Digital Storytelling with Xtranormal.com

Check this out! If you want to encourage your learners to write and speak English this is a great tool to do it, especially with younger learners and teenagers. Xtranormal.com is a site where you can choose backgrounds, characters, sounds, actions etc and make a movie either by recording your voice or by typing in text that is then read back by an automatic voiceover (in a range of accents). It's like Voki, but you can get a lot more elaborate! When you have made one, you can e-mail it, embed it, download it (interestingly), share it on Twitter, Facebook etc etc....
Here's an example:
ICT Blog movie
by: JGakonga


It's free to play with and to make your first couple of videos (they give you 300 points to start with) but you do have to pay after that - I think it's quite cheap, though, and the three or four free ones that you are allowed on a free log in may well be enough for most learners.

Present Me

Present Me is a really nice tool for encouraging your learners to get speaking/ presentation practice  outside class.  Learners can register and then upload a Powerpoint presentation and record themselves talking through the slides.  If you have Business English learners, or people studying for IELTS/ academic English, this is brilliant, but even some of the ESOL exams (eg the City and Guilds Level 1 and 2 Speaking and Listening that I'm currently doing with a class) involve learners giving a presentation, so this is a good way for them to practice, send it to you and get feedback before they do the real thing in class.

It's relatively easy to use, but here are Russell's detailed instructions, which are very helpful.  There are various levels of it, but the most basic is free, and frankly would be fine for most learners.  This allows you to upload up to 50MB of material and speak for 15 minutes.
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VYou

This is another real winner from Nik Peachy - I think the man should have a knighthood, personally. Where does he find all this brilliant stuff??!!
One of the most motivating things when you are learning a language is to get involved on a personal level with native speakers of that language in my experience, but this can be a tall order.  If you are in your home country, there won't be many English speakers around probably, and even those people who are living in an English speaking country (ironically) sometimes find that making friends and interacting outside of their own language community can be difficult.  This site is a great way to practice your listening, but in a very personal way.  If you click on the site, there are hundreds of people there with a brief description of who they are, categorised under 'hobbies, entertainment, professional sports etc etc. You can ask any of them a question and they will send you a video reply (presumably within a couple of days).  You can also watch video responses to questions that other people have asked.  Predictably, some of the responses are a bit lame, but some people are just great.  One guy will write you a song about any idea that you send him!
If you'd like to be a participator as well as a listener, the sign up process is very easy and quick.  And, of course, if you'd like to talk to me or ask me a question, here I am - go right ahead!!



The only potential problem with this is the obvious one that it's not filtered, so you might get some unsavoury content, but having had a quick surf through it, it seems OK.
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Using Video

Using video in class is a great idea for all sorts of reasons - it brings novelty and interest to the class, learners get visual paralinguistic clues to help them with listening comprehension, and if they are learning in their own country, it may even help them to assimilate culturally to English speaking environments.

I remember the days (and it's not that I'm old - although I am!- it's not that long ago!) when using video in class meant booking out the TV and video, lugging it through to the class, and then finding that someone had gone off with the remote and you couldn't use it anyway!  Mostly I didn't bother.   The IWB has revolutionised this and now it is a matter of a few clicks to a wealth of resources on the net.

You Tube is, of course, a brilliant site, with such a wide range of material that most of us don't ever look any further, but this website has a list of other video material that is also good for a change.

One example is the How Stuff Works website. This has lots of great text as well as video clips, on a wide range of factual stuff.    This example is about bullfighting in France (who knew?!).  The French version doesn't kill the bulls and they are the star of the show, which is quite nice.  It's a nice little video - only 2.5 minutes and with lots of opportunity for discussion of animal rights, risky sports, etc.  There are loads of other videos about different countries and cultures - you're bound to find something that will appeal.

Another good video site is CNN Student News. It sells itself as:
'CNN Student News is a ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program for middle and high school students produced by the journalists and educators at CNN. '
and it really is good.  Although it is aimed at teenagers, it's also very good for adult language learners.  Each show has a transcript, which is great, and a daily discussion and newsquiz, so all of your materials are there for you. What more could you want??!!  As with any topics that might be upsetting, controversial or sensitive, you will, of course, have to make your own judgement about what will work with your class.

Finally,of course, don't forget the TED site (see other blog entry on this) - if that doesn't make you think, nothing will!
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Nik's Daily English Activities

This blog is absolutely brilliant!  Nik Peachey has so many great ideas for using the internet, and this is a list of dozens of websites for learners to use outside the class.  It's also a great one for you as a teacher as many of these ideas can be adapted to use in class. 

Here's an example - A city love story  using a short film (9 minutes) from You Tube about Beirut.  I used this is class - opening with a discussion of places you have been that have surprised you (because they've been better or worse than expected) and then discussed people's impressions of Beirut.
I then showed them the first minute (showing what a beautiful city it is) and asked for impressions.



They then watched the next 6 minutes and noted the things that the girl and the boy like.  It's not in English, but there is really nice language in the subtitles (he likes the elasticity of cheese, for example!).  We did watch  the end of the film, but my main focus was then on the learners writing what they like about their cities or towns.  It was really inspiring!
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Animoto

This is a really nice site for creating videos of pictures or video content that you can upload from your own computer or from the internet (or from samples on the site).  You get to choose a soundtrack for it and different backgrounds and the result looks something like this:



Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.  When you've made your video, you can save it, facebook, tweet or embed it, and it's very easy to use.  You do have to register to use it, and the free version only allows you to make 30 second long videos - if you want to make longer ones, you have to sign up and pay.  Still, 30 seconds is still enough to make something worthwhile for a language class.

There are lots of potential applications for this. The video I made depicts a trip to Egypt; you could ask your learners to watch the first time to see where I went, and then a second time, ticking off vocabulary on a list of things they saw (eg sail, pyramid, camel, seagull - including some likely things that weren't there -hotel, shops, bus). Then ask them to describe the trip as if they went, or to prepare a tour operator's persuasive sales pitch for the trip.  The possibilities for this to be a catalyst for lots of language work are limited only by your imagination.  You could also include pictures of your learners or of places that are familiar to them.

My only criticism of the site is that, although it's free, they do keep asking you if you want to upgrade and this can be a lttle annoying......

Jing

This is Russell Stannard's favourite, and it really is a fantastic tool. Like some of the other great ideas on the net, it's very simple, but has loads of useful applications.  It's a screen capture tool, so you can use it to very easily take pictures and make videos of what is on your computer screen.  Whilst you are showing the screen, you can also tape your voice explaining what's going on, or (if you have the Pro version) also use a webcam to make a video of yourself.  The basic version is free, or you can download the Pro version very cheaply ($15 a year - about £10), and this gives you a few more options. When you have made a video, you can save it on your computer, or upload it to the server and have a url or an embed code to retrieve it by. There's a little yellow sun that sits on the top of your screen, so it's always there, easily accessible and it's a very simple application to learn to use.

This is a set of training videos from the Teacher Training Videos website that will show you how to use Jing.

There are loads of ways to use this tool.  For me, it's an excellent way to get a 'connected classroom' going.  You can really easily and quickly make videos that you can e-mail to your learners and motivate them to continue to study throughout the week.  Some ideas -mainly from  Russell - thanks :)

 - Send them a short video of yourself talking, explaining what the homework is this week
 - Put their homework on your screen and then talk them through the mistakes rather than using a correction code
 - Put the vocabulary from the lesson on a word document, and show it, talking them through the meanings.
 - Rather then just sending the url for a website that's useful, send a captured picture of it, with notes attached.
 - Get learners to download the free version and ask them to make their own videos - you could ask them to find an image they like on the internet (perhaps one from the Google Art Project) and describe it.  These videos can be embedded on their blogs or they can share the urls with you and with each other
 - I think that with more and more distance and blended learning teacher training, this kind of feedback will really help to bridge the distance between tutor and trainee and reduce the feeling of isolation often experienced.

Here are some more ideas from Russell.

I recently sent out my first Jing feedback on some homework that a learner had sent to me, and she was really surprised and pleased.  She wrote back:

Hey..

Wow this is kool

I didnt expect you talking to me

I did this in my email program, really quick  I am sorry... I promise the next it´ll be better

cheers

Hopefully it'll be motivating!

I really like the idea of using this tool for giving feedback to learners.  This is a link to an excellent article about this, and here's an example of a video I made on Jing showing how you can give feedback on written work.




Not many limitations with this - it takes a little while to upload a video after you've made it, and the maximum time you have is 5 minutes, but you can always make a series of more than one video if thats' a limitation. All in all, a real winner!
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English Central

This site is an amazing one for listening skills, learning vocabulary and practising pronunciation.  It has a really wide range of video material at different levels, (indicated easy, medium and hard) that you can listen to and transcripts below them so that you can read along as you listen.  That in itself would be helpful, but this site goes a whole lot further!  As you watch each video, you can go back a line at a time and listen again (helpful), you can slow down the speed of the speaker (very helpful - I particularly love this feature) and you can click on the more difficult vocabulary in the transcript and it will give you a definition and a pronunciation guide (how much help do you need?!!).  Fabulous! There is such a wide range of material it should appeal to adults with a wide range of interests and to young learners.  You can register on the site and it will keep a track of your scores, but you can also use it without registering, and in either case it's free.

After you've watched the video, you can also use a microphone to record yourself reading each of the lines and the site gives you a score.  Most of the videos have American accents, so you won't get 100% scores if you don't mirror that, but it's quite forgiving of other accents and even when I put on my most RP voice (ie quite different to an AmEng accent, but perfectly acceptable) it gave me a high score. 

I think that this is something that you could set as a homework task, allow learners time to listen, understand the vocabulary, practice some of the pronunciation, and then come to class prepared to discuss a video that they have watched.  It may be that you want to give them all the same one or they could each choose one and describe theirs to a small group as a jigsaw activity.

This is a really inspirational video. Check it out!

Limitations - I'm stuck to think of any! 

Twist Our Words

This is a really quirky little site - I'm going to send it to my students now and see what they come up with!   You can choose words from a list and make a video of celebrities saying your sentence.  The list is pretty limited, it has to be said – doesn’t even include ‘you’ – but maybe that’s part of the fun. 

It’s certainly a challenge and will make your students think….. if, of course, they don’t discover the ‘Lucky Dip’ button and get the site to create one for them!    Here's mine:

TED - Videos of really interesting talks.

TED bills itself as 'Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world' and it is just that.  This is one example of the kind of thing that's available, but there are talks on all kinds of things -it would be difficult to find something not to be interested in! This is one of my favourites:  (thanks to Nik Peachy for drawing my attention to this one)

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong."

The talks are aimed at educated native speakers, and as such are high level, but the content is so nice, and they'd be perfect for listening practice for learners aiming at Higher Education in English speaking countries and wanting to do IELTS or similar exams.
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