flynn089

I've been blogging on this site now for just over a year, so I thought that just before I head off on my holiday for a couple of weeks, I would leave you with what I feel were some of my best postings over the last year or so. Creating audio-visual monologues Back in April 2007 I wrote about a nice bit of free recording and lip syncing software that enables students and teachers to create small animated flash characters like this one. Interactive presentations Back in September 2007 I discovered Voice Thread and wrote a tutorial and some teaching tips and some ideas for how to use it. Creating a mobile phone website In October 2007 I wrote about how to create your own mobile phone based community using Winksite. This included a demo tutorial as well as an example site for you to try out. Exploiting two computer-based RPGs In November 2007 I created some tutorials and teaching materials based around two online Role playing games (RPGs) and looked at how thee could be u...

It's amazing how you can spend ages looking for something you want and then when you find it a whole bunch of other things come along with it. That seems to be the way things have happened for me with video conferencing. I found and posted about tokbox last week and then came Bubble Comment this week which I wrote about on my Quick Shout blog , and now Bubble Joy! Bubble Joy is a way of sending short (60 seconds) fun video messages to people. Click here to see the live video message (only good for the first 50 visitors) They have a selection of message cards and you just record your video message to go in the middle using a webcam and microphone. The whole thing is very quick and easy to do. So why use this with EFL / ESL students? It's good listening and speaking practice It's good fun and easy to do It's communicative It's creative It's free, easy to use, doesn't require registration Nice selection of cards So how do we use this with our ESL / EFL stud...

Well I never thought I'd say this, but I've become a fan of microblogging ! I have to say that it's mainly because of Plurk . When I first saw Twitter some time back I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I had a look at a few 'twitterers' sharing such information as what they had for lunch or that they were washing their hair and decided there are levels of detail at which information stops being informative - if you know what I mean. Anyway, as the Twitter phenomenon continued to grow and other players joined the market I decided to give it another try. At the beginning of June I started a Twitter vs Plurk comparison . Now almost 6 weeks later, I have to say that for me Plurk has come out as a clear winner. Watch this demo to see why. Here's a quick demo of Plurk and some of the features. To view the demo in a new window click here (2.7Mb) Download the demo as Quicktime movie (4Mb) Download the movie for i-pod (5Mb) What I lik...

It's not often that you look at a product and think 'Ah! That's exactly what I've been looking for! And it's free!' But tokbox does seem to be that kind of product for me. For some time now I've been looking round for a suitable video conferencing type application and while there have been a few that look okay, like SnapYap which I reviewed a week or two back, when I saw tokbox this morning I realised that here was a video conferencing tool that had exactly what I wanted and a bit more. Here's a quick video demo of what it can do. To view the demo in a new window click here (3mins - 3.5Mb) Download the demo as Quicktime movie (5Mb) Download the movie for i-pod (7Mb) So what do I like about it? It's free and doesn't require any downloads. I was registered and signed in without disclosing any personal information (apart from email address) within less than 3 mins of finding the site! It has a range of ways to communicate including group v...

I've decided to start naming some of the sources I use to locate new and interesting websites and information. I've decided to do this for a number of reasons I just don't have time to write about everything I find, so this gives people the opportunity to find things for themselves and perhaps write about them. I always feel guilty that I don't acknowledge the sources of much of the information I get. This isn't because I'm guarding my sources, it has more to do with not working in a very organised way. I tend to mark interesting sites and come back to them later, by which time I can't remember the original source. I don't have a blog roll, but I would like to send some kudos to some of the sites and site owners that I feel have really helped me. A number of people have asked me how and where I find great sites to write about. If you have a blog and it doesn't appear on this list, please don't be offended, I will try to make this a regular featu...

Well it had to happen! As every other kind of site these days has a social network attached to it, why not karaoke too? The site I've been looking at is called RedKaraoke and it has quite a few useful features. There isn't a huge range of songs there yet, but users can upload their own, it also has a web cam feature so for potential singers who want to be seen as well as heard you can have your web cam hooked up while you sing. As with most karaoke, there are background tracks and you see the words of the lyrics highlighted as you are supposed to sing them. You can rate other singers too and have your own profile as well as take part in forums (mainly used for technical support by the looks of things) and there's also synchronous chat too. Click image to enlarge The high ranking singers get pushed to the top, and if you like someone you can leave encouraging messages of support. So why use this with EFL students? Anyone who has ever taught a EFL / ELT will know how powerfu...

Creating your own personal homepage / feed reader can be really simple to do and can also help you to save time and stay in touch with what's going on in your professional and personal life. My own personal home page is something I use everyday and have open for most of the day. It brings me the news from all my favourite websites, blogs and yahoo groups and allows me to scan content from 20 -30 different sources within a few moments. This would otherwise take me a few hours! So when I was asked to design a course to help teacher trainers use Web 2.0 technology in their teaching, I decided that a session on RSS and personal home pages was an essential. I've been using a yahoo reader for more than 4 years now, but I've become increasingly impressed with some of the other readers on offer and so I decided to have a look around at what else was available. Some of the main ones that impressed me were: http://www.pageflakes.com/ http://www.netvibes.com http://www.igoogle.com ht...