course, even a course especially for trained soldiers, or as in my case I had to teach petroleum extraction courses!!!

What is this & why to use it?

Check this video on the importance on blogs first:

This tool will provide explanation to scientific, educational, social, and technological videos in an extremely simplified language for both teachers and learners to develop a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of some basic up-to-date concept of main interest.

• All the videos had been produced in the most succinct and brief way in about 3minutes on average with great care and skill to cater to various needs and levels of understanding.

• Both simplicity and brevity of these video demonstrations will increase enjoyment in watching that in turn will ensure intrinsic motivation.

• Presenting the materials in such an appealing and easy-to-understand way promotes scaffolding of learning because language might be a little above learners’ level.

• These can be used as warm-ups for a class previous research, or follow-up activities to check learners’ predictions on certain concepts.

• They make use of multimedia in a lighthearted way to appeal to all kind of learners.

Now check this video on what RSS is and how to be used:



Limitations:

They cannot be embedded unless you register for money. However, they are free downloadable, and don’t require high speed internet!!!

iTUNES

iTUNES.COM; A Repository of Educational Podcasts &Vodcasts

What is this?                           PRESS HERE TO SEE MY TUTORIAL ON iTUNES:

No one hasn’t heard of iPad, iPhones, or even iTunes, but the lingering misconception still remains that iTunes can only be used with Mac products!!! Well, that’s not true!!! Thanks to Russell Stannard who emphasized on many occasions that

‘You don’t need an iPad or iPhone to make the most of iTunes and iTunes You’

He also talked about the recent technological advancement in technology, specifically the ones applicable in education. In addition, he added that we are all members of an online community that is sharing the information instead of being cocooned in our secluded words and lag behind the trail of global development. He referenced Vance Stevens in what he called establishment pipes of networking to collaboratively share, exchange, and improve our conceptions on a specific matter.

Simply, just type iTunes, download it for free, and start learning.

How to use it?                             

It’s an absolutely amazing tool for autonomous learning that contains tons of authentic podcasts as well as vodcasts that are installable free of charge by clicking the get button . The sky’s the limit!!!!! You can choose from a variety for languages, technology,, math, history, physics, math, science, medicine, management to life-surviving, personal, and professional development authentic materials. In addition, these are automatically downloadable onto your computer once you have pressed the subscribe button. Here are onlysome of the  vodcasts available for learniong languages:

iTunes You is definitely your choice if you want to get accredited educational materials from the most prestigious and upscale universities in the world like Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, MIT, and The Open University. It also contains materials from TV shows and newscasts. Here is a list of some of these:

Why to use it?

• A source of substantial number of unlimited downloadable audio-visual authentic materials that are updated on a regular basis.

• It has got materials from the most distinguished Universities and institutions around the world like Oxbridge, Ohio, and The Smithsonian.


• A large number of these materials are for free. Not to mention, they are completely automatically downloaded on your computer once you have subscribed to them!!!

• An extra advantage would be to have them automatically downloaded on your iPad or iPhone, but again not a prerequisite!

• It is true that these materials can be integrated in a meaningful way as parts of a lesson. However, they are mainly used to create and develop autonomous and intrinsic motivation for students who will be flicking through educational materials of their own interest and enjoy them at the same time!!!! Subsequently, students will be engrossed in riveting activities that they have decided on being engaged with which will ensure their creativity along with an increase of their awareness in their self-worth and inert skills to develop.

Limitations:

The only obvious limitations are the ones related to students’ access to fairly-speedy internet that allows them to access iTunes store and automatically download the available materials.

Stop Plagiarism!

Plagiarism; Busted!!!

What is this and how to use it?

Numerous are the times when teachers spent hours and hours checking students’ essays and pieces of work for originality and plagiarism. These days are over with plagiarisma. It is as simple as that:

Just copy and paste the text you want to check for plagiarism and use one of the three most popular search engines available, namely Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Let plagiarisma do all the work for you!!!!

Then you can save the files in pdf format and give your feedback to your students who may accidently have used some words. The tool will then tell you the number of number of character, words, and sentences that are original and universities usually have their own allowed percentage of accidental co-occurrences.

You can also use professional features like google scholar search, similarity checker, and synonymizer. The latter creates an original copy that uses synonyms if some parts were accidently used and allows you to set a percentage on the rewritten parts of the texts.






Why to use it?

• Plagiarism is unethical and violates rights of privacy and copyrights.

• Plagiarism deprives equal opportunities for people who work very hard to have an original piece of work or research.

• The act of plagiarism has cost some industries billions of dollars in the last century.

• Plagiarisma is free of charge, easy to use, has extra choices like comparison checker and synonymizer. It also accepts various file extensions like TXT, HTML, RTF, DOC, ODT, PDF. Not to mention its availability to use different search engines like google, bing, yahoo, and google scholar and gives you detailed results of your texts and the number of occurrences.
Finally, you can copy the html for every text and post it on your blog!

Limitations:   I cannot see any!!
 

Virsona.com

                              Have a Chit-Chat with Einstein, Martin Luther Ling, or Beckham!

What is this and how to use it?

Virsona provides interactive dialogue systems for learners and teachers to engage in realistic conversations by emulating the way a historical, fictional or real person might ‘Reason, Remember and React'. Public and historical figures of the political, economic, sports domains in addition to celebrities can respond to questions asked by users in real time.
Not to forget that teachers can create their own characters and let students get to know them by interacting with these characters. This ensures that students will react efficiently with this tool in a meaningful way which whet their appetite for knowledge, involve in an enjoyable activity, and have a finished product. Subsequently, they will develop their autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and a sense of achievement in later stages.

Another benefit for this tool is that learners can collaborate and compete against other members of other groups to discover more information about the chosen character. They can predict certain answers to certain questions and check their predictions. Once they have acquired these verbalised skills unconsciously, they will be, according to Vygotsky’s theories, able to employ higher cognitive skills of understanding in active participation, especially if they were involved in choosing a particular figure of their choice.

I have to say that I like this tool!!! We have always dreamt of a super intelligent computer who can talk to us and react to our sentences. There is always this intrinsic drive that pushes us to outsmart these computers and show-off in front of our friends and colleagues. Give it a stab now!!!
Notice how I was picking Einstein's brain:

Limitations:
Although the tool is interactive and scientific, some of the questions might not generate the right responses from the computer. There is also a limited number of characters in this program which doesn't cater to every student's needs!

An Awesome State-Of-The Art Tool

VOXY.COM Learn a Language from REAL LIFE!!!

                                           Bloom’s Taxonomy & Krashen’s Theories in SLA

What is this?

Finally!!! I’ve just stumbled on this great website that is absolutely fantastic for both teaching in a purposeful context and catapulting students’ autonomy to sky-rocketing levels. It takes pieces of articles of newspapers and magazines and puts it in an attractive interface for students to listen, read, reconstruct, and take quizzes from these articles. Well that is a very parsimonious description of this website. That’s why I’ll talk in the next sections why and how to use it.

Why to use it?

• It’s completely free and easy to access.

• A repository of authentic materials.

• It caters to every student’s interests from which they can choose among topics from news, pop culture, and sports. Therefore, it’s learner centered rather than teacher centered as seen in the main entry's image.

• It can be used in scaffolding in that learners who mastered Basic levels can instantly click on Intermediate and Advanced skills.

• Learners can add their new words to a box that is on the right while listening and reading the articles. This box is called Word Bank that saves the new words and creates later a word-of-the-day entry of the recently-learnt words. Subsequently, learners will have a final Passport that reinforce their sence of achievement for discovering extra materials and links, and thereby foster SLA.

• It corresponds to Bloom’s taxonomy in that once learners have listened, read, added their list of new words to their inventory box, and taken the simple quiz, they can then click ‘yes’ to 'Too Easy' choice to take them to another set of options. Here’s the list of these options:

These options are analogous to a teacher’s way of saying to a learner ‘I have checked your answers and shall we move on’, or a way of employing higher cognitive skills by taking learners to a much harder process in which they have to recreate the authentic articles in a meaningful way after they have understood, applied, and analyzed the constituting parts of these articles.

• Since newspapers are full of idioms and collocations, they are a great source of exposure to these in an appealing and interacting interface.

• This tool offers a formative informal assessment for students because it focuses on quality rather than marks. In addition, its informality creates a relaxed ambience for learners who can take the exam as many times as they desire. It also provides marks at the end of each exam. It’s by far best of both worlds!!!

• Learners who can check their improvement on their Dashboard that tells them how much progress they have made.

• They can check other learners’ improvement by checking the score board and compete against them. That develops huge amount of intrinsic motivation for students who both enjoy and achieve the required tasks.

REAL-LIFE skills:

According to Johnson, he distinguishes between theoretical and procedural knowledge. To cut a long story short, procedural one corresponds to learners’ communicative competence and their ability to communicate efficiently in different expected and unexpected situations by employing certain skills. Real-life skills can shoulder this problem in that it offers. Here are some of these life skills this tool offers:

• Finally, it puts exercises and other kind of quizzes in games framework in order to relieve the pressure and tension that comes with such a scholastic name. It’s also motivating for learners to have checkpoints of their progress in order to be driven to achieve and learn more.

• Learners as well can use flash cards games to know the meanings of words and translation to Spanish for Spanish natives or learners like me.

How to use it?

It can be used in a variety of ways as warm-up listening activities, and then learners can read and guess the answers. They can compete against each other in terms of time and points for every session. The most important quality it possesses is its ability to promote autonomy for learners at home.

Limitations:

 The only limitation I can spot after close examination of this tool is the availability of only Spanish language to be translated to when using flashcards. Having said that, this doesn’t at all confuse learners or set an obstacle in the process of them acquiring a language since Spanish is only needed for one activity, namely ‘flash cards’.

JING & BBC Country Profile

   Two Blog Entries in One:                         BBC Country Profile & Jing                    

                                                      Jing; Screen Capturing Tool:


What & Why to use it?

Jing is a very important tool that records your computer screen. Teachers then can sit down, relax, and show it to their learners in the classroom. You can also send an e-mail to your learners to highlight some important websites you want them to use, assign homework, or give them a presentation on vocabulary, grammar, or any other language focus.

How to use it?

First go to techsmith.com, and then you’ll find Jing. Press download and you get it for free!!!!

Once you have downloaded it, a small sun will appear at the top of your screen and you can press on the capture button to start your screen capturing. In the free edition, you are only allowed to record for 5 minutes at a time.






As soon as you finish recording you can press the screencast button to get the URL and send it to your students or simply paste it in your search engine to get your recording. You can also save it on your laptop or PC to view it later. Instead of wasting time repeating presentations, you can do it once here and save it forever!!!!!! Go now and give it a stab!!!!
If you press this link it will show you how I used Jing to explain the use of another important tool called BBC Country Profiles.

Linitations:
The only limitation for this tool is that it only allows teachers or learners to record themselves for 5 minutes, but time limitations encourage them to be efficient and succinct!!!!!!!

MailVu.com

Speak, Video, & Learn


MailVu.vom

What is this?

This is an extremely powerful tool for both learners and teachers to make a video of themselves and send it to the person they would like to.

Why and to use it?

It makes use of multimedia by utilising sound and video so that learners can see themselves speaking at the same time of recording the video. They can repeat their video-recorded message as many times as they would like with a click of a button. Their video message could be sent to their peers or teachers.

It increases awareness of weaknesses in pronunciation areas not to mention developing natural speaking skills. Paralinguistic features like face expressions, gestures, and some bodily movements have been proven to increase the level of second language acquisition and the development of multi-functional skills for learners. I can spot great potential for the use of this tool in the classroom and take the learning process outside the classroom in a fun, interactive, motivating, and outside-the-box way.

How to use it?

Russell Stannard has suggested some way for teacher to use it in the next video:

Just type mailvu.com, press record, and send it to your students. Yes, it is as simple as that. You can also set a number of times to be shown or to be deleted automatically after a certain times of viewing it. I think this could be a useful way for teachers to ensure that their students have watched the recorded message on a particular day to set a time limit for them. Learners could be also assigned to interview each other and scaffold their language until they are satisfied with the recorded message. In a way it teaches students to do video editing which is a skill rarely, if ever, used in the classroom.

Limitations:
There are two limitations for this tool. First, it cannot be shared with an on-line community like podcasts, and seccond, you cannot embed it on your website or blog. However, you can e-mail it to yourself and watch the recorded message as much as you desire!

Audioboo.com

What is this?

Audioboo is a great tool for both learners and teachers to record and listen to themselves and others. I think this tool has a great potential for English teachers to be used in the classrooms, especially when video is incorporated in it as in Vodcasts.

Why to use it?

This tool can be used for consumption and production by teachers and learners.

• Teachers can work on their personal improvement by listening to authentic materials such as http://www.bbc.co.uk/.

• They can also set up activities for the learners as a per-sessional warm up to set the scene for a particular session or as a follow up activity.

• Teachers can record lectures for learners who had already missed the sessions as coursecasting.

• A great tool for learners to get a huge amount of exposure to authentic materials.

• A great tool for learners to reflect on the learning process.

• After making some podcasts, learners can compare their improvement in speaking skills.

• It is linked to forums such as Facebook and Twitter for other people to listen to and creates sense of audience for learners to improve their motivation.

• Lastly, it has great influence on giving feedback in a relaxed tension-free way in that teaches can only comment on common mistakes after having listened to all the podcasts.

How to use it?
 
Listen to this podcasts on how to use podcasts in the classroom:




• Just sign up for it and you will receive an e-mail to verify your account.

• Log in and start either recording or uploading your previously-made file from your computer.

• You can always repeat or edit your podcasts, add a picture, or even put your place on the map.

• You can join facebook and twitter to share your podcasts and listen to others.

• The most important point is to make your RSS to share your podcast with other on-line community members and listen to your favourite podcasts on the net.

• Do not forget to label your podcasts to enable search engines to find them.

   You can now embed your saved podcasts to post it on your blog.

CNN Student TV Channel

CNN Student News:


What is this and why to use it?

This is an incredible students’ channel that abounds with up-to-date events, technologies, sports, travel, and around the world news. These are authentic, reliable, contemporary sources of English that are not tampered with for educational purposes. However, there are features like questions and answers, in-depth discussions, and shoutouts.

• Completely free, motivating, promotes critical thinking, and learners’ autonomy because learners can download news podcasts and listen to them on the bus or while having dinner.

• It is a great source of exposure to realia and authentic materials.

• It has Questions and Answers for learners to reflect on what they have seen and see their level of understanding.

• In-depth discussion questions that encourage critical thinking in a contemporary framework of current issues and affairs.

• Materials are daily updated.

• They increase learners’ motivations in that learners can be involved in making decisions about their areas of interest.

• Reliable transcripts are provided for every piece of news.

• Learners can develop their skills for listening for gist, or the overall meaning in a natural way rather than being hung up on unimportant details.

• They can learn how to discuss, argue, and critically evaluate current affairs through the use of in-depth discussions or Q&As.

How to use it?

01 A once-a-week lesson can be dedicated for using this tool.

02 Students can watch these videos at home or in class to discuss them.

03 Then they answer the Q&As provided for each lesson

04 Next, printable pdf worksheets are distributed for learners to answer, or if enough computers are provided, they can be set in groups to answer the questions and discuss them.

05 I would prefer the latter way if possible to increase opportunities for learners to negotiate meanings and collaborate on doing the tasks at hand.

06 Finally, a whole-class discussion provides a forum for students to discuss these current issues and say their opinions on it.

07 At this stage, students are asked to keep a record of the new words they have learnt.

08 As a follow up activity, they should have a look at the transcripts at home and download the podcasts to listen to using their mp3 players.

Limitations:

• These videos require a high speed connection for learners to walk at home. However, teachers can easily download these videos and print the pdf sheets for learners to work on collaboratively even without internet connection.

• These are only used for intermediate to upper-level learners.