flynn089

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc. Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project. What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique. How to use this with students When ever I've tried to do drama, video...

Monkey See is an excellent site which carries a lot of short high quality video content. It is based around the concept of instructional videos; being able to see something in order to be able to do it yourself. It has short video clips that cover a really wide range of things from parenting tips, relationship advice, to how to set up a home studio, play the guitar or apply red lipstick! The featured video content is very high quality and each 'lesson' is split into shorted clips of between 1 - 3 mins, so it doesn't take too long to watch. Visitors to the site can also create their own channel page to show their own videos and become 'experts'. Some of my favourites are: How to audition for a vocal competition How to salsa dance (I still need some work on that one) How to create a home recording studio There's also a good section on careers and education which has advice and tips on selecting colleges, doing interviews as well as more business orientated stu...

Chatmaker helps you to do just that! I'm amazed at just how easy things like this have become these days and it's free! I used this website to create this chat room: http://www.chatmaker.net/chatap/rooms/NikPeachey/ It took probably less than 2 minutes! Here's a quick tutorial showing how it was done. Chatmaker tutorial (Flash 202k) This is the kind of thing that you used to need your own server and a lot of knowledge to create, Now anyone can do it. How to use this with your students Creating a chat room especially for distance students can be really useful, but don't just expect them to use it. You'll need to set them some goals and tasks. If you can get your students using it, then you'll also need to decide what level of English you want them to aim for. Do you want them using text speak? e.g. "W8 4 ME, I’M L8, SOZ "OR Would you prefer them to express that in 'plain English'; "Wait for me I'm late . Sorry". Both have some va...

A Picture's Worth is a really wonderful site which collects together images with short essays (300 - 1000 words). It's based on the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. The pictures and essays are sent in by site visitors. There's a gallery section where you can browse all the images and essays which have been sent in, as well as a feature section which has some of the most popular images. There is also a link to Google Maps which will show you where the pictures have been taken. This isn't your average Web2.0 site. If you want to submit a picture and an essay you have to send it to the editor / site owner who decides if it is good enough These are some of my favourites. Nice story here about a pink VW Beetle As a contrast I also like this one of a ladybird, though as much for the story as the image How to use this with students Get them to start their own Picture's Worth. This could be a website that you put together or just with pictures and p...

I've just seen this site which is aimed at helping people to set up language exchanges. It's a kind of social networking tool. It's called Friendsabroad.com . You simply put in your language and then the language you want to learn and then you can also choose the country where you would like to find the person. Click on search and you get a list of people who fit your criteria. You have to register, but it is free, then you can get in contact and start chatting, emailing through the platform (no email addresses are disclosed) and can even leave voice messages. No 'teachers' as such are involved, there are however a coupe of useful tools on the interface to help you. There is; a text to speech converter, so that you can type in a phrase and see how it is pronounced a multilingual dictionary so that you can get help with translating a phrase translator. Type in any phrase you want and get a translation of it On the whole I think this is a great idea. It looks like th...