flynn089

What can you do with a web cam, 12 seconds of live video and some EFL ESL students? Well quite a lot when you start to think about it. 12 Seconds TV is a new website for microbloggers! Unlike it's text based equivalents, Twitter and Plurk , 12Seconds TV enables users to post 12 second video clips. Apart from that it is very like any other microblogging site. You can sign up to follow the feeds of other users and comment on other users' video clips. 12 second TV also integrates with Twitter so that you can configure it to post links to your video clips into your Twitter feed. The image above shows how to record a 12 seconds TV clip. Click the image to enlarge How to use this to create video materials for EFL ESL students Here are a few ways you can use 12 Seconds TV to produce materials for your students or to get your students producing English. Vocabulary record / word of the day - You could ask your students to create a video vocabulary record using a12 second clip to rec...

Text to Speech (TTS) technology has come a long way in recent years and this is nowhere more evident than on the Read The Words website. I've just been having a look at the site and trying to decide whether it has real potential for helping EFL ESL students with their listening, reading and pronunciation. As an experiment I decided to select quite a challenging text and see what the site could do. I also decide to select a British English accent, as in the past I know that TTS systems had struggled more with UK accents than US ones, due to the wider range of sounds in UK English. Anyway, here are the results. The text is from Wikipedia.org at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_to_speech and is about the challenges of text normalisation in TTS. Click here to watch Elizabeth read the text to you. Or Listen using this media player This is the actual text you should be hearing: " Text normalization challenges The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are f...

As ever I'm a fool for technology which can make images entertaining and personalise them, so when I saw this I couldn't resist it. Nik Peachey or Austin Powers? This site is called Yearbook Yourself and is based around the concept of the end of year school books that are so popular in some countries. The site enables you to upload an image of yourself and then import it into the style of a yearbook from any year between 1950 and the 2000s. You can then download the images as jpg files. The site also gives you a little bit of information about what was popular in those years and plays a small music clip from that year. So how can we use for teaching ESL EFL students? In order to use it with your students, you or they will need to have a digital image of themselves. Ideally it should be a head and shoulders portrait with the student face on to the camera. Here are some ideas for activities: Create a yearbook for your class . You could do this by getting the students to select t...

Many of our younger and even older students are exposed to and enjoy 'Manga' type cartoon art work. 'Face Your Manga' is a site which enables you and your students to easily create manga type image avatars, so I'd like to explore a few ways we could use this site for EFL ESL development. The site is quite easy to use and you simply click through a few steps, selecting and adjusting different aspects of your avatar's appearance. Once the avatar is complete, you simply email it to yourself and download it onto you computer as a jpg image. How can we use this with EFL ESL students? Here are some activities you could try. You could ask students to work at home and try to create an avatar that looks as much as possible like themselves. Ask the students to email their avatars to you. Print these up and then stick them round the class. When students come to class ask them to try to decide which avatars represent which students in the class. Once they have done this, t...