Nik's QuickShout

What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need?

2013-06-18T03:26:00.001-07:00

Digital literacy has become one of the major issues facing educators in this early part of the 21st century. The need to develop students and teachers digital literacies has become increasingly accepted as fact and yet most teachers' and students' understanding of what exactly constitutes a digital literacy still seems to remain quite vague. Even more vague seems to be teachers' understanding of how precisely we go about developing those literacies.

For some it is simply a matter of 'using' the hardware and by teaching a lesson that involves the use some form of new technology some teachers feel they are fulfilling their responsibility for developing their students' digital skills, but for some teachers developing digital literacies involves far more than coming to terms with the newest hardware gadget.

So to try to identify what precisely those digital literacy skills are that we should be helping to develop I've launched this crowd-sourcing questionnaire to collect and share opinions from teachers around the world.

Please read it and by all means contribute ideas and arguments for or against the various digital literacies outlined.

NB: Registration isn't necessary to contribute an idea or opinion (Click the X when asked to register if you would prefer not to.)

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Also feel free to leave questions in the comments below.

I hope you find this useful.

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Nik Peachey

Developing geography related vocabulary

2013-05-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

I saw this website today and thought how great it would be to use it in the classroom for developing words related to places and describing different places. The site GeoGuessr is actually based on Google maps and it's a simple game.

The game works like this:

You see an image of an unknown place somewhere in the world and you have to guess where it is and click that place on the map.
Because this is based on Google maps street view you can actually explore around the image and look for clues.
Once you click on the map you will see the real location and how close or far away you were.

You are awarded points depending on how close you are to the real location.
You have five turns to score as many points as possible.

How to use the site for EFL /ESL
The game itself doesn't really involve any language input or output, but you can easily add that.

If you are using it in a single computer classroom you can show students the image and ask them to guess where it is. Ask them to justify their answers by describing what they can see. This way you can also practice modal verbs such as 'it may be', 'it might be' 'it could be', 'it must be' etc.
If students are working on computers you can put them in pairs and get one student to describe what they can see and the other student to listen and try to guess where the place is.
You could get students to make some notes and brainstorm words related to each of the places and then write a short description of each of the five places as though they visited them during a round the world journey.
For lower levels you could just play the game and get the students to call out the names of the places.

What I like about the site

This a is a great way to bring the world into the classroom.
Students can really explore inside the images and pan around to look for clues.
It's fun and a little bit addictive.
It's an engaging and unpredictable way to get students interacting with content.

I hope you and your students enjoy playing with GeoGuessr

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Nik Peachey

Exploiting Infographics for ELT

2013-04-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

For a while now I have been increasingly interested in using infographics in the design of the learning materials and courses I create for students and teachers.

For those of you who haven’t encountered the term ‘infographic’ before, an infographic is a visual representation of, what is often, quite dense statistical information. This is the kind of information which can be very difficult to read as prose / text, but which, when transformed to a visual, can become accessible very quickly.

If this explanation isn’t clear then you can click on the infographic about infographics and get an example which should make some of the benefits of infographics a bit clearer.

There are a few reason I believe these infographics are so useful for language teaching (especially online) materials.

They convey a lot of information using a minimal amount of language. This can make them useable at quite low language levels where intelligent materials for adult learners can be hard to find.
They are quit vocabulary rich
They are visual and the visual and mathematical / statistical aspects can help to convey meaning.
They are much easier to read then dense text on a computer screen.
They lend themselves to a wide range of tasks
You can find infographics quickly and easily on almost any topic.
You can develop students visual literacy
You can help students to become more critical of information sources (for example the infographic I linked to above has some interesting statistics, but are they true?)
They are great preparation for EAP students who will have to deal with dense information in their studies.

Finding infographics is quite simple. There are quite a few sites which specialise in publishing them.

Visual.ly has huge collection and they are easy to search and locate.
Daily Infographic also has a huge collection and if you sign up on the site they will email you a new one every day.
Cool Infographic is also quite good.
Failing all of these sites, you could just go to Google and type in any topic followed by the word infographic and then when you get the results go to ‘images’. This never fails to pull in something of interest on the topic.

Once you have found the infographic you want to use, you’ll need to design a task. Here are a few generic tasks that could work with many of the infographics and don’t require you to do any preparation.

Find 5 - 10 interesting facts in the infographic.
Try to check some of the information in the infographic to find out if it is true or false. See if you can find a secondary source to support the information.
Write up some of the information in the infographic as a summary text / report.
Give a spoken presentation to the class using the infographic as support.
Produce a quiz about the infographic to check the understanding of other students in the class.
What information surprised you most in the infographic?
If the infographic is a survey you could get students to compare the statistics in the infographic with an analysis of their class using the same questions. Here is an example of an infographic which I used with an adult class to do a similar thing - Have you ever? As you can see it is very similar to ‘Find someone who’ and lends itself to practice of present perfect and past tenses.

Use of infographics isn’t confined to receptive understanding though, there are also a number of free tools which can help you to produce your own.

My favourite of these is https://www.draw.io/ which has a great collection of icons and images as well as the usual shapes and symbols. You can search through these easily and just drag and drop them onto you page, then either save it as an image or store it on Google Drive.

If https://www.draw.io/ doesn’t work for you or you want something simpler, I have stored links to a collection of various infographic tools here on Meaki - Infographic tools

Again there are lots of tasks you can use to get students creating their own infographics. Here are a few.

Get them to create an infographic based on a text they have read. This could include relationship map of the characters, timeline of events, actions that took place in particular places etc.
Get students to convert a text which has statistical data into an infographic. This could be based on a classroom survey or could be something from a business magazine etc.
Get students to create mind maps of words based around topic areas and add visuals to them.
They could create an infographic of information based around a verb tense. This could include timelines and illustrated example sentences as well as breakdown of form and pronunciation features.

These are just a few of the ways I think we could and should be exploiting infographics with students. I hope you find them useful. Over the past year + I have been using Pinterest to collect together the infographics that I feel have potential for exploitation in teacher training or language training materials. You can access these below.

I hope you find these useful.

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Nik Peachey

How do you play?

2013-03-12T02:21:00.001-07:00

How do you play? is a marvellous site with the instructions for a wide variety of educational and entertaining games which can be used to practice and develop language skills.

The site divides the games into eight different types:

Each game has some basic information about how long the game will take and what materials are needed, followed by clearly written instructions for how the game is played. You can also vote up or down the games you try.

There are quite a few games that you can use in the language classroom. Here are some of my favourites.

Telephone charades
Mine field
Icebreaker questions (Good for 2nd conditional)
Life timelines
People bingo

How to exploit this site
This is a great resource to exploit with language learners and not just by playing the games with them.

Get the students to read an entry then teach other students how to play the game.
Get students to follow the model and create their own written game instructions for a game they know.
Get students to read and select a game they would like to play.
Copy the text of some instructions, cut them up and get students to organise them in the correct order to play the game (You can use Paragraphy to do this).
Create a Wordle image of the game instructions and see if the students can use the words in it to recreate the instructions after they play the game.

Here's an example of telephone charades.

All learning starts with games and play, but a lot of the time that element of play gets lost as our children grow older and education becomes more of a serious process of cramming for exams. How do you play? has lots of materials that can be used to bring playful learning back into the classroom and make it a much happier and more language productive place.

I hope your students enjoy these activities.

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Nik Peachey

A Great app for developing spelling

2012-11-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan of SpellingCity.com for quite some time now and I was fascinated when I heard they had produced a free app. For those of you who don't know about SpellingCity, the website enables learners or teachers to enter a word list and then automatically generate a range of interactive multimedia activities based around the words. The site automatically adds audio recordings of the words and example sentences to the activities it generates. There is a great range of activities that students can do within the site and they can generate certificates for their teacher or parent to prove they have done their homework.

The app is in many ways very similar to the site. There are some ready made word lists and you just click on one and then click on the type of game or activity you want to play. The app has six different activity types:

Spelling TestMe - In the activity students have to spell out the words from the word list. To do this they hear the word in isolation and then again in the context of a sentence. They then type the word into a field. At the end of the activity they find out how many of the words they spelled correctly.

If they got any of the words wrong they can go to the 'Teach ME' activity which spells the word for them using audio and text and gives them an example sentence containing the word.

The MatchIt activity tests the students understanding of the words by getting them to put the words into gapped sentences. Again the students don't get feedback until they have finished the activity, so this reduces the tendency to randomly try to guess.

Which Word is a multiple choice type activity and students have to choose the correct word to complete the gap in a missing sentence.

The Sentence Unscramble activity tests students understanding of syntax, by getting them to arrange the words from the sample sentences into the correct order. The students can get an audio hint on this activity if they are stuck.

My favourite of the activities though, and the one that is most popular with my students is the Hang Mouse activity. This is SpellingCity's own variation on the hangman game. Students try to guess the letters that spell out words and each time they guess, the mouse runs to tab some cheese. Each time they guess incorrectly, the cat starts to wake up, and if they get too many wrong letters the mouse gets trapped.

As you can probably tell, the app is aimed very much at the younger end of the learner market though the word lists do go up to grades 10 - 12.

To get the best from the app you really have to have a SpellingCity account as this enables you to import your own word lists and to manage and track your learners' scores. That said, you can create a basic account for free.

On the whole the Vocabulary SpellingCity isn't going to cause an educational revolution, but it is a good simple app which does what it sets out to do in a user friendly, engaging and intuitive way, so if your students' spelling and vocabulary needs some work then why not get them using it.

You can download the app from the iTunes store at: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id538407602
Sadly there's no Android version available at the moment.

If you have used the SpellingCity app or something similar I would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

This post was sponsored by RM Education Shop a great place to buy all your educational technology hardware.

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Nik Peachey

Tall Stories as Digital Narrative

2012-11-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite ways of helping students with the difference in use between 'present perfect' and 'past simple' forms is a simple but effective activity called lies and truth.

All you need to do for this activity is to think of three - five statements about yourself using the 'present perfect' tense

Here are a few examples:

I've been in prison.
I've been married 3 times.
I've never eaten meet.

Then get your students to ask you for background information about them to find out which are true. The students should use past simple to get the details. Once the students find out about me they pair up and interview each other using the same format.

This is a simple but engaging activity that I find students really enjoy it and get a lot of speaking practice from it.

Recently, I've spotted a website called BluffBust that works on a similar format. The website contains video clips of people telling stories about themselves and then visitors to the site have to decide if the stories are truth or lies. Here's an example based around a song

Which story is true? 'I'm 6 feet tall' 'I drive a honda cr-v' 'I've never been to Hawaii'

I think this is a great way to get students developing their listening and speaking skills and something that they can engage with outside of the classroom. The language being used is very authentic, so it might be a struggle for lower levels, but for higher levels it should be appropriately challenging and give them some real exposure to authentic English.

All of the content on the site is user generated, so you can also get students registered and creating their own interactive video stories and activities. There are a number of game interaction types which you can see here: BluffBust Game Types

This looks like a great way to get students developing the listening and spoken fluency outside of the classroom in an enjoyable and competitive (there is a leaderboard) way.

Which story is true? 'Legs not attached' 'Expensive hand cream' 'No Macarena'

The site might not be appropriate for younger or lower level learners though, but you could pre-sellect some specific videos that you could use in class as a way to get your students practicing the same activity in class.

I hope you and your students enjoy BluffBust and it helps them to develop their speaking and listening skills.

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Nik Peachey

Create Instant Interactive Text Based Activities

2012-09-11T08:01:00.001-07:00

Creating computer based materials can be incredibly time consuming and also very frustrating as websites and web based content can change so quickly, that's why it is always so nice to discover tools like Textivate which can enable you to create instant interactivity using almost any text you find from around the web.

All you need to do is copy and paste your text into the Textivate window and then click on 'textivate now'.

Here you can see some text I have copied from the Goldilocks story which I found on the Project Gutenberg site.

Now I get a range of different exercise types to choose from. All I have to do to generate the exercise is to click on one of the square and I instantly have an interactive activity.

There are quite a few to choose from. Most of the first row divides the text into 'tiles' each of which have a portion of the text on. The students then have to put the text in the correct order by dragging and dropping them (NB: the columns work horizontally rather than vertically.)

You can also have the text arranged vertically so that students drag and drop the parts into position.

Some of my favourite task types it creates are the instant gapfill activity.

And the text reconstruction activity ( you can choose how many letters from each word are missing and even have all of them deleted if you want to.)

If you sign up and register (for free) you can save the texts that you use in the activity and have access to texts that other users have uploaded.

These activity types aren't new or revolutionary, but they do enable you to create instantly what a few years ago would have taken an experienced programmer hours to create. This means that you can change authentic web based reading texts into interactive texts and get them into your classroom on a projector or IWB in seconds.

You can make this tool available to your students and get them testing and developing their own reading and syntactical skills on their own computer for homework.

Best of all, if you register and log in, you can find a 'Share' button on your activities and get either a URL or an embed code to add these to blogs, Moodle sites or other online materials. (My thanks to Martin Lapworth from Textivate for pointing this out as I completely missed it)

As I said, the activities aren't revolutionary or new, but they are useful ways of getting students to review texts and to look in more depth and the syntactical relationships between the words.

Why not try this one out for yourself and see how you get on:

Click below to access the activity. (Opens in a new window on touch devices.)

Your browser does not support iframes...

Click here to open the above activity in a new window.

I hope you find Textivate useful and try out the full range of activities with your students.

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Nik Peachey

Mind Mapping in ELT with MindMaple

2012-06-30T07:11:00.002-07:00

I have been fascinated with mind mapping since I first read Tony Buzan's book on this topic many years ago. I used it quite a lot when I was studying music, to break down the structure of compositions as well as to brainstorm the structure of essays and assignments, so I was delighted when my new sponsors - MindMaple asked me to look at their product.

For those of you who don't know much about mind maps, they are like diagrams which include words, images and icons to explore ideas and make the connections between ideas. here's an example from Wikipedia

When I was at college, these were drawn by hand on large sheets of paper but nowadays they can be produced using computer programs, and MindMaple is one such program. Using a program like MindMaple to do this has a number of advantages (especially if you don'r draw well). The program comes with a library of images and graphics and you can import in your own photographs and illustrations too. You can also hyperlink words to website and webpages as well as upload files as attachments. Features like these make it much easier to produce a really useful finished mind map that you can share with other people.

MindMaple does this pretty well with a good clean interface which is pretty intuitive for anyone familiar with 'Office' type software.

MindMaple is software so you do have to download and install it and there are many pros and cons around that. If you work in a school or institution that has good IT support, or better still none, then you can get software installed pretty easily and especially if you done have a great internet connection MindMaple will be fast and easy to use. If you work in a school that has a very security conscious IT department it could take you months to get this installed whereas a web based tool you could probably use immediately - if you have a good connection.

So how do you use mind mapping with students?

There are a number of really useful ways of applying mind maps in your teaching.

You can get students to create a mind map of the lesson as a form of note taking to help them revise later. Or you can create a mind map of each lesson and give them to students to see how much they can remember from the lesson.
You can get students to make a mind map of a book, story or text they are reading. This could involve mapping the relationships of the characters, adding in characteristics, adding in actions that each one does etc.
In an EAP context you could get students to create mind maps of more academic texts they are reading, so that they represent the information from the text visually
You can get students to create vocabulary mind maps based around themes such as sport or politics and they can gradually add words to these and organise them in categories around the central theme.
You could get students to research a topic and create a mind map to display their findings, such as research into a historical place or event. They could hyperlink their mind map to the relevant research sources they find.
You could create or get students to create grammatical mind maps research a specific verb tense with break down of form, and pronunciation points as well as few examples and notes about concepts etc.
You could get students to create infographics using MindMaple. Infographics usually compare contrasting ideas or display statistical information. Here are some examples: Infograpgics

There are many tools and software available for creating mind maps, but these are some of the things I particularly like about MindMaple

It has some really useful formatting tools that help you make the mind map look nice. You can easily change the look of your mind map and in a single click apply a hole different colour palette.
You can add callouts and notes to the mind map. These appear and pop up when you haver the mouse over parts of the mind map image.
It's great that you can add your own images as icons within the topic blocks.
You can drag the topic blocks around the screen to arrange them with your mouse, but MindMaple also has a really handy balance tool that with a single click will arrange the whole of your mind map so that it looks tidy and symmetrical
MindMaple - in the premium version - exports to quite a few formats which makes it pretty flexible as a tool, you can export your mind maps to pdf and use them as wall charts or save them as Word documents. The Word document export also shows a breakdown of the different levels of your map so you can use this a the framework for structuring an assignment.

Things that I'm not sure about

The concept of 'software that you download and install seems very 'old school' these days with so many browser based tools around, but as discussed earlier, there are some advantages to this.
It would be great to have a mobile version of MindMaple or at least a function html 5 web based version (I'm told that they are working on a mobile version).
It's great that MindMaple exports to html, but there isn't any hosting support, so if you ant to get your mind maps online you have to have access to some sort of server space. This can be a real stumbling bock for many teachers.
The built in clip art and selection of backgrounds is still a little limited and it would be good to have more variety to choose from.

MindMaple has free and a premium version. You can compare he differences here: http://mindmaple.com/Products/ but the main ones seem to be the export features are more limited in the free version and there are fewer themes and images .

At $9.99 a year MindMaple is a pretty good buy for those who take their mind mapping seriously or you can buy a lifetime license for $50. There doesn't seem to be an institutional license option and you would probably need this if you wanted to get it installed in a school for students to use.

So if you work in a school where installing software is no problem or if you want to try it on your own computer then I think it's well worth downloading the 'lite' version and seeing how well it works for you. If you take your mind mapping really seriously and want a good reliable product that isn't going to disappear ( as many web based products do) then it's well worth thinking about MindMaple Pro.

I hope you find MindMaple useful and enjoy making some beautiful mind maps.

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Nik Peachey

Explore The Past Online

2012-06-14T02:46:00.001-07:00

I spotted this interesting tool this morning. Take Me Back To is a search engine which can locate information from a particular day in history. It searches for a range of things from the date you enter, from popular songs and movies on that day, to news, fashion styles and advertisements.

All you have to do is type in a date and click on 'Go' and it will generate your results.

You can try it from here.

This is potentially a great tool to use with students.

You could show results and see if they can guess the year / date
You can get students to research a date and make past tense sentences about it.
You can get students to find out what was happening on the day they were born.
You can get students to compare results from two different decades.

There are a few things you need to be careful about though

The search doesn't work so well when you tart going further back than the 60s
In the section that shows magazine covers, it sometimes shows the cover of Playboy magazine and students could possibly click through to the site from there, so be careful about letting younger learners or teens access the site.

Despite the potential problems, I still think Take Me Back To is a really interesting site to generate materials for language work in the classroom.

I hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey

Create an eBook from Online Articles

2012-06-12T04:37:00.005-07:00

ReadLists is a great tool for creating eBooks from any content you find online and you don't even need to register!

Just go to: http://readlists.com/new/ and paste in the URLs of any articles or webpages you want to include in your eBook then click on 'Add'.

Once you have finished adding article to your book, give it a title and a description.

Then all you have to do is send it to the device of your choice.

You can also share the eBook on Twitter or Facebook or get a URL or Embed code for it.

Here's the URL for the Top 10 Most Popular Blog Postings from my Learning Technology Blog. You should be able to open this on iPad or iPhone or on any other reader: http://readlists.com/b7254a42

This is a great way to create eBooks from your own online content or from any content you find online.

You can create and share reading lists for courses.
Create your own eBooks of yours or your students' stories.
Create your own collection of your favourite articles.
Collect a reading list of articles to read when you don't have an Internet connection.
Webpages that you capture in this way can be much easier to read and of course you have all the eBook's mark up and note taking functions which will store all your annotations on the eBooks you create.

There are a few things to watch out for though.

Remember copyright. If you are creating eBooks from content that belongs to someone else, get their permission, especially if you start distributing it.
It's a shame that video and other embedded elements from the webpage aren't included in the eBook version.

I hope you find ReadLists useful.

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Nik Peachey

Teachers are Like Sharks

2012-06-11T07:00:00.001-07:00

In the classic 1977 movie - Annie Hall, there is a scene where Woody Allen compares relationships to sharks and says that they have to constantly move forward or they start to die. In many ways I think the same can be said of teachers. Many of us work with our classes in complete isolation and are rarely observed and when we are then it is often only for the purpose of quality check rather than as part of a process of continuous development.

In my own case I was often lucky enough to work in schools that had regular development seminars, or a lively staffroom where teachers willing talked about and swapped teaching ideas and materials. For many though I know this isn't the case, though the growth in access to Internet services has enabled a lot of teachers to find their own way towards their continuing development, so now as part of a workshop I'm developing I would like to ask you how you keep developing your teaching and which methods do you find most effective.

Please contribute your ideas to the questionnaire below. You can:

Add ideas for developing your teaching
Add Pros and Cons to the ideas
Vote for the 4 you think are most effective.

You can either add ideas below or click on this link to submit ideas and vote

powered by tricider
Thank you for contributing towards this research.

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Nik Peachey

Engage Students with Flipped Video Tasks

2012-06-08T09:12:00.001-07:00

The concept of the flipped classroom seems to be gaining ever increasing momentum within the field of education generally. Much of this revolves around the use of video to deliver input / lectures to students who can then come to class and do the more engaging and practical part of their work with some teacher support.

One of the major criticisms of this method though is that a dull unengaging content doesn't suddenly become engaging because it's on a video on the web, so how do we get students to engage with the content and make sure they watch it in a challenging and interactive way.

Vialogues is a useful tool for attempting to do this (though dull content will always be dull) because it enables you to create interaction around the video that actually gets students to think about and engage with the content.

Here's an example Vialogue I created around one of my own (rather old) short videos.

As you can see it has the YouTube video (you can also upload video from your computer if you prefer) but I have been able to create a few questions and simple polls for students to interact with at specific points in the video.

Here's a quick video which shows you how it was done: How to create a Vialogue

As I said, this doesn't make the content any more lively, but it does make the viewing process a little more interactive and collaborative.

So if you think the flipped classroom approach is for you ( and your students) then Vialogues could be a good tool to try.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey

Create Quick Video Conferencing Rooms

2012-06-04T11:28:00.003-07:00

Video conferencing is becoming an increasingly common form of communication within business, learning and within our day to day social lives. So what are you doing to help your students get to grips with this important medium and to help them communicate effectively with video conferencing tools?

Well if your answer is 'Nothing' here's your chance to get started. Meetings.io is a free and very quick and easy tool to help you create a video conferencing chat room that you can use wit your students.

All you have to do is go to: http://meetings.io/ and click on 'Get a Meeting Room'.

This creates a link to a unique meeting room for your meeting. You copy the link and send it to any of your students you want to meet up with.

Then click on 'Enter Now' and you'll just need to add your name and then enter the room.

At this point you may get a message asking you to allow access to your webcam and audio. This is nothing to worry about, just click 'Allow'.

At that point you should be able to see yourself in your webcam and you just have to wait for your students to arrive.

If you look to the bottom of the screen you'll see that you can also open a note pad so that you can take notes during meetings and that file sharing and screen sharing are coming soon.

Here's the link to the meeting room I created: http://m1.io/8Cn There's unlikely to be anyone there, but you can use the link to see how it connects on your computer.

It's great that you can do all this without even registering on the site. There is a registration option too though and if you do use this you can create your own permanent room and schedule and manage meeting etc.

So this is a great free, cheap and easy way to get your students into a video conferencing chat room, but what do they do once they are there?

Here are some suggestions for video chat room activities

Tell them a story - Ask them to make notes as they listen then come to the next class and retell what they remember of the story using their notes.
Interview a visitor - Get visitors from outside the class to come to the chat room so that they can interview them and then write up the interview. (Make sure they prepare questions first and have some idea of who and why they are interviewing)
Show and tell - Ask each student to bring a long an object that has significance for them and ask them to show and tell the other students about it.
Salesman simulation - Ask the students to bring along an object and attempt to sell it to the other students. They must describe the object's features and say why it is a bargain. You could add to this simulation by giving a students a budget to spend on the different objects.
Tutorials - You can use the chat room for one to one tutorials with your students and give them some feedback on their progress.

Problems

Of course one of the biggest problems with these kinds of activities is that they take place outside of classroom time and so they can be difficult to co-ordinate as you need to get groups of students online at the same time.
There is also likely to be problems with sound and vision if students don't have good equipment and good connectivity.
There is also likely to be a limit on the number of students that can gather in one room before it slows down too much.

If you are worried about all these problems, then probably the easiest way to get started and use something like this is to try to get a visitor online who your students can interview in class.

You could also try to get your students to use the chat room autonomously to do homework in pairs or to peer tutor and support each other.

Well I hope http://meetings.io/ helps you to get started with video conferencing. It's something that's likely to become increasingly important in the day to day lives of our students, so let's help them use it effectively.

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Nik Peachey

Digital Study Skills - Gist Reading

2012-04-19T04:11:00.003-07:00

Studying and researching online is becoming an ever more important element of our digital skill set. I spend a lot of time reading online and skimming through numerous articles from journals and blogs, so I'm always keen to find useful tools which can assist me or my students in this and make the process more efficient. One tool which I have just discovered and which I hope will help with this process is Cruxbot.

It's a very simple to use 'bookmarklet' tool (a bookmarklet is a button that you drag onto your browser bookmarks bar). To get the bookmarklet go to: http://www.cruxbot.com/howToUse.html click on the 'Cruxbot' image.

Hold your mouse down while you drag it to the bookmarks bar on your browser.

Once the bookmarklet is installed just find an article that you want to read and then click on the bookmarklet (You can try this one on connectivism or this article from the BBC).

When you click on the bookmarklet it will analyse the text and provide you with a summary of the main points. It will also pull out some key words and terms from the article.

Clicking on the keywords will show them in the summary and re-summarise using those key words as the main focus.

You can also decide how many paragraphs you want in the summary by using the slider at the bottom of the window.

For me, Cruxbot is a great tool for both teachers and students.

It can help you quickly get the gist of an article and help you decide if you want to read it in more depth.
It can help your students create a framework of the article in their mind before reading in more depth and so aid understanding.
Students can see key words and terms in context to build a better understanding of them before they read.

Cruxbot is a valuable tool that I will continue to use myself and one that I feel can make digital reading more efficient and effective and help students engage with online text.

Lastly, I'd like to welcome Worth Ave Group as a new advertiser.

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Nik Peachey

iPhone for Speaking Homework

2012-04-18T07:00:00.002-07:00

Getting students to do speaking homework has always been quite a challenge, but for those students with smartphones we can now get them using free apps to practice and develop their speaking abilities. This speaking tasks requires the download of a free app called the VTR2 Video Recording Teleprompter from http://vrt2.com/.

The app acts as a teleprompter which scrolls a text across the screen of your devices and records you speaking as you read the text.

The app can be used on iPhone or an iPad with a camera. It's very simple to use. When you launch the app you see 3 buttons at the bottom of the interface. These are:
1. The video gallery icon which links to a collection of all the movies you make with it.
2. The 'Record' button, which starts the text scrolling and records you speaking.
3. The settings icon which enables you to control the speed and size of the text scrolling and change the text.

To get started, find a text that you want your students to read. I chose a poem as this is more suitable for reading out loud.

Go to the settings and scroll down to text. There you can replace the existing text with the one you or your students want to read.

Then then tap on 'Done'.

Now go back to the launch screen and click on 'Record'. Read the text as it scrolls down the screen and then when it is finished click the 'Record' button again to stop it.

You can then click on discard to try again or 'Save' if you want to view your recording.

You need to give the recording a name and to save it.

You can then go to the gallery and watch and listen. From the gallery the videos can either be deleted or shared.

Tapping on the 'Share' button enables users to either send the recording as an email attachment or upload it to YouTube.

The video recordings export to email as .mov and are quite big files, so emailing them can be slow.

So, if you have a YouTube account for your class and they are confident enough, it might be good to get students uploading and sharing them there or on a blog.

How to use VTR2 with students

You can get them recording short poems or monologues from films. This is particularly effective if they have a model that they can compare their recording to so that they can try to improve.
You could get the students to record jokes to share so that they practice good timing and delivery.
You can get them to record speeches or quotes from famous people.
Try to get students listening to each other and praising the ones they like best.
Give students feedback on ow and where they can make improvements and get them to record again.
You can also get students to think about how they look when they are speaking, so that they think about some of the visual aspects of communication like eye contact, facial expression etc.
Try to keep an archive of your students recorded work so that both you and they can go back and look at earlier work to see improvements.

Most feedback on speaking activities is given by the teacher after the activity and it can be hard for students to remember or be aware of what they did wrong or right at the time, but using a tool like this students can really see and hear what's happening when they are speaking and you can really give them tangible feedback on their performance.

I hope you enjoy this http://vrt2.com/ and that your students find it a really useful way of improving their speaking skills.

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Nik Peachey

Create interactive cloze texts

2012-03-17T02:25:00.001-07:00

For many years now I've known lots of teachers who get really enthusiastic about creating interactive activities with tools like Hot Potatoes. This is great but can be quite time consuming to learn and you need to find somewhere to put your activities online once you have created them. Learnclick is a very good alternative that can help to make this process quicker and easier.

First you simply go to the Learnclick website and click on 'Create a Cloze Test'.

Once you have done this you simply type in the title of your text and either type in or copy paste in the text that you want to work with (I've chosen a short story from Andrew Wright's marvelous blog).

Next you select a word that you want to take out of the text and then click on 'Create Gap Word'.

The selected word will go blue and should look a little like a hyperlink. You then click on 'Add a Hint' and you will be able to add a clue to help the student.

You will need to go through the entire text adding your gaps and hints. Remember don't add too many and make sure there is enough context around the gap to help students deduce what the missing word should be.

Once you have added all your gaps you can click on 'Show More Options' and this will allow you to limit the number of attempts the students can have at filling each gap.

Then you just click on 'Start Query' and you activity will be created.

If you sign up and log in before you start creating your activity you will also be able to save it to a page that you can share with your students. You can then give them the link to your public page to do all the activities you create or just the link to a single activity.

It is also possible to create classes and track students' grades, but for this you'll need a premium account. At present, this is only $5 a year, so not a huge investment if you want to get serious about creating online tests and interactive activities for your students. If you go for a free account you'll only be able to have 5 stored texts.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of these types of activities, but I can see that they do have a place in language development and testing and I know that lots of teachers really value them, so if you are one of those, then why not give Learnclick a try?

I hope it works for you.

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Nik Peachey

Create Authentic Text Based Lessons

2012-03-11T01:04:00.000-08:00

I think we all know how potentially motivating authentic materials can be for our students, especially if those materials deal with something current and of direct relevance to our students' interests. The web is abundantly rich in these kinds of materials, but creating lessons based around authentic online materials can be time consuming and complex. There are issues of copyright to deal with, as well as the fact that once we have created our lessons, the text we build them on may disappear. If this is a problem you regularly face, then Lingle could be the answer to your prayers.

Lingle takes the process of finding text and creating lessons and exercises and turns it into a quick and simple 'click through' process.

Once you have registered on the site you will see a search field at the top of the page. Here you simply type in a key topic word around which you want your search to be based. You then also select levels and grammar points to refine your search.

Lingle will then show you a list of results that match your search along with dates and information about each article. You can the refine your search again to select texts from a particular source or based upon how recent they are.

Once you have found your text though, the real fun begins. At the click of a button, you can see all the topic related vocabulary or the difficult words instantly highlighted.

If you prefer to see the grammar contained in the article just click on the grammar tab, and you can see an analysis of the grammar in the article and see different grammar points highlighted.

All of this is fine, but how about creating a lesson? Clicking on 'Create a lesson' will open a new window for you to name your lesson and add a description. You can also decide if you want to include glossary or a gapfill activity based around the vocabulary in the text.

Now your text along with the glossary and gapfill activity will appear in preview mode. You can add additional activities to your lesson by clicking on 'Add Exercise'. You get a choice of 6 different types of exercise: Four of these are vocabulary or grammar gapfill type exercises and the other two enable you to create freer activities that you can write in yourself. These could be things like reading comprehension or discussion tasks etc.

Although these exercises are automatically generated, you do also have the opportunity to edit them and change any element you don't like.

Once you have finished adding exercises you can also arrange them in the order you want them and then print your lesson to use in class or save your lessons so that you can comeback and edit it again at a later date.

Lingle doesn't instantly create great lessons for you, you'll still have to think carefully about which exercises you use and how to arrange these so that you take your students on a developmental path through the materials, but it does take a lot of the hard manual work out the materials creation part and help you to create a collection of professional looking materials that you can access from any computer.

The sad part though is that Lingle isn't free. You can sign up for free and get a 6 day free trail. This will allow you to create up to 15 lessons and decide if you want to pay for an account. The price for a single one year subscription is €40, which is pretty good if you are going to use the site regularly to create materials and it could pretty quickly pay for itself by saving you time when you are creating materials.

I really enjoyed trying Lingle out. To get the best from it, you should have a look at the collection of instructional videos they have on the Lingle YouTube channel as they will show you in much more detail what it can do and how best to use it.

I really liked that it helped to find lower level texts so quickly and that it stores all the materials I create. On the down side, some of the gapfill vocabulary activities it created didn't really have enough context around the words to give a clear indication of which word went into the gap, but you can edit these ones out and select new ones from the Lingle database.

On the whole I would say that Lingle is a pretty good deal for anyone who wants to get away from a course book or who regularly has to create their own materials for specific groups. Why not sign up for a free trial, give it a try and leave a comment below telling me what you think of Lingle.

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Nik Peachey

Create and exploit silent movies for language practice

2012-03-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

The recent success of the film 'The Artist' seems to have created a lot of interest in silent black and white movies again. These kinds of movies are great for using with students as the visual aspect makes the context very clear and they show how video can communicate without language and focus students on the non verbal aspects of communication.

Now you can create your own silent movies using the Artistifier and any clip that you can find on YouTube.

To create a silent movie, just pick a clip and copy the URL. Then go to: http://www.theartistifier.com and paste in the URL and click on 'Artistify'.

The film will then start to play as a black and white silent movie on the webpage. Next give the movie a title and add your name as director.

Now as you watch the movie you can pause it and click on the 'Captions' line to add dialogue or description to the movie. When you click a small box will appear and you can type in the commentary.

When you play the clip the commentary will appear in the movie.

When you have finished adding commentary to the clip, just click on save and you will get a link to your silent movie. The movie with them play in your browser. Be sure to save the URL of your movie so that you can share it with your students.

Here's an example that I started: http://www.theartistifier.com/view_8926. It comes from a movie clip on YouTube that I found here: Lot Like Love

So how can we use this with our students?

We can just create a silent version of a movie clip and get the students to watch and then describe what they saw and what they think was happening. They could write this up as a summary and then compare with the original clip on YouTube.
We can ask students to watch and suggest / write dialogue.
We can ask students to discuss what they think the characters are thinking or feeling. See if they can justify by describing what they see in the movie.
We can get the students to pick their own clips and create their own silent movie and type in their own dialogues and descriptions. They can share these and select the best one for an award.

The Artistifier is a useful creative site, but like most things built on the popularity of a single movie, it might not be around for very long, so make the best use of it you can while it's there. I hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey

Online Teacher Development Course - Research

2012-02-10T08:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last few months I have been working with Bell Educational Services developing online and blended learning courses for English language teacher development. This has been an interesting project and one that has pushed me to review the way I think about online teacher development and the way courses and course interaction is developed using Moodle.

Coming through this process though I feel there are still some areas where I have remaining questions which I haven't been able to answer from the existing research I have access to, so for this reason I am working with Bell to gather new data which we will share with anyone who completes the questionnaire and which will later be analysed and written up for publication.

Click here to complete the questionnaire

The questionnaire should take less than 5 minutes of your time, so if you have 5 minutes to contribute and share your needs, knowledge, opinions or expereinces of online teacher development, then please click this link and answer as many of the questions as you can.

Many thanks

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Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer

Creating Music with Students

2012-02-02T07:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been interested in the use and role of music and song in the classroom, so when I was asked to review MusicShake, I jumped at the chance.

MusicShake offers students and teachers the opportunity to create original music and sound tracks that they then own. This is great for adding sound tracks to videos, multimedia creations, digital projects and presentations or even creating your own classroom songs or raps, like the Rapping Teacher

MusicShake has two main areas. The first is a site where students and teachers can share , rate and even sell the music they have created (You can listen to it for free and only need to buy it if you want to download it and use it.) You can find it here: MusicShake Songs

You can search the site by Genre, Mood or Theme, just by clicking on the tabs to the right.

The more exciting part of MusicShake is the MusicShake editor which enables any student to easily and quickly create a backing track, even if they don’t have any ability on a musical instrument. Creating music with MusicShake is pretty simple and it’s just a matter of selecting different instruments and sounds and deciding which bars and for how long each instrument plays. Anyone who has seen Apple’s GarageBand at work will find this even simpler. Students can listen to their work as they progress and adding and editing out sounds and instruments is easy.

Here’s a video from YouTube that shows how it’s done:

When the music track is complete it can be downloaded as MP3 or Wave file or saved and shared through the MusicShake site. Just click here to give it a try: http://edu.musicshake.com/demo

MusicShake is an education focused product so this also promises some degree of protection for your students and some policing of content that may be offensive.

On the whole if you like using music with your students and you want to them to make something original and creative then MusicShake is a great choice. The downside and of course there had to be one, is the price $499 per year. At this price, using MusicShake is a decision that is certainly beyond the realm of the individual teacher’s pocket and so would have to be an institutional purchase. You would also have to know that it would get plenty of use across your institution, but on the pro side it would at least be very simple to handle training as it is so easy and intuitive to use.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey

Developing materials and practices for the digital generation

2012-01-28T02:21:00.000-08:00

On the 24th January 2012 I delivered an online webinar presentation for the IATEFL Young Learner SIG. The theme of the presentation was 'Developing materials and practices for the digital generation.' I focused on how teachers could combine the use of online tools to encourage students' digital literacy and study skills whilst also developing their ability to develop their linguistic skills in a more autonomous way.

Below you can find a link to a recording of the presentation and you can also download the slides with all the links.

Adobe Connect recording:

Watch the presentation here

Presentation slides:

Technology with teens Developing materials and practices for the digital generationy

View more presentations from NikPeachey

I hope you find these useful. You can leave comments and see comments at: YLT Sig EVO Discussion

Related links:
3D Computer Games with Young Learners

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Nik Peachey

Could Doceri be the IWB killer?

2012-01-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

Just before Xmas I reviewed a potential IWB killer app called Idea Flight. This was the first of a batch of iPad apps that I have found which attempt to replace the need for an IWB. Idea Flight attempted this by enabling the networking of groups of iPads and one of the primary criticisms that readers pointed out with this system is that it was limited to contexts in which students all had iPads.

Doceri takes a very different approach though. Doceri requires that you have a data projector with either a laptop or desktop attached, but using a small app on the iPad and a small piece of software on the computer, it enables you to take control of the main computer with all it’s installed software, and Flash functionality, directly from your iPad.

The iPad app has all the normal software installed that would expect with your IWB, so you can use different modes such as a whiteboard mode that enables you to write on the board from your iPad using your finger or an additional stylus, or surf the internet and interact with the computer native software, or you can mix the two modes and annotate over web pages or software based applications. The app records your annotations too so that you can play them back as video animations.

Here are just a few of the features of the Doceri app shown as iPad screen grabs.

You see the computer desktop on your iPad and can access all the computer's software through the interface.

You can access files images and different whiteboard backgrounds through the app's folders.

You can manipulate the computer software, click your way through websites or presentations and point out different features by using two fingers on your iPad screen.

You can get left mouse clicks or right click menus by using two fingers on the iPad

You can call up an onscreen keyboard for text input.

You can annotate over software applications or web pages using a range of pen types and record the annotations to play back later.

The board can be used as a normal whiteboard and you can write and draw from it and hand the iPad around to students to let them control the space.

You can find more detail about the app features on the Doceri website at: How to use Doceri Features or watch this video to see the basic features.

Recently, I’ve started using Doceri at conferences to control my laptop during presentations, and although it took a little bit of getting used to at first I’m starting to find the ability to control presentations and switch between presentation, interacting with live web and software applications without having to keep going back and fiddling with my laptop pretty handy.

What I like about Doceri

It’s not free ($50) but it’s much cheaper than an IWB.
It’s great to be able to control the whiteboard from where ever you are in the room.
You can pass the iPad around and give students control of the board
It’s wireless so no fuss with leads.
Easy to switch between modes.
I love that you can record and play back annotations etc.
It’s great that it’s portable so you can use the app on any computer in any room as long as it has the software installed (The computer part is free) So it’s great for schools who are supplying teachers with iPads (and they should be).
You can store all your lesson documents on the iPad and access them from where ever you are.
It’s possible to make surprisingly accurate mouse gestures using your fingers on the iPad
You never need to have your back to the class and can maintain eye contact much more easily.

What I’m not so sure about

Writing reasonably sized letters with your finger is a bit tricky, so I think the Doceri Good Point Stylus is a must buy ($39).
The app software doesn’t come with as many fancy tools and library objects as an IWB, but that could be an advantage when it comes to training and teachers will want to build up their own library of images and docs etc to use.
It would be good to have a couple more tools that enable you to draw shapes and tables without having to do them freehand. I also miss some of my favorite IWB tools like the spotlight function and the curtain for slow reveal.
It takes a little bit of time to get used to manipulating the left and right click using the fingers of one hand, especially if you are used to walking around and are hanging onto your tablet with the other hand, especially if like me you tend to gesticulate a lot with your hands.
Teachers are generally more comfortable with a pen in their hand.

As I said before Doceri isn’t free, though there is a 1 month free trial If you want to try it out. At $50 and considering you need to get the software installed on any computers you want to use it with, this probably isn’t going to be a purchase for the average teacher, though it might be something you try to get your school to invest in instead of IWBs.

For someone like me though, who does a lot of work in different schools and a lot of presenting at conferences, Doceri is well worth the investment as I can turn up anywhere with my laptop and iPad and know that I’ll have IWB functionality and that’s certainly worth the $50.

So, what do you think? Could Doceri be the IWB killer?

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Nik Peachey

Visualize sentences with video clips

2011-11-22T00:16:00.001-08:00

A while back (well actually about 3 years ago) I wrote an article about Phrasr, a service that helps to visualize sentences by linking them to Flickr images, well now Vizlingo has taken this a step further.

Vizlingo enables you to type sentences and see them recreated as a linked sequence of video clips. Here's an example: This is a very smart way to visualize words and sentences. You like it?

These are easy to create, you just type your sentence into the field below the video and click on 'Create'. You may have to wait a few moments while the video is assembled and then it will play with the words that are represented underneath each clip.

If you don't like one of the clips in your sentence you can select it in the 'Lingo Breakdown' and you will see a number of alternative clips you can insert to replace it.

If you want to save or share your clips you will need to register and log in. Once you have done this you get a number of sharing options, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as getting a direct link to the video clip.

This is a great tool for students who are visual learners as it helps to connect the concepts in the sentence to visual reminders.

Some suggestions for activities

When learning vocabulary get students to create example sentences using the word (or better still two words) they want to remember in the sentence.
Try to assemble short dialogues using a number of clips.
Explore the relationship between the images and the words (The link can be a bit abstract sometimes).
Show students the clips and see if they can guess the sentence (cover the words)
Give students a list of ten sentences and see if the can link them to the videos you have created (again cover the words)
Get students to create a clip from a line or the title of a song in English and try to guess each others' song.
Get students to create clips of idioms, for example

To some extent I think the value of getting students to create sentence visualizations like this and think about and select appropriate clips to represent different words has more value than the actual finished videos. It can really help the to explore the concepts of words.

Vizlingo is still in development at the moment and is likely to get better as more clips are added and more features (it looks like there will be a mobile version) so this is a simple tool that is well worth keeping an eye on.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey

Translate text into phonetic script

2011-11-15T02:58:00.001-08:00

I always believe that the best sites and web tools are the simplest, and this is certainly the case with Phonetizer. It's a really easy to use tool that takes and text and adds the phonetic spelling below it.

It's really easy to use. You just cut and paste or type in the text you want to use in the left hand side, click on 'Transcribe' and the text appears on the right with the phonetic writing underneath each line. You can then cut and paste to a document if you want to save it.

Ways of using Phonetizer with EFL ESL students

This is a great tool to add pronunciation support to any reading text and help students to develop their pronunciation while reading.
You could also get students to use it to record their own version of the text using something like Audioboo.fm.
You could use it to produce vocabulary records with pron symbols added
You could get students to transcribe a short text then use Phonetizer to check their own work.
It can be especially useful with things like scripts or poems which are intended for reading out loud.
It's a great way to add a pronunciation record to any dialogues students work with.

I hope you find Phonetizer useful and create some useful materials.

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Nik Peachey

A collocation thesaurus concordancer that produces word clouds!

2011-11-14T23:44:00.001-08:00

On the surface of it Just-the-Word looks just like any other online dictionary or thesaurus, but start using it and you will soon find that it's much more.

If you type in a word, you can ask not only for alternatives just like any other thesaurus, but also word combinations for use with your key word.

The word combinations option produces a great list of collocations for the word, and what's better, if you click on the collocates, you get the kind of list that a concordancer will produce, with the expressions highlighted in context.

That's great, but there is still more, because if you click on a small button that says 'View in Wordle' the site will link through automatically to Wordle and create a word cloud of the most frequent collocations.

All of this is great, but there could be even more to come. There is also a button to select for 'Learner errors'. I haven't been able to get this to work yet, but to be able to search common learner errors really would be a very useful addition to such a site.

There are lots of ways we can use this site with EFL and ESL students.

We can create gapped sentences using the contextualised results from the concordancer, then create a Wordle that students can try to select the answers from.
We can create collocation Wordles and get students to try to make sentences with the combinations.
We can get students to use it as a tool to research words and collocations.
We can get students to check the collocations in their own writing to see if they are correct.
We can get students to research the context in which different collocations would be used.

I hope you find Just-The -Words useful and think of lots more uses for it. And if you work out how to use the 'Learner errors' button, please leave a comment below.

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Nik Peachey