flynn089

I've been aware of 280Slides for some time now, but haven't really tried to use it much as I'm a very keen user of Keynote on my MAC, but this week I was looking around for ways to get video type lessons online and discovered what an incredibly easy and useful tool 280Slides is for this. Basically 280Slides is an online tool for creating presentations. It works in a very simple way and has a very intuitive interface which is very quick to understand. It has a few basic themes and layouts and you can do all the usual things like adding text, shapes and images to your presentations. The two key areas though that I like about 280Slides are: 1. It's really easy to import and embed video into you presentation. Just click on the 'Movies' icon add a search term. Find your video and double click it and there it is in the the presentation. 2. It's really easy to share the presentations online. Just click on the 'Share' icon and you get the options to publis...

Over the past few years video sharing websites have become increasingly specialised, bringing about the development of different 'genres' of video sharing sites. As online video increasingly competes with TV this has also brought about the development of genres of 'micro shows'. These are complete episodes of shows that take place within 2 - 5 mins. This is an ideal length both for or 'digital native' students with their characteristically shorter attention span, but also for our English language students with their limited ability to cope with longer streams of authentic input. This more specialised content is also ideal for teachers developing materials for content and language integrated learning (CLIL)courses or for teachers who want to develop video projects. Product Reviews There are an increasing number of specialised video sharing websites like ExpoTV . This one enables users to create and share videos that review new products. This is a great source o...

Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots. Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students. To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212 The chat bot has beeen programmed with lots of information about Abrham Lincoln and each time you enter a question the bot searches it's log and tries to match key words from your question with its log information. This all sounds very compicated, but the site actually makes it quite simple to create your own bot which can either be yourself, a fictional character or a historical or real person. The students can add information to their chat bot in a number of ways: Write diary log entries Email in...

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...

Product review sites are becoming ever more popular on the internet, and why not after all? If you are going to spend money buying something, it's always a good idea to see what other people who bought that same product think of it. ExpoTV is just that kind of site. It has a collection of, mostly home made, video clips made by ordinary people, mostly from North America, talking about the products they have bought. There is a huge collection of material here on a whole range of products from computer accessories to clothing, make up, cars, video games, children's toys and even trucks! Here's an example product review. This one is of one of my favourite products, Apple's i-pod touch What I liked about the site The clips are reasonably short and download quite quickly. It's free and you don't have to register unless you want to add comments or upload your own video. The site is rich with the kinds of language and vocabulary that students find quite useful in thei...

I’ve just seen this new website called the Carbon Account . It’s sort of an ecology 2.0 social network. Once you register you fill in details about your household and your travels, the meter readings for your bills and the amount of miles you travel in your car etc and it will then calculate your carbon emissions for you. You can see what the carbon emissions of other users are too and work at reducing your carbon emissions. You also have the option to network with other site users to offer support and encouragement, so the site is a bit like a weight watchers for the environmentally sound! If you want to see how it works then take a look at the video on the site at: http://www.thecarbonaccount.com/ The site also has some well written information on what carbon emissions are and how they are calculated . The site owners can also help set up special accounts for groups and give tips on reducing emissions. This is a really good site to base a class project on. Collecting and inputting t...

Rollmio is an ingenious new website base around the idea of user produced advertisements! The site seems to be able to get commissions for online advertisements (they're only on their forth so far, but it is a start up site), then users come along, read the brief and produce and submit an advertisement (10 - 60 second video)that should fit the brief. The advertisement that the company likes best wins a prize ($500) and there are also some runner up prizes. For more videos, rollmio.com How to use this with students This seems like the ideal site to build a project around and get your students creating and uploading their own advertisements. You could even try to win the prize for your school. You might need to do some preparation work first discussing their favourite ads what they like about the etc. Then you'll also need to do a bit of analysis of ads thinking about who the target of the ad is and the kind of profile of people the company wants to sell to etc. You could also g...

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc. Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project. What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique. How to use this with students When ever I've tried to do drama, video...