Nik's Learning Technology Blog

10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses

2011-11-08T18:27:00.002Z

Over the last few years I've done a lot of work developing writing and redeveloping online courses and course materials. In the initial rush to get learning online many organisations got themselves a Moodle platform and then attached a whole load of PDFs and .docs, added some forums and the odd video clip and called it an online course. It's no surprise then that drop out rates for online learning courses have been so high.

The advent of Web 2.0 though, brought a whole bunch of new tools that course designers could take advantage of to make content more social, interactive and engaging.

Here are some of the tools I've been using recently to embed a bit more interactivity into the courses I work on.

Storify - http://storify.com

Storify is a great tool for collecting together a mixture of web based resources and references into a web based widget that you can then structure into a digital research paper. You can easily pull in comments from Facebook, Twitter or Google searches as well as a range of other social media sources. You then add blocks with your own commentary and reflections. The whole thing can then be embedded into a webpage. This is a great tool for developing digital literacy and referencing online sources.

Here's an example of a Storify text designed to share information about Wordle.

Tricider - http://tricider.com

Tricider is a great tool for crowd sourcing opinion. You start with a single question problem and then you or your students can add possible solutions to the problem. Students can also add some pros and cons to the solutions and vote on the ones they prefer. These can be embedded into webpages and can give far more structure to online discussion than things like threaded forums which often become garbled and confusing.

Here's an example discussing the pros and cons of Moodle (Feel free to participate)

Urtak - https://urtak.com

You can use Urtak to create simple social questionnaires for your courses. Although the responses are quite limited (Yes / No / Don't care) This can still be a useful tool for quick straw polls before developing deeper discussion through a forum. It also give students the chance to compare their opinions anonymously with those of classmates and also add their own questions to the questionnaire. The questionnaires can also be embedded into web pages and materials.

Here's an example of a questionnaire about Education Today

Intervue.me - http://intervue.me

This is also a tool for creating questionnaires, but in the case of Intervue.me the questions can be open ended and the respondent leaves their answer verbally using a web cam. Intervue.me can't be embedded into pages , but you can link to your questionnaires and you can download the video clips of the answers as mp4 so you can then use these in materials you develop and as the basis for further discussion.

Here is an example of a questionnaire asking teachers about their use of technology

VYou - http://vyou.com/

You can use Vyou embed a video booth that students can go at any time of day to ask you questions. The video booth gives the impression that you are always available and builds some presence on your course. The messages students send you are delivered to an inbox and you are notified so that you can answer them. Vyou also has a very handy mobile app so you can answer the questions where ever you are on your iPhone or other mobile device.

Here's an example of my own Vyou Q & A page on this blog

Keek - http://www.keek.com/

It's a good idea to get students to keep a learning journal on any course they do. It can feel a bit dull though writing journal entries to yourself, so why not get student to create a video based learning journal using Keek. They can add entries each day just using a web cam and microphone and you can leave video comments on their entries. Students on your course can also be encouraged to 'follow' each other. Individual entries can also be embedded into web pages which can enable you to build pages that share insights from your course participants. Keek also has a free mobile app that allows you to up date from mobile devices such as iPhone.

Here you can see some examples from Keek users

Bundlr - http://gobundlr.com/

This is a really useful tool for sharing theme based collections of bookmarks. It creates a very visual record of the book marked links which you can then embed into your course pages as widgets. This can be a really useful tool for setting research tasks based around a group of online resources.

Here you can see a bundle of links relating to digital storytelling

Zooshia - http://zooshia.com/

Zooshia is a handy tool for creating widgets from social network sources that can be embedded into web pages. The widgets show a dynamic stream from whatever source we select. This can make suggestions for twitter or facebook people to follow much more informative and can also allow you to embed dynamic widgets from YouTube channels which will make your content much more dynamic too.

Here is a widget I embedded into my blog showing the postings to my Facebook page

Present.Me - http://present.me/

Present.Me can help you create online presentations from your PowerPoint slides. You can then add your talking head commentary to your slides and embed the whole thing into your online course. This works well as a lecture replacement and having a presenter that you can actually see along side your slides can help add to the engagement with your learners. You can embed this into your page and build a forum around it for follow up discussion.

Here you can see a useful series of presentations showing you how to create a good presentation

Goanimate - http://goanimate.com

Online course content can become very dry and serious, so why not spice it up by creating a few animations using something like GoAnimate. It's a an easy tool for creating short animated dialogues that can be exported as video clips and embedded into your course. You can use these to introduce topics or raise issues for further debate.

Here you can see a selection of channels that have been developed using animation

I hope these ten tools and the links from them have given you a few ideas into how you can spice up your online courses and make them more engaging and enjoyable and help you to retain students. Please leave a comment if you have suggestions for other free tools you have found useful for developing online content.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses

2011-09-13T14:01:00.000+01:00

Over the summer I was running a number of two week ICT in language teaching courses for teachers from around the world. The courses were part of the Bell summer campus at Homerton College Cambridge. This was the first time in a while I had been asked to teach such long courses and i thought it was a great opportunity to see if I could fundamentally change the way the teachers related to technology, not just in the classroom as a tool for teaching learners, but as a tool within their everyday working practice.

As sub goals I set out to run the course with absolutely no paper. That meant no photocopied handouts and no paper based note taking from trainees. I wanted to push these teachers to the point where they could work totally in the digital medium and where paper became totally unnecessary.

I also wanted to use a form of loop input (using the technology to teach the technology) so that teachers were learning about the technologies they could use with students by actually using them for themselves.

I would like to add that this course took place in a computer room with 1 Internet connected computer per teacher.

What follows below is a brief outline of the tools I used to achieve this and how I used each tool.

TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet
This was my fundamental communication tool. It allows me to create an instant chatroom which I can use as a backchannel so that students can communicate with each other by text and contribute to the session or just socialise while I'm talking. More importantly though, it enables me to share links to websites and digital document without having to get students to copy complex URLs into their web browser address bar. I simply paste the URL into the chat and when they get the message they click on the link and the URL opens in a new tab in their web browser. I can also use it as a kind of audience response system to get opinions from the whole class and to allow them to type in questions that I can address later.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: TodaysMeet

Penzu

Penzu
Penzu is a very simple web based private journal tool that I've been using for some time now. In this course I asked teachers to use it instead of taking paper based notes. Penzu is really quite minimalist and it looks just like a sheet of paper, but it stores and date stamps each journal entry and this makes it quite easy to find notes again from any computer as it is 'cloud based'. So this became one of the two standard tabs I asked the teachers to constantly keep open on their web browser. That way they could easily switch between note taking and investigating links and socialising with the class.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: Penzu

280Slides

280Slides
In place of PowerPoint and Keynote I used 280Slides to prepare and deliver the presentations I included in the course. 280Slides is really simple to use, stores the presentations online and creates a link and embed code so when I'm finished presenting I can instantly share the link with my group either by embedding it into a site or passing the URL through TodaysMeet.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: 280Slides

Delicious
During the course I shared a lot of links to background reading materials, useful follow up websites and blogs etc. The links were passed through TodaysMeet, but to make sure these links weren't lost I got the teachers on the course to create their own Delicious accounts to tag and store all the links so they could find them later on any computer. I also taught them how to add the bookmarking plug in to their browser tool bar. This really helped as it meant they could simply click on it and tag and save everything with just a couple of clicks.

Here's a link to: My Delicious Bookmarks

SimplyBox

SimplyBox
Using Delicious for bookmarking articles etc was great, but for the Web 2.0 type learning tools I was introducing I wanted something more visual as a reminder, so I used SimplyBox. This is a simple to use tool which uses boxes in place of folders and enables you to grab an image from the site as a link back to it, rather than a title. The other great advantage of this tool is that you can share boxes and work on them collaboratively and anyone accessing the box can leave notes on each of the tools. I introduced this tool about halfway through the course by putting links to all the tools we had used in one box, and using this as a revision task, I got the teachers to leave teaching suggestions and notes about how to use each tool and what its strengths were on each of the bookmarks.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: SimplyBox
Here's an example box with my collection of: Vocabulary Tools

Posterous
I used Posterous as my basic publishing tool for the teachers to build blended learning materials on, you can get started just by sending an email with your blog content in the body of the email and any images, videos or audio as attachments. Very few of them had done any blogging previous to the course so this was a really simple tool to get started on and it handles all kinds of media such as video, documents and embedded objects really well. So as they were building examples of online learning they were also creating their own e-portfolio.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: Posterous

Jing
Jing was another of the core tools for the course. Initially I got teachers to use it to grab and annotate images of websites so that they could create detailed step by step notes of how to use various web tools. They then dragged the images into documents and uploaded these to their Posterous blog which formatted them into web based documents using Scribd. As the course progressed I moved the teachers on from making text and image based instructions to using Jing to make and upload video based screencasts of the websites. They could then bookmark these with delicious and later use them to show their students how the websites worked, or they could add the link to their Posterous blog which would automatically embed the video into the blog page.

Here's an example of a document uploaded to Posterous: Example
You can download Jing free from here

Wiggio

Wiggio
Towards the end of the course I introduced the Wiggio VLE to the teachers. Wiggio is a very versatile and quick to create online environment which has a rich variety of communication tools. Using this platform has enabled me to form working groups from the courses so that they can stay in touch with each other and me after the course and continue to share links, videos, documents and more importantly ideas. This is a great tool for building dynamic courses and adds much more social interaction than something like Moodle.

Here's a quick video showing how it works: Wiggio

Tricider
I used Tricider as my needs analysis tool at the beginning and my action research tool during the course. It's a very simple to use, but very versatile polling tool. You just create a question and add some options then share it with the people you want answers from. The great thing is that they can add extra options and add various pros and cons of each option as well as voting on the ones they like. This makes the whole process of polling much more open, social and interactive.
Here's a quick video showing how it works: Tricider

Firefox
Last but not least is the Firefox browser. I use this as a replacement for Internet Explorer. I find Firefox to be fast reliable and consistent and especially when working with Web 2.0 type tools it gives me very few problems. I can say none of this about IE which I often end up cursing whenever I have to use it in a training environment.
You can download Firefox from here

So, using this combination of tools I managed to deliver the complete course without using paper note books or photocopying any materials, and I feel at the end of it my trainees were the better for it as they had spent a week challenging their ingrained study habits and taking a step towards working in the kind of digital world
their students will probably be negotiating in their future. Most of all though they had a chance to actually use the tools in much the same way that their students will and to make and overcome the kinds of mistakes they will have to deal with students in class.

I hope you have found something interesting here and this article makes you think a little more about how you deliver teacher training in general as the use of these tools isn't just restricted to tech training. They could be integrated into the delivery of any language or teacher training course and to some extent I feel that until tech tools are integrated into mainstream teacher training we aren't going to get the quality and quantity of digitally literate teachers that we need to really provide a 21st century learning environment for our students.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

2011-06-24T17:51:00.009+01:00

Over the last few weeks I have been playing with a very simple brainstorming and voting website called tricider. The great thing about tricider is that it is incredibly quick and simple to use, and yet it enables users to collect information and opinions from all over the web in a very easily digestible and powerful way.

It's very easy to create a tricider topic or question and you don't even need to register, just type your topic or question into the field.

You can also add a bit more detail and instructions to guide your students.

After you have saved the description, you or your students can start adding solutions.

Once there are some solutions added it's easy to either vote for them or add arguments for or against, using the + or - symbols.

Once you have set up your page you can add your email so that you get notifications when ever anyone adds something new or votes. You can also get a URL to edit the page (in case anyone adds something offensive) and a separate URL to either share with your students or post to Twtter or Facebook.

Here are some examples that I have set up to crowdsource in formation from my PLN.

So how can we use this with students?

Set up some controversial statements and get students to vote for the ones they agree / disagree with and leave pro and con comments. You could assign groups of students to all think of pros and another group to think of cons and see which can come up with the most convincing arguments. Example: Controversial Issues
Your statements could be about a particular book your students are studying and they could add arguments for or against. Example: Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
Get students to brainstorm word or phrases based around a theme. Example: Computer Phrases
Get students to vote on a list of topics they want to study. Example: Topics
Put up a list of favourite films or books or bands and get students to vote and debate which is best. Example: Favourite films
Get students to brainstorm, debate and share knowledge about any particular topic or even language point. Example: Present Continuous
Set up true false questions to check comprehension of a text.
Create action research questionnaires to get feedback on the things you do in class. Example: Things we do in Class
Create needs analysis questionnaires for your students or other colleagues. Example: Needs Analysis
Get students create their own questionnaires and circulate them online (through Twitter or Facebook) to collect opinions. You could also get the students to use this information as part of a written assignment.

What's so good about tricider?

It's free and really quick and easy to use.
It's allows people to interact and share opinions.
It doesn't require any registration.
It's very simple for students to add their arguments or just vote.
It updates very quickly so you could use it live in class and just click refresh as students add opinions or vote.
It's versatile.
It can help students pull in opinions from outside their classroom and also share opinions beyond their school.
It creates easily digestible information.

What's not so good?

Well there's not much wrong, but a couple of nice extra features would be:
An embed code to allow me to embed the page into a blog or wiki.
An archive button to enable me to close some of the debates so they don't go on forever.
The ability to export the results to pdf or csv.

Well I hope you find tricider a useful tool and please do share any ideas you have for using it in the comments below.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Create Video Questionnaires

2011-04-20T23:00:00.007+01:00

Intervue.me is a new website I have been using recently. It's another website that is based around the use of webcams. The site enables users to create questionnaires and then get the recipients of the questionnaire to leave video recorded answers. The site is very easy to use.

Register the go to 'My Dashboard' and click on 'Create New' to start your first questionnaire.

First you decide on the levels of privacy you want for the questionnaire and whether you want people to be able to leave anonymous answers or add comments to the answers.

Next you click on 'Start adding questions'.
You can type in your question and give more explanation below the question if you think that makes it clearer. You can add as many questions as you want. You'll also need to click on 'Edit title' so that you can give your questionnaire a name.

Once you have added all your questions you can just click on 'Share' or 'Invite' to either get a URL for your questionnaire or to email it to specific people.

Then once people receive the questionnaire they just click on the questions and record their answers using the webcam in their laptop.

To see all the videos you can just go to 'My Dashboard' and click on the 'Videos' tab.

Here are some example questionnaires I have created. Feel free to leave an answer to any of the questions.

How to use Intervue.me with students

Create comprehension check questions to go with reading homework so that students also do some speaking for homework.
Create opinion polls for students to answer.
Make action research questionnaires
Play the alibi game and get students to explain where they were and what they were doing at particular points in time.
Ask students about childhood memories.

What I like about Intervue.me

It's very quick and easy to create questionnaires
It's a great way to provide speaking practice for students.
You can add more detail and explanation to the questions.
Students get to practice their digital communication skills.
Students will be able to watch and listen to their replies and rerecord them so this will focus them on accuracy.
It can be more communicative and engaging than writing down answers as students can also see the other answers that have been recorded.
You can create long questionnaires or very simple single question ones.

What I'm not so sure about.

It could take time to get students feeling comfortable in front of the camera, so you might need to help them a little and get them to think about lighting and getting the correct distance from the camera.
Be careful about enabling anonymous replies or comments as this could be abused.
Students need a laptop with a reasonable quality microphone.

I hope you find Intervue.me useful and that your students get plenty of speaking practice.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Get your Students Listening and Interacting with Native Speakers

2011-03-17T15:35:00.006Z

Listening in the EFL / ESL classroom can be a pretty dull business. Usually it consists of students all listening to the same thing at the same time and doing the same tasks. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you feel the urge to get away from the course book and get your students listening to and interacting with some real native speakers from the safety of their computer then why not check out some of the people on Vyou.com ?

I've already written about how you can set up your own Vyou Q&A video booth, but it's also well worth looking round some of the people who are already there and seeing if there are any your students would be interested in, as a lot of the people there a quite young and some are quite interesting and quirky and Vyou offers your students the opportunity not only to listen to them and hear a range of accents, but also to ask them questions, though the answers might take a while to come.

It's very simple to use. You just go to : and there you can either search through some of the featured people or you can click on channels at the top and look through the more topic related people.

Each person has their own video channel and you can either type in questions below the video or you can click on the questions on the right of the video to listen to the answers to questions that have already been asked.

Here are a few people your students might find interesting.

This one is a British guy called Jonny and he claims he will write a song about any subject that readers suggest. There a quite a few there already: http://vyou.com/Spontaneoussongs
This one is Loren Rochelle for North America. She works in 'Social Video seeding' (Yes that seems to a job these days). She answers questions about a wide range of things from the personal to the trivial: http://vyou.com/lorenrochelle

It's also worth checking out the channels.

If you and your students are more interested in literature then there is an ask the author channel where writers answer questions about literature and their books: http://vyou.com/channels/simonandschuster
If your students are more interested in music, EMI also has a channel where you can submit questions to some of their recording artists: http://vyou.com/channels/emi

So how can you exploit this with EFL / ESL students?

Show students some of the people and get them to think of questions they would like to ask. Then get them to submit the questions (try to get them to submit questions to a few different people) then in the next lesson they can see if they have any answers and share the information they got from the answers (Also good for lessons on reported speech).
Ask students to choose one person each and give them 5 - 10 minutes to discover as much information as possible about that person. They can then discuss and share the information in class.
Collect some of the questions that have been asked and get students to think of possible answers, then watch and compare to their own answers and see how much they have in common with each person. Then get students to find the person they are most like.
Get students to watch two different people and then compare and contrast their character and interests.
Get students to think of one or two good questions and submit them to a range of people. Then in the next lesson students can check the answers and decide who they think gave the best answer.

What I like about this Vyou

These are real people that students can interact with.
The use of the looped introduction videos gives a real sense of presence and this can be much more motivating and engaging for students.
There's a real wealth of listening materials with various accents on a range of topics.
The answers are quite short so they aren't too demanding on students concentration despite being 'ungraded' and authentic.
Students can listen multiple times.
I've looked at quite a few channels and there doesn't seem to be anything inappropriate or offensive.

What I'm not so sure about

Some of the channels allow for anonymous submission of questions, so students might be tempted to ask something inappropriate (though they are unlikely to get an answer.)
It is possible that your students might stumble across something they might find offensive or some bad language, but I haven't found anything like this yet.

Well I hope you try Vyou.com and that your students find it engaging, entertaining and useful.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

3 More Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology

2011-01-20T14:14:00.010Z

At the end of 2010 I published the first 5 tasks in a series to help teacher learn how to use technology with their students. Now I would like to add 3 more tasks to that collection. The first few tasks are all quite simple to lay the ground work and get teachers started. As the series progresses I hope to get on to more adventurous tasks. Please feel free to use these tasks yourself or to share or use them for teacher training.

Task 6: Creating a video review activity
In this task you’ll learn how to create a film trailer review activity using film trailers from YouTube and an online notice board called Wallwisher. Here’s an example to look at before you start: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/nikstrailers

Wallwisher is a really useful tool for giving students a semi restricted choice of online videos or links to other resources from around the Internet.

Read the task
Download Task 6 (pdf)

Task 7: Creating screenshots using Jing
Jing is a really useful free tool that allows you to create and annotate images grabbed from the screen of your computer.
This can be really useful for creating instruction sheets like the ones used in this series and helps you to grab images to add into websites or other documents.

Read the task
Download Task 7 (pdf)

Task 8: Create your own YouTube channel
Video has become one of the most useful resources on the Internet for language teachers. There are a great many video sharing websites on the Internet, but YouTube is by far the biggest.
In this task you will create your own YouTube channel. It’s very useful to have your own channel even if you never create your own videos. It enable you to subscribe to other channels, share videos with groups of your students and even annotate and add subtitles to videos. We’ll be doing all those things in future tasks, but in this task you will create your channel and subscribe to some other useful channels.

Read the task
Download Task 8 (pdf)

I hope you find these tasks useful and I hope that you'll soon find some more here.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

5 Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology

2010-12-16T19:40:00.015Z

Some months ago I had a plan to write a book of tasks to get teachers using technology. As with so many of my plans and ideas, time and circumstances over took me and I never got further than the first 15 tasks. When I went back to do some more I noticed that I was taking so long doing these that some had gone out of date, so to try to get some use from the tasks I've decided to revise them and start publishing them here so anyone can download them and use them either to do teacher training or to develop their own ability to use technology.

So here are the first five. If they are popular I'll publish the next 5 for new year, so they can be my new years resolution and yours.

Task 1: Create your learning journal
So here goes. The first task is based around Penzu and you can download the task or read it on Scribd. In this task you'll create an online journal that you can use to reflect on the other tasks you'll be doing, so you should do this one first.

Read the task
Download Task 1 (pdf)

Task 2: Create online storage for your teaching images
In this task you will create a Flickr photo sharing channel. You'll need to do this to enable you to best do some of the later tasks as they come up, but having your own store of images online that you can use for various teaching purposes is always really handy.

Read the task
Download Task 2 (pdf)

Task 3: Create an online speaking activity
In this task you'll learn how to create an online speaking activity using VoiceThread. So if you have never done that before try the task and see how your students like the activity you create.

Read the task
Download Task 3 (pdf)

Task 4: Create a blog with a video activity for your students
In this task you'll create a simple blog and use it to make a video based activity for your students. Many of you may already have your own blog, but it's a good idea to have a separate one that you can use to experiment with and create activities for students. Once you have created the blog you'll be using it for other tasks as you work through them.

Read the task
Download Task 4 (pdf)

Task 5: Create digital books with illustrations
In this task you will create a digital image book based around a short text. Once you have created the book you will embed it into the blog you created in the previous task.

Read the task
Download Task 5 (pdf)

If you manage to do any of the tasks please do leave a comment and tell me how they went and if the response is good I'll try to put 5 more tasks on the site early in the new year.

So, if you celebrate Xmas please take these as my gift and if you don't celebrate it, you will have more time to do the tasks.

Best wishes for 2011.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

So Ask Me a Question

2010-11-24T18:52:00.010Z

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 receive notification of any video responses posted.

I'm trying this out because I think it's a great way of getting students to speak to each other and ask you or each other questions. All you need is a webcam and a microphone.

How to use this with students

You could set up your own grammar or vocabulary answers site and students could send you questions.
You could get students to ask each other questions about a story.
You could play animal, mineral or vegetable and each students has to ask question to see what you are thinking about.
You could just get students asking and answering questions about their likes and dislikes etc.
I think this would work particularly well for class exchanges with students from other classes or countries.

What I like about it

It's free and very quick and simple to set up.
There's a real feeling of presence and that someone is there waiting for your question.
I can generate some real spoken interaction.
It's a very simple idea made very effective.
You can embed the video chat into your blog or site.

What I'm not so sure about

Of course something like this is very much open to abuse, especially as it allows anonymous questions to be posted.
The widget which I've embedded into my post is a bit big and it would be nice to have smaller sizes.
A lot of the example conversations that have been created on the site are a bit adult in nature and certainly inappropriate for younger learners, so if you use it, be sure to use it with adults and embed it into a blog or site so that your students don't wander round the site.
WebCams aren't generally very flattering, especially in a bad light, but you can always wear a big hat or dark glasses.

If you do give this a try, please do follow me and I'll reciprocate, as I'd like to find out a bit more about how this will work in practice. You can visit my profile on the site at: http://vyou.com/nikpeachey . There you will be able to see a better view of the full size widget.

I hope you find this interesting.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Grow Your Own Personal Learning Network

2010-09-27T09:57:00.006+01:00

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 real greats of ELT. Thank you to Barbara Sakamoto for putting together this list.
http://twitter.com/barbsaka/starter-pln/members

LinkedIn is a great place to put your online CV, connect with other ELT professionals and start joining special interest groups. The groups are a great place for sharing and finding information.
http://www.linkedin.com
I'm on LinkedIn at: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nikpeachey

Facebook

Although controversial as a teaching tool, Facebook can also be a useful professional networking tool, just start looking for the ‘Like’ button on various websites and click it to keep in touch with what’s happening. http://www.facebook.com
I'm on Facebook too and am in the process of creating a page for people interested in learning technology in ELT. http://www.facebook.com/NikPeachey

Ning and other independent social networks

Many of the IATEFL Special interest groups use Ning for discussion of very specific areas of teaching. Here's an example from the Global Issues SIG
http://global-issues.ning.com/

Yahoo Groups

They’ve been around for a long time, but there are still some great connections to be made by looking for ELT related Yahoo groups.
http://groups.yahoo.com/
Particularly useful is the Webheads list.
http://webheadsinaction.org/

Blogs of course
Some great bloggers to follow are:

Larry Ferlazzo
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/larry-ferlazzos-english-website/
Ozge Karaoglu
http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/
Be sure to check out their blogroll and look for connections to other great blogs.
Find out about more female bloggers here: http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2010/04/let-us-now-praise-famous-women.html

Feed Readers

Here is an example of a feed reader page I created. This can make capturing information much easier.
http://www.netvibes.com/Nikpeachey/en%23Teaching_English
Create your own using
http://www.netvibes.com/

Storing links and social bookmarking
These are great tools for storing links to information so that you can find them when you want them and share them with others.

Instapaper
http://www.instapaper.com/
Delicious
http://www.delicious.com
You can see my Delicious bookmarks at:
http://www.delicious.com/NikPeachey
Diigo
http://diigo.com/
Also check out all the really useful Diigo groups. You can see the ones I'm following here:
http://groups.diigo.com/user/nikpeachey

Simplybox

This is a great bookmarking tool for the more visually stimulated
http://simplybox.com
You can see an example 'box' of bookmarks here. I've made it public to share tools for creating digital content.
http://simplybox.com/public/?id=145809

Here are some tools for reflection

Keep a personal online diary with Penzu
https://penzu.com/pad
Create your own blog just by sending an email to post@posterous.com and wait for the link to come back in your email.
https://posterous.com/

Slinkset

If you want to share links and get comments on them but don't want to write a blog, then create a portal site. Here’s an example of a portal I created using Slinkset
http://technogogy.slinkset.com/recent
You can create your own for free.
http://slinkset.com/

More information

Barabara Sakamoto created this fantastic ‘sticky wall’ for teachers to express what it means to have a PLN. http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/ChubuTeachers
Read or download this free booklet I wrote to get the technical knowledge and get started creating your own PLN.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22124764/From-Information-to-Knowledge

I'd really like to add a special than you to Barbara Sakamoto from Teaching Village for allowing me to share here work on PLNs and for helping to save me and I hope you a lot of work too.

Please also check out the other recorded presentations as they include:

Patrick Howarth
http://www.livestream.com/bcvalencia
Steve Evans
http://www.livestream.com/britishcouncilspain
Graham Stanley
http://www.livestream.com/bcbarcelona

I hope you find these useful and thank you to everyone at the British Council Bilbao for their hospitality and professionalism under pressure.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations

2010-05-10T13:50:00.011+01:00

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/ . It’s a great tool for setting up backchannels. A backchannel is basically what your students create when they talk among themselves or text each other during your lesson.

The advantage of setting one of these up to allow your audience to do this is that you can capture and share what your audience is saying while they are listening to you and enable them to collaborate and share with each other what they know about the topic and links to any relevant resources.
It can also help them to type in questions as they think of them rather than waiting for you to ask at the end, and for me it’s a great way to pass out URLs to interesting websites to give the audience some hands on participation during the presentation.
It’s also a good way of getting the audience to brainstorm and do tasks together, just ask a few questions and get them to type in answers, and they’ll appear in the backchannel window for everyone to see.

Setting up a back channel with Today’s Meet takes about 60 seconds. You just type in a name for your channel and launch it. You can select how long you want the channel to be available (from two hours to a year) and if you have people in your audience posting updates to Twitter, you can select a hashtag (#) specific to your talk so that their ‘tweets’ appear alongside the backchannel chat window.

You can read more about backchannels here ‘Tap into the Backchannel in Your Presentation’

Live polling
Getting audience response during presentations can be done quite easily by getting a show of hands, but I tend to find that pretty unsatisfying in terms of capturing and sharing data, so I’ve started using a polling / survey tool called Urtak http://urtak.com/ during presentations.

With Urtak you can prepare a number of short online polls to to get your audience to do during the presentation.

Just send the URL to them using your backchannel and then you can show and capture your audience response live during your session, as Urtak collects and shares results as soon as people vote.
If you are logged in during your presentation it’s even quick and easy enough to create short polls on the fly and pass out the URL through your backchannel.

Here’s an example one I created for a presentation on digital teaching skills that you can look at: http://urtak.com/u/1826 . Urtak even enables the audience to add questions if they register and log in.

You can read more about Urtak at ‘Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak’

Make note taking collaborative
Many listeners at presentations do their best to keep notes during presentations, so if your audience has wireless connectivity why not get them to do this collaboratively? A great tool for doing this is Sync.in http://sync.in/ .

It has a desktop launcher that your simply click to create an online collaborative note taking pad. You then share the URL for each pad with your audience and they can then work in groups to assemble notes and comments on your presentation as you go or work on collaborative tasks that you can set them.
The texts can then be saved by each person at the end of the presentation or they can even continue to refine the notes after the presentation is over. Sync.in also has a handy text chat room which runs alongside each document that’s created, so collaborators can discuss things and ask questions as they work. See Collaborative Text Editing Tool for more information on Sync.in.

Of course these tools aren’t just useful for conference presentations, but can be used for online training webinars as well as classroom teaching if you work in a wireless enabled classroom environment. Be sure to practice with them one at a time first for short tasks as you gradually build them in to your presentation skills repertoire.

Good luck and I hope you find these tools useful and soon have your audience multitasking as well as listening.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

2010-05-03T15:01:00.010+01:00

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 colour and test them out to see how they move. These are some of the other creatures I created.

Once you have created your creatures you can either make videos of them, take snapshots, which you can either save or email to someone, or create an animated gif of your creature (I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the animated gifs)

Here' a tutorial showing you how it's done.

You can download a .mov version of the tutorial here or this pdf document has the main screen shots and instructions if you'd prefer to follow on paper.

You can download the Creature Creator from the Cnet website here. It's a big download (205MB), but once you have it, you don't need to have web access to do any of the tasks or create the movies and snapshots.

How do we use this with students?

Create images of different creatures and get the students to create a story about them.
Get the students to create descriptions of different creatures - This could include appearance, but also likes and dislikes, habits etc.
Get students to match pictures to descriptions.
Get students to create a creature based around your description.
Create a creature and use a picture of it as a picture dictation with one student describing the picture while the other one recreates the creature using the software.
Get students to create a short video of their creature and add a description and narrative below it as a video project.
Ask students to create a creature suitable for a particular environment, or types of tasks, then get students to discuss which they think would be best adapted for the environment.
Get the students to write instructions for how to create a creature.
Use the creatures to demonstrate present continuous tenses ( sitting, running etc.)

What I like about it.

It looks great on a data projector and if you work in a single computer classroom, you can get students up and dragging things around and creating in front of the class.
The creatures are very colourful and in the environment mode they really start to take on character.
You can use the tool to create versatile and stimulating materials.
It's free and pretty easy to use once you get it installed.
I like the integration with YouTube as it makes it very easy to get your videos online quite quickly.
I like that they can produce a range of gestures and expressions.

What I'm not so sure about.

It's a big download and will need to be installed on any computer it is used on, so if you want to use it in your school computer room, you'll need the help of a supportive IT manager to get it downloaded and installed on all the computers.
The Gifs it creates aren't that good, but you don't really need to use them.
You need a fairly good computer with a good graphics card for it to work well.

I hope you enjoy trying some of these ideas with your students.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak

2010-04-20T13:44:00.008+01:00

I discovered Urtak a couple of weeks ago and took an instant liking to it. Urtak is a web based social polling application that enables you to very quickly and easily create online polls and questionnaires.
The only thing you require to get started is an email address to register as it is completely free. Here’s a short tutorial showing how it’s done.

Watch or download a higher quality video: Urtak tutorial

The polls it creates are pretty simple. You just type in 'Yes , No' questions or statements and then click enter, give your poll a title and instructions and click on done. It seems like you can have as many questions as you like. The longest one I created had 45. Here are a couple that I created. Feel free to try them out and answer the questions to see how they work. You'll also be able to see the results.

Once your poll is complete you can either link to it via the URL or embed it into a web page.

Once the poll is live anyone who sees the poll can answer it without having to log in or register. Viewers can even add additional questions or statements to the poll if they do register though.

What I like about it.

Once users vote they can compare their answers to other people who have used the poll.
The poll gives a feed out of information on the right and you can even cross tabulate answers to different questions.
It’s great that other people can add questions to the poll.
I like that it doesn’t give the ‘correct’ answer but shows most popular answers. This is good to keep students thinking and questioning themselves.
If you don’t like the questions that people add to your poll you can easily get rid of them.
You can embed the poll into other web based materials.
It’s free and really quick and easy to use.

How can we use this with students?

We can use it for class / online surveys and get students to analyse and write up the results.
We can use it for action research to find out what things we do in class students enjoy or understand or just to get general feedback.
We can use it to test comprehension by creating question or statements about an online text.
We can set web research tasks for students by asking questions and getting them to search the web to find answers or find out if statements are true.
We can use it to create progress tests to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.
We can use it to create debate and explore attitudes by giving students the poll before they come in to class to get them thinking around topics to discuss in class. We could also follow this up with a post class poll to see if opinions have changed at all.
We could use it for needs analysis to see what students feel they need to study in class.
We can use it to get students to self assess their progress.
We can get students to create their own reading tasks by getting them to produce questions in a poll based around an online text, then they can answer each other’s questions.(Great to use with Mashpedia)
We can get students to practice Yes No questions forms and create questionnaires to find out more about their class mates.

What I’m not so sure about.

At present any poll you create is added to the Urtak directory, so it would be nice to have private URLs to ensure only your students answered the questions.
It might also be handy to be able to disable the option to have other people add questions to your polls as you can’t be sure that what they add will be relevant etc.
If students go to the directory of all polls they might find some unsuitable and potentially offensive ones.

On the whole though I think Urtak is a great free tool and one that I will continue to use. It’ helped me to make designing web based materials a bit more interactive and also enabled me to quickly and easily do research that I can share and use to inform training and workshop presentations.

I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers

2010-04-03T13:19:00.004+01:00

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

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:

Best

Nik Peachey

Cropping YouTube Videos to Create Activities

2010-01-13T14:46:00.010Z

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.

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. At 9 mins it's quite long so I just wanted to use a few sections.

Copy the URL and then go to: http://www.safeshare.tv/. Paste the link into the field then click on ‘Generate safe link’.
This will create a new link to the video which you can then use with your students to show them the clip.
When the students open the link they will only see the single video clip with it’s title, like the example below.

If you want to crop the clip so that only a short part of it shows, then generate your safe URL and then click on the link that says 'Do you want to only share a part of the video? click to crop.' This will open a small video viewer. Click the video to watch it, then click on ‘Set Start’ at the beginning of the segment you want students to see. Watch the segment and click ‘Set End’ at the end of the segment. Now click ‘OK’

Once you have clicked 'OK' your safe link will be adapted to only show the section of the video you have selected. You can then either copy the link to share with students or share it through a variety of social networking mediums.

Here's a quick video tutorial showing how to do this.

You can download this video here or download a copy for i-Touch or i-Phone here

How can we use this with students?
Clipping videos makes it much easier for us to create activities and tasks that focus on specific areas of the video clip without having to watch the whole thing.

You can select example phrases to show the use of language in context, such as a telephone call or a scene that shows someone booking into a hotel etc.
Here’s an example: Booking a hotel room This was trimmed from a much longer clip on YouTube
You can show students the beginning to a clip and ask them to predict what’s ‘going to’ happen next.

Here are two examples:
1. What's going to happen?
2. What's going to happen?

You can show the beginning and end of a clip and ask students to predict what ‘has happened’ in between.

Example:
They watch this one
Then this one

You can show students a number of sections from the same clip and ask them to order them either by using linguistic or visual clues and explain their rationale.

Here are 5 clips for you to try to order:
Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3
Clip 4
Clip 5

You can show each student in a group a different sections of the clip (like the 5 sections above) and then ask them to work together to describe the part they watched and put the different sections into the correct order as a group.
You can use the sections to focus on the use of specific structures, like this one for ‘should have’ Should have clip or this one for the use of 3rd conditional 3rd conditional clip
At the end of these types of activities you can show them the complete clip. http://www.safeshare.tv/v/Tehft3GDw6k

What I like about it

It’s free and easy to use
It gets your students right to the part of the video you want them to see
It allows you to easily split videos into shorter clips
there’s a simple ‘bookmarklet’ that you can drag to your favourites bar, then whenever you find a YouTube clip your want to use you just click on it to get the SafeShare.TV link.

What I’m not so sure about

Sometimes it doesn’t work on my MAC
It would be great to have an embed code as well as a URL

Well those are some suggestions to get you started cropping YouTube videos. I hope you find them useful.

You can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL students here.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

10 Teacher Development Task for Web 2.0 Tools

2009-11-24T20:45:00.018Z

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 means come along for that if you want to share ideas and learn a bit more together.

10 Tasks to help teachers develop their use of learning technology

Task 1
This task explores the use of TokBox, a synchronous and asynchronous video conferencing and communication tool. In this task you will look at and evaluate some teaching materials I have created using the tool and see how you can use it to create your own materials.
Go to task
Task 2
This task explores the use of Voxopop, a tool for the creation of web based audio discussion threads. In this task you will see how other teachers have used the tool and have the opportunity to participate and contribute to an online audio thread.
Go to task
Task 3
This task explores how Forvo, the web based pronunciation dictionary, works and what it can offer teachers and learners. In this task you will explore some of the entries and have a chance to add your own example pronunciations to the dictionary.
Go to task
Task 4
This tasks explores the design of Listen and Write, a tool for the creation of web based dictation activities. In this task you will be able to try a dictation exercise and see how autonomous learning is supported through the design of the tool. You will also have the chance to create your own activity.
Go to task
Task 5
This task explores the use of ESL Video, the web based video activity creation tool . In this task you will be able to examine and compare three different video activities to see how the tool can be exploited. You can then attempt to create your own activity based around a video clip of a bank robbery.
Go to task
Task 6
This task explores the use of 280 Slides, a web based tool for creating online presentations. In this task you will see how you can use the tool to add video or images to presentations and so create video based learning activities or multi media presentations.
Go to task
Task 7
This task explores the use of Dvolver, a very simple tool for creating animated movies. In this task you will be able to watch a video created using the tool and then evaluate its potential and limitations whilst creating your own animated video.
Go to task
Task 8
This task explores the use of Wallwisher, a web based 'sticky notes' notice-board. In this task you will be able to look at how the notice board has been used to share a range of web 2.0 tools and also have the opportunity to contribute your own favourite site to a notice-board to see how it works.
Go to task
Task 9
This task examines the use of Wordle, a web based tool for creating graphic representation of texts based on word frequency. In this task you will learn how to create your own graphic image based on a news article and explore some potential uses for the tool.
Go to task
Task 10
This final task looks at Penzu, a simple tool for keeping a web based journal. In this task you explore how to create your own journal and then create your own reflective journal entry based on the work you have done in the previous task.
Go to task

I hope you find these tasks useful. Please do leave a comment or suggestion for improvement or any recommendations for links or other examples of materials created using these tools.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating an Online Journal for CPD

2009-10-27T11:11:00.012Z

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice.

Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can later return to, share and reflect on again.

For me Penzu is a really good tool which can help me and my students or trainee teachers to do this.

How to create your learning journal

Go to: https://penzu.com/ and click on ‘Sign up’.

You will need to create a password and enter a username, email address and agree to the terms of use. Then you just click on ‘Submit’.

You can then start creating your journal entries by adding a text and title. Each entry is dated automatically and you can move from one entry to another using the tabs on the right of the page.

To add pictures, you simply click on the ‘Insert Photo’ icon at the top of the page and locate an image on your computer and upload it.

Once you have uploaded your pictures you simply click to insert the ones you want to use.

The picture will appear in the margin and you can then drag it up or down to line it up with the text. Users click on the images to enlarge them.

To share journal entries you click on the share icon and this enables you to email your entry to someone else. You can either include your name and email along with a message or this can be done anonymously.

How we can use Penzu as a journal tool.

We can write short summaries of articles we have read and make a note of what our personal main points of interest or learning were from the article.
We can keep a journal of our teaching or training work and reflect on how classes went, compare these to our expectations and make notes of things we would like to try differently next time.
We can use it as an action research journal recording what we do in each lesson and setting out our objectives for the action research project. We can also ask students to use it to keep a journal of their reflections on our teaching and we can ask them to send us entries anonymously so that we can get unbiased feedback from our students on our teaching.
We can include it as part of a peer to peer development program and partner up teachers to watch each others classes, reflect on what they saw and send each other entries.
We can use it as a simple record of what we did in the class and what we want to do to follow it up in the next class.

The vital thing with all of these activities is that we return to our entries and reflect on what we wrote some time later. Immediate responses to what happens in our classes can be very subjective and emotional. If we record those responses and then come back to them at a time when we can be more objective we are often able to gain much greater insights into what happened in the class. In this way the journal enables us to capture thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be lost.

What I like about Penzu

It’s free and very simple to use.
The entries are private, but be can be shared
We can add images to make the entries more memorable
It can be accessed from anywhere
It’s quick and date stamps entries for us

What I’m not so sure about

It would be nice to be able to add a few hyperlinks (I think this is possible in the ‘Pro’ paid for edition.
It would be nice to have the option of having images in the text rather than just in the margin (again, probably available in the ‘Pro’ edition)

Well that’s about all I have to say about Penzu for now. I’ve focused on its uses as a tool for teacher development here, but it is also a great tool to use with students too. For more information on using Penzu with students check out my teaching manual Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers, which you can read or download for free.

Related links:

Best

Nik Perachey

Revising Short Texts and Syntax on IWB

2009-10-01T11:37:00.007+01:00

WordMagnets is a really useful tool that students can either use alone on a computer, or that you can use in class with a projector or IWB.

Here's a short video showing you how to use it.

You can download a copy of the video here and copy suitable for iPod here.

WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange. Here's a text that I quickly copied in from an article about J. K. Rowling.

I clicked on 'Next', then ignored the opportunity to change the background and clicked 'Next' again and I had these randomised word tiles that I could then drag to recreate the text.

This is a great tool that has some really useful features. You can type in and add words to the text, or you can delete word tiles from the text by clicking on remove then clicking the words you want to get rid of.

You can also change the colour and size of the tiles, which could be useful if you really want them to stand out on a whiteboard or dataprojector.

How can we use this with students?

Revising text - You can get students to test themselves working alone or in pairs on a computer. They simply copy and paste short snippets of text into the text field and generate their won activities. Just two sentences at a time should be enough (Try it, it's harder than you think). Then they have to drag the words back into the correct order. They can check against the original source to se if they get it right. This is great to help them develop an awareness of syntax and collocation.
Dialogue build - You can type or copy some short dialogues either from your coursebook or by grabbing text from a movie script (Here's a site that has a huge collection of movie scripts that you can copy and paste from: Drew's Script-O-Rama). First get the students to read or listen to the short dialogues then get them to work together to arrange the words into the correct order (This would be a great time to have the dialogue on an IWB and students could actually come up and drag the words into the correct order themselves).
Once you have the words in order you can get students to practice saying the dialogue. Once they have done it a few times, gradually start deleting words. Start with less important ones like articles and prepositions, so that the key 'sense' carrying words remain. See if your students can still say the dialogue. Then ask them to rebuild the text again adding the missing words. This is a great way to get students internalising dialogue.
Error noticing - You could use the tool to revise a text with the whole class and actually add in some words that didn't appear in the text as distractors or delete some words and see if students can guess which ones are missing.
Extending sentences - You could get the students to arrange a short sentence and then start adding new words to it to lengthen the sentence like the telescopic text from this exercise: Extending a Sentence. You could suggest a word to add to the sentence and then students can decide how and where they make it fit and what other words they need to add with it.
Focus on form - You could use it to focus on form by creating an exercise using examples of sentences with a specific structure that you want to revise. Get the students to arrange the words of the sentences then highlight similarities in structure.
Parts of speech - You can get students to colour code the parts of speech in the sentence of colour highlight collocations, etc.

What I like about it

Word magnets is free, easy to use.
You can use it to create materials and exercises almost instantly without any preparation.
Once the Flash swf file is open it works quickly in your browser and so doesn't require a fast connection or any software downloads.
It can push students to really think about syntax and collocation without having to focus too much on applying sets of rules.
It makes text much easier to manipulate on an IWB (if you have ever tried to create an exercise like this on an IWB, you'll know that it takes a long time).
You can get students up to the board and moving the words around and changing the colours themselves.

What I'm not so sure about

It's a shame you cant save activities, but at least this means that you aren't violating copyright by cutting and pasting text as all activities are transitory.
It would be useful to have a solution button that you could click and see the words in the right order. Again though this could also be a benefit because it encourages students to keep trying rather than give up and get the answer.

WordMagnets is a really useful tool whether your students are working alone or whether you are working with them using a projector. I hope you find it useful.

You can find more text based activities for EFL and ESL students here.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Wise Quotes with EFL ESL Students

2009-07-22T12:27:00.011+01:00

I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.

You can search for quotes by keyword, look at quotes of the day, browse quotes by topic or just click for a random quote.

That isn't all, iWise is compatible with Twitter and allows you to re-tweet quotes or subscribe to and follow tweet feeds from your favourite sources of wisdom.

If you decide to search by topic etc, it even pulls in tweets from Twitter too.

So how about some quote activities with our EFL ESL students?

Here are some suggestions:

Get students to find a random quote and translate it into their own language or find a parallel quote in their own L1.
Collect 8 - 10 quotes on a similar topic and get students to discus them and see which ones they prefer / most agree with.
Get 8 - 10 quotes and cut them in half to create a matching activity. Get your students to match the two halves of each quote.
Get you students to match the quotes to the writer of the quote.
Give your students a list of 6 - 8 topics and ask them to find their favourite quote on each topic, then compare them in class and discus / have a class vote on which is the best (students should try to convince others in the class that theirs is the best quote)
Get two+ quotes on the same topic. Print them up and put them around the class get the students to stand by the one they most like / agree with and discus why.
Choose 2 -3 people and get your students to find their best quotes, then compare that quotes and try to decide which of the people is the wisest.
Give the first part of some quotes to your students and see if your students can write an ending to it.
Find some quotes about someone and see if the students can guess who they are about.
Use a single quote at the start of each lesson to lead in to the theme of the lesson.
Use a single quote at the start of each lesson as a warmer and ask students if they agree / disagree with the quote. They could give it marks out of ten too. Keep a league of favourite quotes.

Why do I like it?

It's free and really simple (but also quite complex)
Some amazing features that really take advantage some Web 2.0 technology
Lots of fast and varied ways to access the quotes
There are loads of quotes from a real range of sources
There is an iPhone ap which can enable you to get all this information via your iPhone or iPod Touch so great for mobile learners

What I'm not so sure about

The site is so dynamic that you can see then loose quotes pretty quickly if you are just browsing.
Some quotes can be a little abstract!
The site is free, but the ap isn't, but it is very cheap (59p in UK). Here's a video showing how you can use it.

NB: I have bought the ap, but haven't tried it yet so this is NOT and endorsement of the ap.

I hope you enjoy iWise and the ideas here. Please leave a comment if you have any other favourite quote sites or suggestions for how you have used quotes with students.

Here you can find more online reading activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

2009-07-17T12:57:00.014+01:00

Back in November 2008 I published Part 1 of a series of articles intended to explore the use of WebCams in education. I have now finally got round to writing Part 2 which is a collection of 20 activities EFL ESL teachers can do with their students. The post was instigated by Ana Maria Menezes who sent a video message to me through Tokbox asking for suggestions for ways yo exploit it.

I've used Tokbox because it is a free online video conferencing tool that enables you to communicate using different 'modes'.

These are 1 to 1 live synchronous direct communication
One to many, by creating an asynchronous 'public broadcast stream' - like a series of short video programs
Many to many live synchronous video conferencing
One to many private asynchronous communication - by emailing links to video clips with text message included.

One of the great advantages of Tokbox is that any video messages or clips you create are stored and can be shared either through links or by embedding them into web pages (like the examples below).
Here's a rather dated video showing how Tokbox works (The interface has been up dated since this was made , but the functionality is still very similar)

20 WebCam Activities

1. Chinese - video dictation - whispers - Use the video email feature to record a short text. Send it to the first of your students. Ask your student to write down the message and then record it themselves and send it to the next student. Each student should rerecord and send the message on to another, until the last student sends it back to you. You will then see how accurately the message matches to your original text. 

2. Interactive video learning diary - You could get students to create an interactive learning diary, they could email you their video summary of what they feel they have learned each day and you could then respond. The videos would form a good learning record and students will be able to look back at them later and see how they have improved - quite literally - and also hear the improvements in their speaking ability. This is also a great way to give your students one-to-one-time which can often be a problem in class.  

3. Class survey - Action research - You could send a video message to your students with a class survey question that they could respond to. This would be a good way to carry out classroom research, decide on learning goals and make sure that all students had a means to feedback to you in private and on an individual basis.   They could also create their own questions and send them to each other, then feedback in class.

4. The witness - Show half of your students a video clip or picture, that includes a number of people (scenes from films with bank robberies, where a number of people are involved are quite useful for this). Then ask the students to imagine that they are one of the people in the film or picture and they need to describe what happened. Ask them to record a video statement giving their account of what happened in the first person. You can then ask the other students to imagine they are detectives and watch the clips your students have created and make notes to piece together what happened. Afterwards they can watch the original film clip together in class and you can see how well they did and what they missed.   Here's an example bank robbery scene

Bank robbery - The Young Ones - BBC comedy

5. Favourite poems or haiku - Students could record themselves reading their favourite poem or haiku, you could then embed the videos into a web page or blog as a class poetry collection. 

6. Video twitter - Using the feed feature you could create a kind of video Twitter, with your students video micro-blogging about learning English, their day at school, or any topic they find interesting. 

7. Text and video error correction - Using the video email feature, you could record a video of yourself reading a text, then add the text within the email message. You could include some errors in the text and get them to watch the video and correct the errors. 

8. Create a collaborative story - Email students a video with the first line of a story and ask them to record your line of the story and add their own, then pass it back, or pass it on to another student. This way you could build up a story between the group over a period of time. 

9. Tip of the day - Send you students a learning tip each day by video email. These could be exam tips, study tips, recommended website etc.(The URL for the website would appear in the text part of the message below the video - see: http://www.tokbox.com/vm/lwrtuj1jhuog)

10. Video dictation - Send a video email of yourself dictating a text and ask your students to watch and write the text in the email and send it back to you for correction. 

11. Vocabulary record / word of the day - You could ask your students to create a video to record the words and example sentences. You could also do something like this yourself as a kind of 'Word of the Day' channel. 

12. News Reports - Ask students to read the news ( in English or their own first language) and then produce a video news report on one of the main stories that they are interested in.  They could also create their own local or school video news channel for other students to subscribe to.

13. Present continuous (sound on or off) - You can record video clips to demonstrate present continuous sentences. You can do this with sound on or with sound off and the students can guess the sentence .

14. Questions for response - You could set up clips with questions and ask your students to respond online. They could also set up a sequence of their own questions for other students to respond to. 

15. Guess the object - You or students could record a description of and object and viewers have to listen and guess what the object is. Getting students to create these clips will help them to be concise and really identify the key concepts behind describing objects. 

16. Sales pitch - A variation on the idea above is to ask students to produce a video trying to convince users to buy a particular object. Again this helps them to identify key concepts, gives them practice with using language of persuasion and it may well help them to push for faster speaking speeds and better fluency. 

17. Moods - You can create video clips of yourself or your students expressing different moods. This can help them to learn the vocabulary of the moods, but you could also use it to get students to predict the cause of the mood ( and practice present perfect; "He's angry because he has just been made redundant." etc.)

18. Live tutoring support - Tokbox and video conferencing is an ideal tool for supporting distance learners and doing 'face to face' tutorials. 

19. Video interviews - You could get in touch with someone for your class to interview. Just have one computer plus camera set up in class, and a visiting expert, friend or colleague on the other end for your students to interview. They could also interview an expert in groups from home with a conference call.  The interview doesn't have to be done 'live' it could also be done through a series of email video messages sent to the interviewee.You can try it here by watching this video and then clicking reply.

20. Video lesson with conferencing - You could use the conference call to videocast your lesson or presentation to a group of distance learners. 

I hope you find these suggestions useful and manage to use some of them with your students. Do drop me a line if you have other recommendations for useful video conferencing tools or activities. You can find more video related activities for EFL ESL here.

Related links:

External links:

Reach Out and Chat With Someone-Virtually!

Best

Nik Peachey

Brainstorm and Debate Collaboratively

2009-05-20T19:24:00.006+01:00

This morning I spotted Solvr on MakeUseOf and decided to give it a try. Solvr is a free easy and interesting way to collaboratively brainstorm and attempt to solve problems online.

It's very simple set up. You just got to http://www.a.freshbrain.com/solvr/ type your problem into the field and then click 'Start'.
You will then see your problem with a number of options underneath.

You can add different elements of the problem, make suggestions by adding ideas and leave comments.

The collaborative part comes in when you share the URL with someone, then other people can come and join in the problem solving and brainstorming. Here's the URL for the 'Making a living 'problem I set up.

I also set up a problem earlier on today, which was about integrating technology into the ELT classroom. I added a couple of elements of the problem and then posted it to Twitter. With a few minutes, the problem started to develop as people added in comments solutions, and even started to vote on the solutions.

If you would like to see how this problem is developing go to http://www.a.freshbrain.com/solvr/d/eltrilxlwu and feel free to contribute.

So how do we use this with students?
We can set up a whole range of debates and online collaborative tasks.

You could set up debates on the environment or other issues that your students find relevant. Here's an example on how to end world hunger. Each students could have their own topic to brainstorm the elements and causes of the problem, then students could exchange links and try to offer solutions to each other's problems.
You could use Solver to get anonymous feedback from your action research tasks. This would also enable you to enter into debate with the students and get a deeper level of understanding of their responses.
You could use it to address classroom issues or learning issues and explain some of the rationale behind activities. This would enable students to safely and anonymously discuss the issues with you. Here's an example We don't like reading in class
You could use it to brainstorm vocabulary around a topic or theme and then get your students to add definitions, and other elements of information about the words, like their parts of speech, collocations, example sentences etc. Here's an example on politics. Feel free to add to it.
We can get students to share their strategies for learning English. Example: How can we improve our English?
You could use Solvr to plan an events like a class outing, party or doing a play. This way you can get students to think about the different jobs involved and decisions to be made, decide who will do them and explore the potential obstacles.

What's so good about it?

It's free. very quick and really simple to use.
It encourages critical thinking skills and the breaking down of problems into manageable elements.
It encourages debate and interactive discussion.
It's very versatile.
Great for interactive homework tasks
It can be used synchronously or asynchronously.
It can give students time to think about and review what they write.
Students can see the ebb and flow of ideas and opinions and the way they interact.
Solvr also seems to work in Second Life. Check out Peter Miller's posting: Problem Solvr
It's anonymous so students can be honest without being identified.

What I'm not so sure about

It's anonymous, so can be open to abuse.
It shouldn't be used to replace face to face debate in class, where that is possible, but could be useful to prime students before class so they have more ideas when they come to class for discussion.
Carries some advertising, but students can be asked to ignore the ads.
It's still being tested, so you debates could disappear or there could be bugs.

I think Solvr is a really useful addition to any teacher's technological tool set, especially if you are involved in any kind of distance learning courses. I hope your students enjoy it and that you think of other useful ways to use it.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Online Sticky Noticeboards

2009-04-13T18:51:00.006+01:00

For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to.

You can see a wall that I created here with some notes about Web 2.0 Tools for EFL ESL Teachers.

It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are:

Uploading an image
Choosing colours
Adding title and subtitle
Creating your password
Deciding who can see and add to your wall

Once you have done this you just click the big 'Done' button and you are almost ready to start adding content to your wall. Before you start to add content you'll need to check your email account where you should find your password. Then you just log in to your wall and double click on the wall to start adding the sticky notes.

The sticky notes are quite simple, you just add some text and you can either link to an image, a video or a web page.

The nice thing about this is that when users click on the link it opens in a pop up browser over the wall. This means that you can use your wall to focus students access to sites like flickr or Youtube and stop them drifting into other content. It also means that you can use the wall to set up specific activities and get your students to post their responses on the wall (as long as you have selected 'Everyone' to allow others to post to the wall)

So how do we use this with students?

We can create video tasks and get students to post responses to the wall by leaving it open for everyone to contribute. Here's a wall that I created about Ramadan. This wall has been left open for anyone to contribute to.
We could use the wall to collect different links to various resources around the web for students to explore, a little like a web quest or treasure hunt.
We could give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.
We could get students to create fan walls based around a favourite band or celebrity.
You can use the wall to collect and share resources like this one on IELTS
You could use the wall to set up video or image based activities. Here's a video activity that I have set up for teachers based around a Mr Bean Video. Feel free to contribute.
This activity uses an image to get students to practice using present continuous.
You can use the wall to create debates. You can do this either by posting your own contentious opinions or using videos from sites like BigThink.com and get students to respond. This could be a way of dealing with sensitive issues and enabling students to be able to express opinions that they might not feel comfortable doing in the classroom. Here's an example
We can even create grammar walls and get students to post what they know and examples of different verb tenses or grammar points.
We could even get students to post their wishes on it using third conditional.
Or last but not least we could use it to notify our students or parents of homework assignments and keep them up to date with what's happening in class.

What I like about WallWisher.

It's free and easy to use and requires a minimum of registration info
I like the way the links open in a pop up over the page
You can embed the wall into a blog or website
Your wall produces an RSS feed which can make it easy to keep track of what is being added
Students can get involved and post brief comments or create their won walls
It can be used collaboratively
Great way to create easy online learning tasks
It looks nice

Things I'm not so sure about

It would be nice to have a few more controls about who posts to the wall. At present it's either only the creator or everyone! Would be nice to be able to invite people to post to it.
I'd also like to be able to add / embed more than one link into a sticky note so that you can include an image or video and a link to a site, but you could get round this by adding more than one sticky.
Would be nice to have a bit more control over how the embedded wall appears in a web page. Here's what mine looks like.

Well I hope you like WallWisher and find it useful. If you have other ideas for how to use it please do post comments and links.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Getting Video Tasks Online

2009-02-20T12:32:00.003Z

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 publish to Slideshare, email as a PowerPoint or (and this is the one I like best) get an embed code for your blog or direct URL.

This is a quick easy lesson I created and you can compare the two last options below.

This is the embed version, just click the bottom right icon to see it full screen.

This is the direct link version: Led Zeppelin or the Beatles

How about using this with students
Well as you can see this is a great easy way create materials that exploit video.

You can create listening tasks with questions and comprehension questions.
You can get students to create their own video related projects by getting them to import video into the slides and write about them.
Great for digital narrative which combines video images and text
You could get students to import significant news clips and respond to them.
You can combine video into grammar presentations with videos that demonstrate grammar points
You could just use it to make your presentations and get them online

What I like about 280 Slides

Really quick easy to understand interface.
Works in the browser so no software to download or install.
Great way to make YouTube videos accessible without sending students to the site.
Easy enough for students to use.
Free and no sign of advertising.
The only information they ask for is email address.
Really quick way to get materials online without having to illegally download video or have server / web hosting space.
Really professional looking results.
Embedding the videos into sides with tasks might discourage students from wandering off to look at other YouTube videos.
Great to have an embed code for blogs.

What to watch out for

It's still in Beta and free and I can't see how anyone makes a living from the site, so they may start charging or advertising, but until then ...
If YouTube is blocked in your school, this probably won't solve the problem, though you can get students to access your video activities from home.
It doesn't have all the powers of a commercial product like PowerPoint, but how many people use those powers anyway?

Hope you find 280Slides useful.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Can Music Aid Memory of Text?

2009-02-13T11:25:00.009Z

This is a really interesting site that I spotted a little while back. The site was inspired by the late great John Cage, one of the most revolutionary composers of the last century.

The site is called P22 Music Text Composition Generator and you can find it at: http://p22.com/musicfont/
What the site does is to convert a written text into musical notation with a midi music file to play the notation.

It's quite simple to do. You just copy and paste your text into the field, give it a file name (with no spaces or punctuation) choose the speed and instrumentation, then just click to generate the notation and midi file.
Then you get a printable copy of your notation and a midi music file that you can download and play.

I copied and pasted this blog text in and generated this music file with it.

Music Aiding Text Memory

Well I can hear people thinking; "What's this got to do with language teaching?" and that's a really good question, so here's how this 'might' work.

How to use this with students

You could produce a music file to play as background while students read the text used to create it. This could build up associations between the music and text and might help them to revise and review elements of the text. You just play the music file a week or so later and see what they can remember from the text (vocabulary, main points).
It could also be interesting to build up a music text library and see if your students can remember which text went with each composition. Just play a music file and see which text they think it is.
Students could produce musical versions of dialogues and see if listening to the music can help them to remember the dialogue.
You can produce the musical accompaniment to stories or plays and use it as background to reading the words.
Get your students to play with the speed and instrumentation and produce the best accompaniment to a text. They could listen to each other's composition and choose the most appropriate one and try to explain why it works best for that text.
For students who like creative writing such as stories or poems it might be nice for them to also have their own musical version of the text.
You or your students could create short musical versions of example sentences that show how vocabulary or grammar points are used.
Students could write a text about themselves and then generate their own personal music.
If you have any musical students you get them to try to play the notation.

Well I know these ideas are certainly on the borders of ELT methodology and I'm not convinced that they will all work for all or any of your students, but I would be really interested to hear how you get on if you try them.

What I like about the site

It's free, quick and easy to use.
It produces something that to my knowledge is quite unique
The midi files it produces are very small and could be emailed (The one I produced 0f this text is 30 mins long, but still less than 30K)
I like the musical angle and the appeal to different learning styles
Nice to see anything that promotes the ideas and musical concepts of John Cage

What I'm not so sure about

Would be great to have an embed code for the midi file so that you could upload to a blog more easily (I hyper linked to mine, but might put it on my own server space then link to it as it might not stay on te website server for very long)
Would be great to be able to select more than one instrument
Good idea to select either a short text or a fast speed as the compositions can be quite long

Anyway. I hope you enjoy trying out some of these ideas with your students and please let me know how they go.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners?

2008-12-16T11:12:00.014Z

This series of postings are the result of a training presentation I was asked to deliver for Moroccan teachers of English in Kinitra on 15th December 08.

To prepare the session I looked back at many of the postings from my blogs over the last 18 months and thought about some of the changes that have been taking place in the way online video sharing has developed.

I've split the materials from the session into four sections.

These are by no means conclusive. With the spread of broadband access the potential for education and for language teaching and development and autonomous teacher development is huge, but still as yet largely under exploited as the discussion that followed my session highlighted.

Some of the potential problems we highlighted were:

Inappropriate content
Dead links
Teacher preparation time
Blocked sites
Lack of connectivity

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading this series of postings, which are in main part a summary of my work in this area over the last 18 months, and that they give some insight into some of the potential and a few of the ways we can overcome the problems. If you have experienced other problems, by all means leave a comment.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Online Video: As Knowledge Resource

2008-12-16T01:40:00.002Z

Since the birth of YouTube, the web has seen huge growth in the availability and quality of user generated online video. With just a simple webcam, or a digital camera or camcorder it is now possible for teachers and students to create and share their knowledge and experience of a vast range of topics. It's also possible for them to access a global pool of knowledge and experience from cultures all over the world.

YouTube
YouTube was originally set up as an online dating site, but has become one of the biggest user created video libraries in the world. With quite literally millions of video clips, it is a fantastic resource for materials and information. You can find anything there. One of the biggest problems though is that you can find anything there!!!

Apart from being a place to find and store your own videos, YouTube also offers some editing features; You can add annotations, change the sound track and also create your own private or public channel.

Read an article on Using Videos from YouTube
Watch a video showing How to embed video from YouTube into web pages
Download instructions as PDF
I created my own channel to share my educational videos. Nik Peachey

TeacherTube
In an attempt to make video sharing safer for teachers, students and educational establishments, Teacher Tube was created. This is a site where any teacher can create their own account and upload their own videos. It’s also a great place to find educational videos for teacher development.
If you create your own channel and add the video you want to use with your students, you can choose to keep it private, so that only people you invite can see the videos.
TeacherTube has the advantage that you can also upload support materials, worksheet and presentations for each video that your students or trainee teachers can download.

This is my TeacherTube channel where I share the video materials that I create.
Here you can find a review of TeacherTube with more detailed information and some recommended videos to watch to help you use it.

Video sharing for young learners
Using online video with young learners can be difficult, but Totlol can really help you. The content for the site is selected by educators especially for use in education with young learners. The community of registered users ensures that only suitable and useful videos are included and makes sure the service isn’t abused. This is also a great site to recommend to parents who what to help their children study.
Read this article to find out more: Video sharing for young learners

Downloading Online Video
Because of the many problems associated with using online video sharing resources, it can be really useful to download the clip to your own computer. This can help you in a number of ways:
It stops your students wandering around sites and finding unsuitable materials

You don’t need to worry about the Internet connection
You don’t need to worry that the clip may get moved
You can build the videos into other materials
You can edit the videos

There are a number of online converters which enable you to copy in the link to a Youtube video, choose a suitable format and then download it to your computer hard drive. One reliable one is http://vixy.net/

Another useful tool for this is idesktop.tv
You can use idesktopTV to search for videos across a wide range of video sharing platforms. You can then either email a link to someone or download the video in a range of different formats:

Here you can read a more in depth review of idesktop TV: Downloading Online video

Video Clips for Teaching English
Creating your own video material is great, but having someone do it for you is even better. Jamie Keddie runs a great site with regularly published Lesson plans based on video clips from YouTube.
Read more about Video Clips for teaching English

I hope this posting has given you some insight into the wealth of what's available and how to overcome some of the problems involved in exploiting these materials.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey