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...

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...