flynn089

I'm beginning to think that besides the actual computer itself, a WebCam is one of the most fundamentally useful tools we can possibly have to help us teach and learn a language and of course what's great about WebCams is that they are getting very cheap and many laptop computer come with one ready installed for free! Beware of bad hair days!!!! So I've decide to start a mini series of postings on 'Things you can do with a WebCam' - Even if you don't have an Internet connection. Create fictional characters for narrative and photo stories Most WebCams can be used to create and record both still and moving images and come with their own software which can be used to add backgrounds or to change and distort the images. You can get your students to dress up, disguise themselves and then create images that they can build into a picture story. Here are some images of characters that I created with my daughter as the basis for a story. I then embedded these into a docu...

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool called Bookr . Bookr enable us to create nice interactive image books with text captions. Here's an example that I created based on the poem 'In White' by Robert Frost. I found the words to the poem on Poem Hunter here: 'In White' You can see the full size version here: In White by Robert Frost The books are really simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add your text. Here's Bookr video tutorial to show you how easy it is. You can download a higher quality (4.9Mb . mov) version here: Bookr Tutorial You can download a version for iPod (5.6 Mb) here: Bookr Tutorial So how can we use this with our students ? Poems - Like my example above...

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in. There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle , (an alternative is Google Fight ) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar. Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in' The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context. If you ...