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.
Showing posts with label Voice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voice. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Friday, September 30, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Voki
Vki is a really cute tool that will make your learners smile! It's a website on which you can make your own 'voki' avatar and record messages for it to say, taking messages via e-mail or you can embed them on your website (like this!). In all honesty, the fun is in making the avatar, and the messaging is a bit secondary, so it's not all that applicable for language learning, but it's a bit of fun!
Tweet
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)