flynn089

I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver , an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site. This is great because it provides you with and endless stream (or I should say river) of images as you scroll down the page. You can keep scrolling and pull in thousands of images to the page. This is what it looks like. I started by just scrolling through the random images that appeared when I opened the page, then I went back and typed in 'sport' to see what images would appear. How to use this with our EFL ESL students This is a great tool to use with a projector or an interactive whiteboard as we can p...

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 have to admit that when I first saw Bubblr , I thought it was just a simple tool for adding speech and thought bubbles to images, but when I started to try it out I discovered that it can do far more than that. You can use Bubblr to search through Flickr images, then drag them onto an image line and create a long sequences of images with text /speech bubbles / thought bubbles etc. These can then be printed, saved online or embedded into a blog. This quick tutorial shows you how it's done. Right click to download an .mov version Bubblr tutorial So how can we use this with our EFL ESL Students? Possibly one of the easiest ways to use this tool is like a picture dictionary. If you have a data projector in your classroom you can use it live to cross-check vocabulary and ask your students which they think is the best image to depict a word. By the end of the class you could have a sequence of images that represent all the new words students have learned in that lesson and then simpl...

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students. Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot. Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles. So how do we use this with EFL ESL students? We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities. Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having. Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism as...

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...

If you enjoy working with images with your EFL students, especially on an IWB (interactive whiteboard) or a data projector, then PicLens is exactly what you need. PicLens is a plugin (small program) that works within your web browser (there are versions for Firefox, Safari and IE 7) and it converts many of the standard image sharing websites, like flickr , Photobucket , Google Images , Yahoo Images etc. into "3D immersive environments"! To understand what that mean have a look at this short flash video tutorial which shows how to use PicLens. Click here or on the image to view the movie (5Mb Flash) OR Download a version of this movie for i-pod / i-tunes here At the click of the mouse the normal 2D web pages are converted into a wall of images which you can explore and enlarge. How to use this with ELT students on your data projector or IWB Pull up a wall of images and describe one while your students try to guess which one it is. Then get a student to describe an image an...

Flashcards have always been one of my favourite teaching tools and with the FaceinHole website I've found a place where I can quickly create my own personalised ones. The site is easy to use. You just need either an image of yourself that you can upload or a webcam that you can take a picture with. Then you choose the picture you want to put yourself into and upload your image. With a bit of resizing and colour adjustment you can have a set of your own personal flashcards in just minutes. Then you can either embed them in a webpage like these ones, have a link to them on the site or print them up to use them in class as flashcards. How to use these with students These kinds of flashcards can be used for a multitude of purposes. They are great for generating stories / personal anecdotes ( The time I met Paris Hilton etc). You can use them to practice a range of grammar structures. The ones below could all be used for 'used to' and students could either ask about the exp...

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...

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 been looking at a really interesting on line tool called Voicethread . What's Voicethread? Voice thread enables users to create online presentations using their own images. It also allows the creator to add audio or written text to the images and give access to other people to leave audio or text comments on the presentation. This is a really nice way of creating presentations that can interact and create dialogue with an online audience. Here’s a couple that I’ve created. I decided that I wanted to use this tool for a class of students I teach in Second Life. I wanted them to explore various islands and take snapshots of what they found. They would then be able to upload these to Voicethread and record audio reports, which they could then share with the class and leave comments on. I thought this would be a good way to get them to really concentrate on producing a high quality fine tuned finished product, as they would know that there was and audience for these presentat...