Webheads HQ @ EduNation III

Here's a nice use of VoiceThread by Graham Stanley (always one to get the most out of new tools the quickest!): Webheads @ EduNation III on October 1st.

Graham's blog at Blog-EFL has a description of the meeting in SecondLife and a transcript of the chat.

The Webheads gather at SL on Mondays at 20:00 GMT.

GCFLearnFree.org

Evelyn Fella, old friend and colleague, just turned me on to the nifty little online lesson sets at GCFLearnFree. They use a variety of animation, flash, drag-and-drop, etc., to make the user feel they are "really" there. The Everyday Life lessons might be useful for ELT. And possibly the Basic Math and Money and Computer Training lessons also. You need to register first, but it is instantaneous.

A sample of lessons at Learn Free:
One downside may be that the visual instructions are great, but are accompanied by rather high level aural instructions--if learners could understand them, they might not need the training.

Metaplace

Though still in alpha, Metaplace looks like a miniature Second Life. Sponsored by BBC, it's a site where you and students can build their own world online. Seth Dickens suggests a number of possibilities, particularly for adolescent learners whom you might wish to shield from the seamier side of SL, and the dungeons and dragons dreariness of other battle-based worlds. The frontpage appears to appeal to 'tweens and younger, rather than adolescents, however.


To be explored later in more depth.

Evoca

You may have noticed that I just added an Evoca recorder to the Sidebar. You can send me a voicemail easily. This is a nice application but an even better Website: it suggests a wide variety of ways--in detail--that a group (for example of students) might use the simple voice recorder for digital story-telling, socializing, and even looking up a word in any of the recordings in the site archives. For instance, the story-telling page discusses what makes a good story.


I note that BaW07 explored the tool, but there is not a whole lot of activity elsewhere in the groups (most of which have just one member). This would be worth examining in much more detail. The features it notes are

* Make and store up to 15 minutes of recordings
* Enjoy FREE unlimited listening
* Record on the fly from your phone
* Use our in-browser recorder and your computer mic
* Record Skype calls
* Do instant Podcasting using RSS
* Record conference calls, interviews, team meetings and oral history
* Post recordings to your blog and website
* Email online recordings to your colleagues and friends
* Order transcriptions and translations right online

Thanks to Seth Dickens--I found Evoca on his site and left a recording there.

Seth's Place

A nice series of explorations is to be found at Seth Dicken's blog. More in the next few posts.

Videos Explaining Web 2.0 Tools - dotSUB.com Closed Captioning

Here's a really neat site at dotSUB.com with four (thus far) videos on various tools for Web 2.0 by Lee LeFever. The titles are

• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
  
• Social networking in Plain English
  
• Wikis in Plain English
  
• RSS in Plain English
  

Also, according to Nick Peachey, Webhead, dotSUB lets you add subtitles or text transcriptions to your videos. While exploring his blog entry about dotSUB, which contains a little promo video, I found that the closed captioning feature is itself based on a social networking idea: viewers type in the transcription or comments themselves--in any language. So one example video had translated subtitles in 74 different languages. This is very cool!

And further...rocketboom, the sample Nick gave, is a long-running series of witty, clever how-to videos. Just can't stop watching. It would indeed be a neat exercise for students to hear/see the video while reading the translation in their own language, or see it in English--and then make their own transcription. (Nic has more ideas on his blog for using this feature of dotSUB.) Only downside to the site--the search engine is a bit primitive--you can get about 4 videos per page in returns, and there seems to be no way to get a list of all the videos by one creator on a single page.

WebSlides

WebSlides appears to be a very useful Web app that converts your bookmarks to slideshows, presumably by creating a slide of the front page of each item in your Bookmark folder. I'll have to report further once I've been registered and allowed to try it out.



Since I have lately been giving presentations via the Internet and using Web pages as a walk-through, WebSlides should fit my style.

Many thanks to Andreas Büsing, Webhead, for this tip.

Technology in Review - MIT Journal on Second Life

This article from the Webheads, "A Boon to Second Life Language Schools: New technology will allow high-quality audio in a virtual world," at

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18510/page1/

has an interesting quote from Graham Stanley, and also discusses some of the discomforts people have with what voice reveals about their real lives. The language school mentioned, however, sees great benefit in having a good voice technology and realitic (?) situations and places to use in language instruction.

Innova JC - Using SL to learn negotiating techniques

This is a relatively comprehensive article on how Second Life has been used over a period of several terms with 18-year-old students learning to negotiate in a second language. Authors Natasha Tang, Daniel Yip Kok Hoong, and Baey Shi Chen provide a full description of their program and how results, particularly learning points, were attained.

EFL Resources

Nick Gromik has created a really good wiki with instructions for video archiving your own presentation (using his own presentation on Vygotsky as an example), creating a videoblog (vlog), how to create a video cast for an iPod, and so on. He includes some student instructional video productions. A most useful collection.

EFL Resources

E-Portfolios

In a discussion some time ago on the Webheads' list, Sharon Betts (http://www.sharonbetts.org/site/pmwiki.php) gave us a nice list of definitions of tools that might be used for electronic portfolios. I cite her here with her permission:

*Blogs* - Blogs are ongoing individual postings with the ability to take
comments from readers. This is a great way to journal, reflect or get
input.

*WIKIs* - are online editable pages available to anyone given
permission. Usually you can attach files to wiki pages and there is a
comment page connected. This is good for collaboration. It does not
fit the journal model as well as it does a portfolio / archive model.
Of course, it is also great for multiple editors of a single document.

*Forums* - threaded discussions. Can be used for the same as above.
They individualize each posting, but in a threaded manner unlike blogs
which are sequential

*Social networks* - combine all or some of the above with many added
features. If you are ready to launch your students into the cybersphere
of learning, this is the way to go. I like Ning - but it still does not
have a wiki module although the blog and forums are great.

*Course Management Systems* - also combines the above features and adds
the ability to quiz etc. It is an online class. My favorite is Moodle
(at the moment). Students are part of a class and can use the forums,
wikis, as well as complete assignments. I do not like the blogging
feature presently being used.

There are hybrids of all the above - and more appear each day. The key
is to know what your goals are for each project.

• Is it your students first adventure into online learning?
  
• Do you simply want journals?
  
• Do you wish to attach artifacts?
  
• Do you want to actually hold your class online with assessment and all?
  
• Do you want to use these [features] in a more social atmosphere?
  
• Do you have the ability to pay for a service or to host it "in house"?
  

vod:pod

Mike Marzio has put a bunch of his Real English videos onto vod:pod, which converts them into a highly compressed, easy to manage format that can include closed captioning.

This is the search result for "Real English" at vod:pod. Looks like this might be a good place to archive stuff.

Tony Buzan on Creativity

Buzan is the originator of mind-mapping (I didn't know that!), and here talks about a global crisis in creativity. From Esnips:



Thanks to Webhead Michael Coghlan.

JingProject

Another winner from Carla Arena, Webhead:

JingProject allows you to take a screenshot of your desktop, or a movie, and then instantly send the URL of the resulting media to any email address. Carla Arena tells us that you can also record voice over. I'd been looking for a way to take screenshots of my Mac for instructional videos, and this may be just the ticket. Unfortunately, I'll have to upgrade to OS X.4 to do so.

CoPe_it! and other Mind Map Managers

CoPe_it! was recommended by some Webheads looking for Webware to edit mind maps collaborately. This tool appears to have nice visual effects and is directed to

supporting argumentative collaboration and decision making for Communities of Practice.

Other tools mentioned were Gliffy (discussed elsewhere in this blog and something I've used quite a bit for very professional-looking diagrams), Thinkature (real-time collaboration on the Web, allowing the use of your own photos and drawings), and the software, MindManager (for both Mac and Win/DOS), which is not simultaneously collaborative, as I understand it.

Other visual-assist tools include FreeMind, a free, downloadable, Java-based software purportedly faster than MindManager because of one-click "fold/unfold" and "follow link" operations. There is a gallery with some jazzy examples, and you can upload/archive your own there for free, too.

Skrble is an online whiteboard with collaborative features that you can put in your blog as a widget:

Start skrbl & give out your URL; instantly share online. Collaborate with others or, keep skrbl your own private web space.

Bubbl.us looks very cool as a collaborative tool and suggests it might be useful for brainstorming. Love the concept, but like much of Java-based stuff, it tends to be a bit slithery. It will take a little getting used to to use the "bubbles" with facility.

Mindomo is another mind-mapping tool:

Mindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain.

Create, edit mind maps, and share them with your colleagues or your friends.

So all of these share some features and would involve a bit of trial-and-error to decide which worked best for your students.

Thanks to Moira Hunter, Carla Arena, and other Webheads for good links!

VoiceThread

VoiceThread is yet another photoblog, but is refreshingly free of advertising, so far, and is very easy to register with and use.

A nice feature is zooming in, magnifying the photo, and swooping around with the mouse. You can record an audio or type a comment, and comments are attached with cartoon bubbles to pictures of the commentators--a nice feature for getting the feel of who is talking to whom.

This would make a great project base for kids to write and audiocast with a picture prompt. There is a good instructional slide show to tell them how to do it. As the narrator says--it's one picture, but with 65 stories, or more, embedded in it. How interesting to hear all the stories unfold with pictures of the narrators.

SplashCast

SplashCast purportedly

enables anyone to create streaming media 'channels' that combine video, music, photos, narration, text and RSS feeds. These user-generated channels can be played and easily syndicated on any web site, blog, or social network page.

One particularly nice feature may be that

When channel owners modify their channel, their content is automatically updated across all the web pages 'tuned' to that channel.

Effects of technology on SLA

I'm using this video as an experiment, but the question it poses is for real--I'm preparing for a presentation at the CALL-IS Academic Session in NYC.

Second Life Video Gallery

This set of videos, Second Life Video Gallery, gives a very good picture of many facets of activity in SL. Makes for fascinating watching, whether you are interested in education, politics, or aspects of personal interaction. I found the making of a guitar prim (Suzanne's Guitar) absolutely absorbing.

SitePal for free!

Received a notice from Bravenet that members can get a SitePal avatar on their site for free during the month of June (2007), so I hopped over and got one. You should be able to hear/see the result in my sidebar. Hope this is not too annoying. Leave me a comment if you think I should take it down.



PS: The "free part turned out to be a trial, so I took it down. It got annoying anyway.