My Brainshark.com

It's been a while since I've put a new entry on here - a combination of being away all summer and struggling to get back in the swing of things since we got back!
This site is a real winner, though, so I hope you find it useful.  It does the same kind of thing as Present Me, but with audio instead of video, but it is sooooo much easier to use - I really like it.
Essentially, it's a tool to record presentations, but you can also use it to narrate over a document or over pictures.  You have to register on the site, but it doesn't take long and it's free.  Once you've done this, you can upload a Powerpoint presentation or a document, or pics and then record your presentation over it.  I've used it for Powerpoint and the nice thing about it is that you create the presentation for one slide at a time, so (for learners) if you make a mistake, you don't have to re-record your whole presentation, just the last slide, and you have the option to listen to each slide again before you save it.  When it's saved, you can embed it into a blog (see below!) or send the url link to a friend, or your teacher.  This is brilliant for Business and Academic English, but your general English learners might like it, too.  The other way you can use it is as authentic listening practice.  There are loads of interesting presentations on the site that are freely available.  You could assign one for the learners to listen to (maybe with some comprehension questions) or ask them to find one they like and tell another learner about it when they come back into class.

If you want some help using this, here is Russell Stannard's video to show you how.

Slide.com

I'm not sure that this is really very valuable for language learning, but it's a bit of fun and very easy to do!  You can go to the site and upload a few pictures to make a slideshow, as you can with other sites, but you can also put different effects on them

With these pictures, for example, I asked my learners to guess who the people were and to describe them. I then went on to a lesson about families.  I think that the puzzle aspect makes it that bit more engaging, and you can press the 'View All Images' button to see the images without them changing every second!   It's quite limited in scope but it's a nice little gadget to warm up a lesson!
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