flynn089

Over the past few weeks I've been pretty busy teaching my first English students on a Business English course I have been developing for Second Life. The experience has been pretty daunting with myself and the students having to come to terms with the complexities of the user interface and I have felt at times that my fifteen years of 'real world' classroom experience and the subconscious habits and reflexes that I developed over that period have totally deserted me. The introduction of voice within SL has certainly made a huge difference, though there are still problems and bugs to be ironed out. Though to my surprise I did find myself drilling a group of advanced learners to help them with their word stress, something I rarely do in the 'real' language classroom. To my relief though, the number of students in the class seems to be steadily increasing rather than decreasing and they seem keen to come back for more. As part of the course I've found it necessary...

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying out the new voice client for Second Life and despite a few remaining bugs with voice groupings it seems to work pretty well. It is sensitive to distance and location! If you turn around while someone is speaking to you, it really does sound like they are behind you etc. It is possible to put groups / pairs of students (avatars) into different groups so that they can only hear the 'person' within their pair or group and for the 'teacher' to switch between groups to listen in on how each group is doing. (though this is still buggy at present) This is really going to open up the potential for language teaching. How to try it out If you want to try the voice client out. You will need to download a separate 'First look Viewer' . You can get this from: http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php It seems to run fine on both MAC and PC. If you can't get it to work, it could be that either your firewall or anti-v...

I was recently lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation on course and materials design for Second Life at the SLanguages 2007 virtual conference (June 23rd 2007) which took place on the Edunation Island in Second life. The conference itself was a fascinating event and the experience of presenting a conference paper within a virtual world to an audience of avatars was certainly a new and novel one for me. I was asked to give this presentation because I have been working over the last few months on designing a Business English course for Second Life. As part of putting together the presentation I came up with a list of lessons I’ve learnt while going through the process of designing the course. The list is by no means finalised and I’m sure it will continue to grow and change as I learn more about developing materials for this world, but I thought I’d publish it here for anyone who is interested in designing their own materials for language teaching in SL. For anyone who ha...

There's a very handy web based tool called Screencast-o-matic that I've just spotted. If you go to the website and simply click on 'Create' you should be able to record and make movies of your on screen activity. This isn't anything new as there are quite a few software tools that you can either buy or download to do this, but what's good about this tool as that it all works through the web page and also allows you to create an account and save your screencasts online. This makes it much easier to share them. The tool is very easy to use and it looks like it's even capable of recording some quite complex screen activity, such as gaming and 3D virtual worlds. You can also record audio voice over. Great stuff and all free.

I’ve just been doing some writing work for a really useful site called Exam English . The site specialises in providing information and free practice materials for a variety of English language exams including IELTS, TOEFL and the range of Cambridge exams.. The practice materials are mostly Flash based and are interactive. They test a range of skills and grammar, and you get the results at the end as well as the chance to review your answers. Many cover listening skills with professional quality recordings for students to listen to. I’ve just written one for the TOEFL reading paper based on a text about Robert Capa. You can try that out here I've also written a listening paper based on the life of Sylvia Plath You can listen to that here There is also a basic level test which students can use to see which exam would be appropriate for them. You can have a look at it here On the whole I think this is a really useful site with some really useful resources and information and some wel...

The Nicenet Classroom Assistant is a really useful tool which enables teachers to very quickly and simply create their own virtual learning environment. I’ve been using this with various classes and groups of teachers for the last 7 or 8 years and it has remained reliable, stable, safe and free. Features The VLE it creates has a number of useful features. A messaging function which allows registered users to send personal or group messages to others registered on the VLE (this can be configured to forward messages on to email addresses if the user so chooses) A conferencing function. This acts like a bulletin board where threaded discussions can be created around tasks or topics. A link sharing resources where the tutor and / or users can post and share and annotate links to external sites. This can help to focus your students’ use of web resources. Document publishing . This can be used by either tutor, to publish course materials, or students to publish their work. The tutor has ...

This is a useful site if you are teaching pronunciation. Though it could take some time to load the first time you use it. There is a phonemic chart which has small audio clips of the phonemes along with video clips that show the mouth movements as the sounds are made. (Be warned, this is quite a big file) Open pronunciation chart You simply click on the mouth and then watch and listen. I’m not so sure how helpful seeing the mouth is with some of the sounds, but with some it could be quite helpful. Because the chart is a Flash (swf) file if you right click on it, you can ‘zoom in’ and this makes the view of the mouth much larger. You can even fill the whole screen with just one clip if you want to, though this looks a bit scary! If you use the menu at the side you can turn off the symbols and just have the video clips, so you could use this for a phonemic dictation activity. (Students listen and write down the phoneme they here) You could also use it to pronounce words while your stude...