flynn089

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website. The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building. Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2 . Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want. This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback . I've al...

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show of images with words. Here's an example of what it produces. This one is based on the old expression; "You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink" Here's another based on the first verse of a Shakespeare sonnet (130) Sonnet 130 Once you have created your picture phrase you can either send it to a friend by email or go to the archive and find it to copy the URL. If you want to see just how quick and easy it is to create these then watch this short Flash tutorial movie (800k) How to use this with students...

This is a really handy little tool which is doing the rounds at the moment. It's called CuePrompter and it's an online Teleprompter. For those not in the know, a Teleprompter is a tool used by news readers, TV presenters etc to help them remember their lines. They read it from above the camera. This one is very simple to use and you simply cut and paste your text into the field, choose screen size, text size and colours and click a button and you are off. Once you have your text up on the screen you can then choose the speed that the text moves at and also do a few interesting things like having the text reverse or having the text as a mirror image! This video shows you how it is done How to use this with students This could be really useful to push your students reading speed and gist reading. Many students find it very difficult not to focus on every word of a text and get stuck when words come up that they don't know. With a tool like this, you can literally force the...

I've just been looking at a useful websites called Gifup that enables users to quickly and easily create animated gifs / image sequences like the one below. This seems to me a like a really useful way of revising and teaching vocabulary. What are the sports? This is a gif that I created to revise some sport vocabulary. It took about 3 mins to make using images from Flickr. Here's a tutorial movie showing how I made it . (1.2Mb swf) It was very simple and just involved searching around my key topic and selecting a few images. Then a couple of clicks and the site generated my gif and gave me an 'embed code' to add it to the site. (See my previous tutorial to find out how to embed images and video into webpages on your desktop) How to use this with students Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will...

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds. It's very simple and works on images from flickr . You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers. Watch a short video to see how it's done . (499k swf) How to use it with students This is great for vocabulary revision, especially with higher levels. Students could even learn some new vocabulary from it. It would look great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB) or you could give students a collection of vocabulary themes and get them to work on their own. Good to use as a filler for students who finish early What I like about it It's free Each wordsearch it generates is pretty much unique The timing adds an element of motivation and competition to it It's just so s...