flynn089

I recently spotted this very interesting site called Vyou.com which exploits video to create asynchronous conversations. I find it interesting because of the simple way it creates presence. As you can see below, it looks like the person (me in this case) is waiting ready for your question. All visitors need to do is type a question into the text line below the video and the creator will get a message with the question and post a reply. You can try it if you wish by posting a question to me. I'm not sure yet how long it will take for me to answer though. This is very quick and easy to set up. You just go to the site and register for free, then once your registration is validated you record two short video clips. One is the one you can see above and another for unanswered questions. As questions are answered they appear below the 'waiting' video. It's also a bit like Twitter in that you can 'follow' people and build up a group of followers. These people all recei...

Well this is my first blog posting for quite a while, but I'm hoping to have a lot more coming up very soon. This is just a quick posting to share a session on building your own Personal Learning Network, that I did for teachers in British Council Bilbao recently (25th September 2010). The session was part of a larger conference that was happening all over Spain to celebrate 70 years of the BC in Spain. You can watch a recording my conference presentation here. Or follow this link to it: http://tinyurl.com/382rmy2 The links from the presentation are also below and you can download a PDF copy of the presentation slides here: PLN Presentation slides (PDF 4.7 Mb) Tools for growing your PLN Twitter Twitter is a great tool for starting to reach out to a huge network of teachers. http://twitter.com/ You can follow me and see who I’m following here. http://twitter.com/NikPeachey This is a great starter list for Twitter of people involved in ELT who you can follow. It includes some of the...

Coming as I do from a background in language teaching that emphasises that the teacher should shut up and get the students to do the talking, I often feel uncomfortable doing conference presentations, many of which still follow the format of; speaker gets up in front of audience with presentation - does presentation - audience listen (try to stay awake) and desperately try to think of a few questions at the end to prove they were awake and listening. One of the gifted- Jamie Keddie. There are of course a few gifted speakers who can hold the audience’s attention for a full hour and keep most of them listening and awake. If like me you’re not one of those, then here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators. Set up a backchannel One of my favourite tools to use during presentations is Today’sMeet http://todaysmeet.com/ ...

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals ( See survey ), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society. The free trial creature creator that we will be looking at allows you to create creatures, take snap shots of them and make videos of them to see how they move. Here's an example of a video I created to get students interested. I added the captions and text using i-Movie though you could just as easily use a free online video editor such as Video Toolbox or Windows Moviemaker if you are using a PC. The creatures are very easy to create, you just drag and drop different features onto a body and the add ...

I've just been brainstorming digital skills that I believe are required by teachers in the 21st Century. So far I've come up with 45 of them. What's striking for me about this is: few of these skills will have been taught to anyone who trained as a teacher longer than 5 years ago. few of these skills are being taught to teachers training now. the 21st century teacher needs to be a pretty amazingly skilled professional. Please look through the list and tick on the ones you believe you have. Teachers Digital Skills Tick List Teachers' digital skills tick list I'd also be very interested in any comments about any you think I've missed or that you think don't belong there. Related links: Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners? Using wikis for teacher development 10 Teacher Development Task for Web 2.0 Tools Creating a personal homepage Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2 Create your own social network 7 steps 120 + Online A...

Using YouTube videos with students can be really great, but finding a video with the exact language you want and at a suitable length with too many other distractions around can be really difficult. That's why SafeShare.TV is so useful. SafeShare.TV is a tool that has two primary functions. The first is to enable you to share YouTube videos using a direct URL that frames the video without the advertising and other distracting features that might cause students to wander off into less suitable materials. The second and perhaps even more useful function of SafeShare.TV is that it enable you to crop the video clip so that only a particular part is shown. This is particularly useful when you want to build activities or tasks around clips that focus students on particular linguistic features. Find out more How to use SafeShare.TV First find a YouTube clip that has a section that you would like to use. I chose this one from ‘Room with a View’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tehft3GDw6k ...

Over the last couple of months I've been busy travelling round a bit and doing some face to face training and workshops. As part of the materials for these workshops I created a number of tasks for teachers which I hope will help develop their ability to use technology and to evaluate and create materials using web based tools. I've decide now to share those tasks so anyone who wants to use them to train other teachers or to develop their own skills can take advantage of and make good use of them. Capturing the art shark http://www.flickr.com/photos/artolog/1693491849/ There are ten tasks and they can be done in any order, except for the tenth one which should be last. Please feel free to use and share these tasks and by all means leave any comments or suggestions for improvement. I will also be hosting a teacher development week using and discussing these tasks and the related tools from 7th to 15th December 2009 on the SEETA Moodle site: http://www.seeta.eu/ so by all mean...