MailVU

This is one of those multi-purpose tools not necessarily designed with learning in mind which seem to have "here I am, language teacher" written all over it.  As long as you have a webcam it allows you to record a video for up to 10 minutes, save it in a repository and e-mail it to someone else.  You can click and record as soon as you access the website, though there are three versions you can sign up for. I've tried the free one which gives you a repository to save your recordings to but doesn't allow you to embed.  It is ridiculously easy to use: one click and you are recording. 

My first thought was to use it to record stuff to take into the classroom.  Listening to teachers talking has now become acceptable practice again - teachers are great resources for authentic, but roughly tuned input and add a personalised and context-sensitive motivation for listening. HOWEVER, I find spontaneous, unscripted story-telling, for example, quite difficult to get right first time (and we often ask our students to do this!)   So I've made recordings at home, with an off-screen audience, and I was a lot happier with the result. Click this and see what you think?  http://ml.vu/yUBlvL It also meant I could think about some of the language I was using and decide which bits might be useful for students to notice.  Of course, the next step is to prepare students to make their own recordings and this needs to be done in the classroom.  The teacher's recordings can be used for more than one listening so students can be encouraged to notice the structure of the story, the tenses or typical narrative discourse markers.  Students need time to think about, prepare, elaborate, rehearse and correct: the classroom environment is ideal for this.  They have a critical but receptive audience for each stage in peers and their teacher who provide feedback about meaning, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.  All this and the prospect of recording should challenge students to 'raise their game' (as in the reporting stage of task-based learning) and develop greater accuracy and complexity. The actual recording, on the other hand, can ideally be done from the students' homes and e-mailed to their teacher and other students.  This enables the teacher to send back individual feedback, which is usually quite difficult to achieve for speaking activities.  You can imagine how much students might appreciate this as they approach their speaking exams.  Thinking of assessment in more formative terms, once students start saving their recordings, they are beginning to assemble a portfolio with evidence of their progress.  They should find this motivating and your quality assurance-minded managers would certainly be interested in this method of tracking. Once you have the students' recordings, there is more motivating learning potential in playing one or two strong ones and encouraging peers to analyse what makes them successful. 

It's difficult to find  any problems with this tool except where your classrooms or your students don't have webcams: this is certainly a problem in my own context.  It would also be ideal to be able to  save these elsewhere. 


http://mailvu.com/