Make a difference with mailVU

With this, you can send free video email to your friends, family, teachers or anyone for FREE!

This is website where you can easily learn to make a video. No complicated instructions or button. Just a click away and you're ready to make your own video.




In English language learning, fluency in spoken and written English is essential. It is also important for motivation. Therefore, speaking activity is necessary in language learning and choosing the right methods is crucial.

Usually speaking activity only can be done in the classroom. But now, not anymore!
Because I'm going to make use of this fantastic tool; mailVU.


How I want to use it?

Speaking activity

For example:

Students talk about the important years or dates in their life. First, you may wanna write the important years in your life and talk about it as an example. Then, ask students to make a timeline about the important event in their life and let them talk about it in pairs.

Other possible ideas:


- Talk about the object that's important to them. e.g. a ring.
- Cooking show.
- Talk about their special talent and they may teach others on how to do it. e.g. sewing, cross stitch, playing guitar.
- Act as a promoter and promote something. e.g. cosmetic product.

This activity can be done in the classroom and as a homework.


Homework. 
Here is where mailVU come to the rescue!
This tool contribute to the new idea for homework. Now speaking activity not only can be done in the classroom but also at home.

I'll ask my students to record themselves and talk about the particular topic that they already done with their friend in the class. Then ask them to send it to me via email.

Once I receive the mail, I'll just simply click on the link and watch the video. I'll listen to them speaking  and make some notes. Then I'll give them feedback using the video or maybe attachment by click on the Reply button.



Advantages:

1) Encourage students to speak the language. Not only during the classroom activity but also at home when they're doing their homework.

2) Connected classroom. Link the content they learn in the class with the homework. The interrelation of classroom activity and homework is important to enhance their understanding.

3) Make videos for free.

4) Personalising the topic in language learning to their interest.

Good Teachers Need Technology.

Adobe Connect

"... a web conferencing solution for web meetings. eLearning and webinars. It delivers exceptionally rich interactions......"

How this tool will be useful for language teaching?

I would use this tool as a revision session outside the classroom.

If fate decided that I'll be teaching in a well-equipped school with majority of the students have the internet connection at home. I would be happy to use this tool as a medium for discussion with my students. Maybe once a week.

In the discussion session, I will come out with the latest topic that we cover in the class. I bet it will be useful for students especially to those who don't really understand the lesson in the class.

Or

Suppose one of your students has missed some lessons so you decide to give a catch up lesson. This tool may help you to arrange a replacement class for those who keen to learn what they've already missed.

How does it link to current idea about language teaching?

1) Captivate students with rich, engaging, and interactive experiences.

2) Possible in for anyone and anytime. Because this tool makes students available to virtually anyone, anywhere, on almost any device, with just a click of a button.

3) Assessible. Allow students to easily attend your virtual classroom without the need for additional downloads.

4) Enable rich, highly collaborative interactions between students and teacher.

5) One type of students that you may find in a class is 'the invisible'. So, this virtual discussion might be an advantage for them to express themselves. They may be quite shy and passive in a real classroom but active in a virtual discussion.

Limitations?

1) Not really appropriate to do all the time as a main lesson where you actually teaching a new knowledge to students.

2) You don't have eyes on the back of you head. You can't always monitor students at home. either they're actually actively participate in the discussion or playing around after they joined the discussion group.

3) The internet problem may hinder the progress of the discussion.

4) Cannot pass the power to control the cursor or discussion to others.

5) The only way to interact with the students is through the chat box. Sometimes you can't attend to all the questions and interactions.

Hello hello ellloenglish !!!

http://www.elllo.org/

Look at the red arrow:

This tool is divided into 5 sections: VIEWS, MIXER, GAMES, VIDEOS and NEWS

When you click on Mixer there're 2 more sections you can get: SONGS and POINTS.

There're one more feature which is SCENES as shown below:

You can see 3 tabs:

1) Transcript

2) Audio Slide Show - you can turn on the text to get the subtitles

3) Audio Notes where you can click on the highlighted word to hear the pronunciation of the word and how it's used in a sentence.

You may download the audio and do the quizzes as well.

How I would use this tool?

Easy peasy lemon squeezy! I would simply use this for listening activities.

This tool can suit my secondary school students at all level depends on how I'm going to use it.

There're a lot of topics you can choose but I will make some adjustment for the activities or maybe adding more activities for students.

The website will be my favorable source for any listening sources.

How is this tool underpinned by current understanding of language learning?

1) Can hear variety of accents spoken by people all over the world.

2) Authentic materials: Using the real English that we hear on the street.

4) Personalising the learning to students' interest. Important to motivate students.

5) Develop listening skills - Loads of listening activities (audio + transcript).

Most importantly, it not only provide the audio for listening but create the reason for listening as well that will create the reason for students to communicate and talk about the topic.

6) Variety of topics - world & cross cultural knowledge

As in the picture above: The topic is about Korean Family. Students can listen to the audio and do the exercise while learning about other culture as well.

Kill two birds with one stone!

7) Promote autonomous learning - a good autonomous learner will look at other way to learn English and this tool will be one of the best choice.

8) Language learning is skill-based. This tool has variety of skills: writing, reading, vocabulary and listening.

9) Extract language from the context. Learning language while learning other stuff as well. (Content and language integrated learning; CLIL)

10) Let students to gauge their level. Good learners will always reflect themselves.

Limitations:

1) The organisation of the main page is quite messy and confusing.

2) The website can be easily corrupted. Especially when lot of people using this webpage simultaneously.

3) The video provided not really helpful and interesting.

Live Discussion

Introducing the tools that can help you embrace the backchannel and connect with your students in realtime.

(1)

http://todaysmeet.com/

With Todaysmeet, the only thing you need to do is to create a room.

Then students can start make comments, ask questions and so on.

teachers can attend to students' needs one by one.

(2)

http://www.wallwisher.com/

Wallwisher is an online notice board. It's ideal for making announcement, discussion and keep-notes about anything.

Use Todaysmeet and Wallwisher because:

1) Easy! No registration needed

2) Effective. With wallwisher, you can send images, music, video and pages.

Learning by Clicking

http://clicknlearn.net

You may wonder how this website work.

Well, you can try it out. Just click on the link above.

This tool is actually designed for Spanish students learning English. That's why the levels of the activity is classified based on Spanish education system.

Basically, this website is aimed to let students have fun while they learn.

I would recommend this on account of:

1) This tool is actually interesting and quite helpful.

2) It is a good practice for beginner and intermediate students.

3) It is free!

4) Printable version is provided. Teachers can print it out.

5) Combination of visual + audio + written explanation.

However, there're several things I dislike about this tool.

Taking example of one of the activity:

(1 BAT: grammar: Futures)

1) The topic is depressing. The effect of airplane crushed in the air is terrific.

2) Confusing. The pictures in this activity don't really represent the name. For example: sleeping bag in this picture don't look like sleeping bag.

3) Inflexible. You will stuck in one activity forever if you don't get the right answer.

For example in the activity above. You have to get the answer right before you can proceed to the next activity.

4) If you click on the 'back arrow' and click 'next arrow again', all the answers you've filled in are gone. You need to do it again.

That's all!

But I still believe this tool would be useful to the some extent.

Try it and see what'll you think of this tool....

Distill a long Text

Reading a long text can be daunting , but it doesn't have to be. Knowing a few simple, statistically proven tools will help you understand the long and wordy text.

Here is the saviour tools that will help you:

1) http://www.wordle.net/

Start with the simple step. Copy and paste the text in the space provided or just enter the URL of the web page where you find the text as shown below:

Then it will create this for you!

You can choose the colour, layout and font you like for your wordle.

Most importantly, you can print that out!

2) http://www.wordsift.com/

This tool work almost similar as Wordle. But this tool has extra features like images/videos, visual thesaurus and the text.

I don't really like the idea of images because I don't really think it will be a great help for students to understand the text.

The images and the text will work if you click on the words in the wordle. Then a lot of related pictures will appear from Google. Sometimes unrelated pictures will appear as well and that's the UGLY part of this tool.

But the idea of highlighting the words in the text by clicking in particular word in the wordle is absolutely brilliant. Students can see how frequent the words are used in the text and how it's used in a sentence.

Another cool thing about this tool is, the words in wordle can be sorted versatilely. You can sort the words from common to rare or vice versa and sort it alphabetically as well.

Why I think and are FABULOUS ???

1) Good pre-reading activity. Students can preview the text to build comprehension.

2) Help teachers to review the text to identify challenging words or concept.

3) Identify suitable images or videos to use in class.

4) Great tools for group activities and also can be used individually as literacy support.

You may wanna try this as well!

http://www.visuwords.com/

Be crazy with Zimmer Twins

Anyone fancy creating a movie?

You should try this!

Introducing Zimmer Twins.

You may act like a director and create your own movie. This tool allows you to create your own endings to one of the story starters. You may also create your stories from scratch.

So put on your director's hat and reveal your creativity.

How to use it in the classroom?

We can organise a small movie-making competition in the classroom. Ask students to work in pairs and let them compete. You may reward the best pair.

This is a great tool to practice communicative activity in the classroom.

Good things about ZimmerTwins:

1) It encourages students to talk and discuss with their partner

2) Encourage creativity.

3) The activity is fun and very engaging for young learners.

4) The combination of three main learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic (VAK)

5) Learn the sentence structure.

BUT

It's not-so-good because:

1) It has word limit for the conversation they can create

2) The movie cannot be shared with other people. Seems like we can only view our own movie.

3) The final product cannot be embedded. (That's why I cannnot share the movie I've made)

4) The 'post new comment' part seem to be useless if other people cannot view the movie and post the comments.

To sum up, I think this tool is an absolutely brilliant but the fact that it cannot be shared disappoint me.... =(

Tools for Teaching and Learning : Concordance

Each word has its own grammar or syntagmatic relations. That's why we find some words are usually collocate with specific words in a sentence.

Sometimes, even dictionary can't help us to understand the syntagmatic relations between words. This can be help with the concordance programs such as:

1) BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

British National Corpus (BNC) is a collection of samples of real life language, chosen to be as varied as possible in its coverage. It includes speech as well as a wide variety of different kinds of written language.

What does a concordance do that a dictionary can't?

1) It shows authentic examples - the word usage 'as it really is'.

2) Shows common collocations/combinations

3) Can identify subtle associations and connotations

4) Can hightlight culturally-specific meanings

2) http://www.just-the-word.com/

This tool is a good concordance analyser that will be a great help in English writing.

For second language learners, this tool can justify your choice of words and suggest improvements.

One cool thing about this tool is it knows about some common errors made by second language speakers.

If you seek for the tool that have the advantages of dictionary and thesaurus, this might be your choice! Because it combines the advantages and enhances the usefulness of both.

How this help students in learning English?

In writing:
Students can use this concordance analyser to help them in finding the right collocation.

Connected classroom

Connected classroom builds lasting relationships between teacher and students in or outside the classroom. Most teachers in second language classroom find it hard to ensure that students are actually practicing the language even outside the classroom. The tendency of them to speak in their mother tongue is inevitable.

Thus, we need tools to make students practice the language beyond the classroom. And I would love to introduce this charmingly tool for language learning.

http://www.brainshark.com/

Check it out!

This would be a great help for teachers and also students.

They can practice the language by record their voice for their own presentation. The presentation can be made in many ways such as power point presentation, document, video or photo album. They can even produce a podcast.

This tool enable students to practice and speak the language while enhancing their grammar and vocabulary skills. And of course their presentation skills!

In English classroom, this tool might be suitable for all level of secondary school students. You can ask them create a simple presentation and record themselves. It is a very interactive homework for your students and at the same time get them do the speaking activity outside the classroom.

The activity can be as simple as it can be. For example, you can ask them to talk about themselves.

Something like this:

Try it out!

You may find it fascinating.

:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:.

:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:.

Check it out this amazing website where you can find a lot of pictures!
Only start with simple steps. Type in anything you want to see and Bubblr will search it for you!
The pictures will come out in group of seventeen and simply click on next to see more pictures.

In English classroom, this tool will be great for presentation session. They can select any suitable pictures depends on the topic of the topic they need to present and slowly build up the presentation.

This tool will be great as speaking activity.
You can ask students to form a group and make a presentation. Of course they need to talk about the pictures they choose. Or you can narrow down the topic. For example, "places you want to visit or you have visited".

Another way to make use of this tool.
Make it as a writing activity!
In the pictures they need to write in or make a caption about the pictures.

Or you can make it as 'correct the errors activity' where you create the bubbles with a lot of mistakes and ask your students to correct them.

The things I like about this tool are:
1) Free
2) Easy!
3) Pictures with a lot of choice.
4) Encourage personalisation. Let your mind wander!
5) Good collaboration - mash-up the pictures in a good way.

However, there are several downside I would like to share about this tool:
1) Quite boring for the advance learners.

2) Don't actually use the language

3) the bubbles distract the images.

Alternative way!

You can choose Bookr instead of Bubblr. Bookr work exactly the same as Bubblr.

http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/

Writing while listening

Writing and Listening are fundamental skills that need to be focused on in language learning.

Here is an useful tool to get these two skills polished up:

There are so many topics and issues we can choose from this tool.

After we decide on the topic, we can begin by selecting the mode for this activity; Full Mode, Quick Mode, and Blank Mode. Every mode presents you a different principle.

But, you need to choose the level of the acticity, beforehand. If you use this tool with your students, you need to decide on the level which suits your students' level of English. The red arrow show you where you can find the levels by clicking on the 'Level' tab.

After I've chose the topic, I can start by listening to the audio provided and start to dictate it by type in the words on the space provided and click on the 'enter' tab on your keyboard. It will appear on the box above it:

If we opt to listen according to the track, then we can simply click on the 'track' and select.

If you can't get what the word is, simply play the audio again or click on the 'hint' tab below the box.

This tool would be suitable for all secondary school's students depends on the level of the article. That would be our' job to determine on what level our students are.

Pair work might be a great way to do it in the classroom. We can try it once in the class and ask them to do it again as homework with different topics or issues.

One thing about teaching, we always need to think of the advantages and disadvantages of the tool we want to use.

Let me list down the advantages and the disadvantages for us to consider.

Advantages:

1) It supports autonomous learning.

2) Suitable for all levels

3) Students are able to work on vocabulary

4) Can enhance listening skill

5) More exposure to the language

6) Students can evaluate themselves

7) Focus on multiple skills (listening, writing, spelling)

8) FUN and FREE!!!

Disadvantages:

1) The news or issues in this tool may come from unreliable sources

2) May not have the facilities and internet access.

3) Facebook advertisement on the right side can distract students' focus.

Now we know one more interesting tool to teaching. Why don't we make use of it creatively and wisely!

Sing and Write

Do you think activities that involve singing are enjoyable?

I do!

One reason why I found them fun is because I love singing. Especially when I'm all alone.

I don't even care if I discovered that my singing pitch is consistently more off pitch on particular part in a song. Most importantly I can remember the lyrics. Sometimes you will find remembering the whole lyrics is useful and blissful especially when you are in shower listening to the mp3. Then, the catchy and favourite song of yours is played, you can sing the entire song without a word missed, until the whole world hears! That's a bliss~

However, memorizing the lyrics of a song isn't an easy task for most people. But with a little time and effort, you will come to know every word of the song. Whether you will be able to sing it is another story.

Memorising song can be very hard but all you need is practice, practice, practice and soon you will know every word to a song backward and forth. Therefore, I found Lyrics Training is very practical for me. It's kind a good practice not only to memorise a song but also in developing the language skills especially listening, writing and spelling.

There are so many songs we can choose from the list. As shown below, I randomly pick 'just the way you are' by Bruno Mars:

If we look at the Game Mode in the picture above (in the black circle), we can see that there are three levels of this activity that we can choose depends on our ability. There are Beginner, Intermediate and Expert.

For Beginner mode, 10% of the song is deleted and we need to complete it by listening and write in the space provided (as shown by the red error). The higher the level, the harder it get.

As for Expert mode, 100% of the lyric is deleted. In other words, we need to complete the whole song!

If you cannot catch up the lyrics or any particular word you can simply tab the backspace button on your keypad and it will play the line again.

It is quite interesting isn't it? You've the chance to have fun and also polish your language skills.

I might suggest this activity to my students in future. They will be very excited with this tool because it is very engaging for them. I've tried it so many times and believe me, it works! Once I start doing it, it will be hard to stop. Very engaging!

Most importantly, I learned a lot of new vocabulary only by listening to songs and my spelling is improve too. Thus, I am quite sure it will be an appropriate tool to be introduced to all level of secondary school's students.

This will be an alternative way to make your spelling session in the classroom variety. I might say it enlighten the mood!

This tool can be a very good practice for students as a homework. You may show them once in a classroom and practise it as a whole class. Then, they will start to sing together and complete the song. You may ask for a volunteer to type in the missing word in the screen. I can imagine it will be like a choir.

Nonetheless, there are pros and cons for every thing. There might be some downside of making this tool as an activity for students. Maybe I should try it first and see how it will turn out.

It is good to try. So, TRY IT OUT!

Make lessons fun with Dvolver

My lecturer, Russel introduced us to a website that can be very helpful for teaching and learning; Dvolver Digital Movie. Check it out!!!

http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/index.html

This will be my fundamental teaching tool one day. It allows me to create an interesting environment for English lesson. Perhaps it is suitable for all level of secondary school students because this tool is flexible and compromising, depends on how we use it in our classroom.

No worries. Everything is on us! We choose the tool and we decide on what we want to do with it....=)

Let me illustrate briefly about this tool;

Firsly, we need to choose the setting for our movie:

Then, we need to select the characters, there are two characters they need to decide; Character 1 and Character 2:

After that, we need to decide the plot for the movie:

This is the most crucial part in this type of activity where we need to type in the characters' lines. This is where the language is being tested:

After we done with the conversation between the two characters, we can select the background music for the movie, this is quite enjoyable:

The final step, of course we need to decide on the title and the title design for the movie we made:

Then we can click on the 'preview and send button' to finish up the process and email it to our friends or teacher:

This activity would be great if we can do it as a pair work so that they can discuss and gather some interesting ideas together.

The good things about this website are:

1) It creates a context for a language to be used.

2) Most importantly, this tool will make your lesson FUN!

3) It is very engaging for students.

4) It allows them to use their creativity! You will be surprised on how creative your students are.

5) In fact, this types of activity is very authentic in both language and productivity.

6) Dvolver maybe can help you make variety for your lesson. As a teacher, we always want our lesson to be motivating for students and not dull...

However, there are some limitations that we need to consider:

1) It may be inappropriate for young learners for example for primary school students. It may be way too hard for them to handle on their own.

2) May not be really helpful for more capable students who have higher proficiency in the language because the sentence they can create is limited.

3) ICT facilities? Is your school has assess to computer and internet? Rural area schools in Malaysia may likely face this kind of problem.

4) The use of inappropriate words or language by students. Be aware of that!

That's all for my first post for this blog. I'll write more next time.

Happy teaching!