Review of SlideShows

This blog entry by Webhead Ronaldo Lima, Jr., has a nice comparative review of three slideshow tools--Voicethread, Splashcast and Qlipboard--with short examples of each. Comments by fellow Webheads are also very useful.

WritingFix

Definitely for advanced learners, WritingFix is targeted toward U.S. high school students and teachers. However, it has a lot of good advice about writing, and is billed as "the home of interactive writing prompts." Various parts of the site will generate random prompts to start writing on a variety of topics and content subjects. It also has general advice about writing essays, e.g., developing voice, organizing, sentence fluency, conventions, etc. In Spring of 2008, the site will have an extensive section of the various parts of the writing process. A good place for EFL/ESL teachers to grab ideas.

Moving Forward

Moving Forward is a wiki whose intended audience is educational administrators, but it has lots of info of value to researchers, IT staff, and instructors. Nicely organized and categorized, and you can join the site and add your own stuff.

The wiki is administered by Dr. Scott McLeod, Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE). You can contact him from the Moving Forward site if you have any questions or suggestions.

BTW, I found this site by subscribing to the Technology & Learning magazine online (free). It's got a nice e-book interface, called Nxtbook, that allows you to page quickly through an issue, and the links are live.

Using the Internet with Young Learners

Nicky Hockley has a fine presentation, Web 2.0: ICT & Young Learner Teachers, with links to resources, handouts, and video tutorials at the Consultants-E site.

Asterpix Interactive Video

Asterpix allows the user to upload video and create hotspots that follow an object or person on the video. The user can mouse-over the hotspots and click for more information: text, weblinks, etc. (Hence the "interactive" part.) The tools seem very easy to use, and the instructional videos are screencasts, as illustrated here.

This tool might work very well with an EFL/ESL practice where the students are led to research further information (a mini-Webquest), or are asked to create their own video and links for the hotspots. This is another tool with a unique twist that can add text and hypertext to the audio-video experience.

Thanks to Andreas Büsing for the tip on this item.

Using your cellphone as a scanner

This is the kind of technology I love--it's already out there (no download), everybody has it--and it's pretty much free!

You snap a print article with your cellphone camera, then send it to ScanR.com, which converts it to a .pdf file with high quality OCR software. Download to your computer and you can convert it to text. Or have ScanR convert it first.

ScanR is free for 5 uses per month, $3 US for unlimited use. Here's the address of the Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/57431

A similar product is found at Qipit.com. Very cool.

Thanks to Learning with Computers for this hot link.

Tribbit

Tibbit is a potentially very useful tool. Billed as a way to communially build a "tribute" to someone, e.g., for a birthday or anniversary, it could be used as another type of presentation tool. It allows you to mash up photos, text, podcasts, embedded video, etc., and then "play" everything together.

A nice feature is that contributors can post their photos and a short text on the main page. So this might work quite well for student group projects that can be created collaboratively and then presented as a show. There is also a "due date" feature--the time by which items have to be put into the show.

This YouTube video shows the several features.

American Writers - C-SPAN videos

American Writers is a series of 2-hours videos about the life and times of famous American writers of the 20th century. The series was produced by C-SPAN, a cable channel sponsored by local, state, and federal governments. (The channel often carries city council meetings, the state legislature debates, etc.)

The videos would make excellent supplementary materials for an EFL/ESL literature and culture class. Enjoy!

QlipBoard

QlipBoard is a nifty little application that allows you to make screencasts with the addition of your own photos and Webshots and decorate/enhance them with whiteboard-like tools. It's a free download. The downside: It's not Mac-enabled.

A couple of video presentations and how-tos are found at YouTube.

(Thanks to Carla Arena, Webhead, for this find!)

Kaltura

Kaltura is a video editor with a twist: you can invite friends to add and edit video clips in a joint project. Should make it much easier for students to work on a collaborative project. On signing in for the first time you can add the emails of two other people to get started.


The tool also has some nice additional features, such as the ability to easily split or duplicate a scene--easy mashups.

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