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/

Videos

Of course, videos have been around for a long while in language teaching and likewise ideas for using them.  What is new is the quantity and range we can now access on the internet.  That is the plus.  The minus is that you need a lifetime to sift through it all and find the gems that will create brilliant and motivating speaking and listening activities.  I have done a bit of my own sifting, but I tend to look for people who are good at doing this for me.  However, this is one of choices - a Mr Bean favourite from Youtube.   

I do the usual things with it: students work in pairs, one with their back to the screen while their partner describes what they can see.  The only frustrating thing for the listener is that their partner generally breaks down giggling.  It's usually a good idea to pause and swap roles.  Beforehand, they brainstorm what you would take on a trip to ...Groups then have to agree on what they would need to get rid of if they could only take hand luggage.  'Silent' movies like Mr Bean are ideal for generating speaking and listening activities.  Alternatively, you turn the volume down. 

There are a few free gems to be found in the National Archive of Public Information films and the British Film Institute Digital Archive.  This screen shot is from a public service film, ie a government ad to educate people in the 1950s about pedestrian crossings and it's a hoot. You would brainstorm lots of street furniture vocabulary before watching it.  It would be a good one to get students to improvise or describe and also to pause and invite them to predict what happens next.  It has a voice-over that you could turn off at least to begin with. 

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1945to1951/filmpage_pc.htm

If you are looking for different ways of introducing functional language to beginner students, the British Council have some more traditional ELT videos: the 'How to...' series are quite entertaining and a bit hammed up.  To help your students to catch some of the detail give them cards with little chunks of the dialogue to listen out for.     

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/

Once you start visiting elt blogs and websites many more (better) ideas emerge.  Visit elteachertrainer (see my blogroll) for some excellent ideas for using the National Geographic videos.
So, videos can bring a motivating multimodal dimension into the language classroom.  Listening is at its most naturalistic, including visual and situational clues, introducing varieties of English you may not meet in course books.  They can also be fun, though this depends on your video.  They don't have to be just for listening either, as you can see.

Finally, there are the videos your students make themselves. Below is an example of a project in which a group of women students decided they wanted their own voice in the campaign to get proper funding for ESOL in the UK. See what multimedia can empower your own students to do: you can imagine how much work, in English, (students and teachers) went into this clip.

However...

If you haven't planned something quite purposeful for your video lesson, it can be unfocused and de-motivating.  It takes some while to find the perfect clip for your purpose and it generally is needs to be very short.  Sometimes, your favourite videos somehow, don't have the same appeal to your students.    

my.Brainshark

This is a great tool for bringing the outside world into the classroom and giving students a real focus for speaking and listening. I've used it to prepare a presentation I could use as a listening activity.  Pairs would then prepare their own presentations about a familiar area or country.  It's a very task-based learning activity and the recording encourages students to pay greater attention to their accuracy.          



Once your students have registered for this - and it couldn't be more straightforward - they download their powerpoints, pictures or videos and click the record button.  They will need headsets.  They are offered an infinite number of opportunities to re-record and preview, which is ideal.  As long as it's done collaboratively, I would expect a lot of planning and talking before they come up with the final presentation.

However...
The main problem I've had is trying to sequence the pictures.  They seem to pop up in the presentation quite randomly.   If anyone has got this one sorted...? It would be particularly hard if students were using them to tell a story.

http://www.brainshark.com/mybrainshark

Word Clouds

TagCrowd is one of easiest but not the prettiest word cloud tool I've tried out.

adult africa amused birmingham blog born camping childhood country decided different discovered earth english esol holidays kingdom later local married nightmare parents parts primary round school siblings sons spent studied teacher teaching things training united university variety wandering years

created at TagCrowd.com

http://tagcrowd.com/

I've been trying to make my own word clouds for years, but there are these wonderful tools that do a much better and quicker job and have huge visual appeal. Copy a text into the site and you get all the content words to appear in different sizes depending on their frequency in the text.  The more I look into this tool, the more ideas I get.  Here are a few which I've come up with, inspired by Nick Peachey's blog. 

• Paste a reading text or transcript in, print it off or put it on your smartboard and students can predict  its content, register, title or genre,  before reading or listening.  They can also use the words to compose a list of yes/no questions about the text.  You can answer them and students can compose their own text before reading the original.  Otherwise the questions just make a good focus for reading and listening. Nick Peachey's idea of using the word clouds to review these texts later in the term is  great one. The 'gorilla joke' word cloud was made in 'wordle', a more visually attractive tool.  If you don't know the joke, you're welcome to guess how it goes.  It's at the end of this post, if you're interested.  It demonstrates quite well how useful variable wordsize is in helping you to guess the main characters, setting, etc.

• Dialogues could be put into a word cloud to get students guessing and reconstructing.  The tool can be set to include all the words from the text so students can reconstruct it fully.  Spot  the way this word cloud highlights the informal emotive register of an 'embarrassing accident' anecdote below. Make sure your students notice the sizing isn't just random.  There must be many other ways of exploiting frequency analysis with this tool. 
  
  

• I love the idea of using these for reviewing vocabulary.  Over the years I've kept boxes of cards to pull out for a ten minute review at the end of a lesson.  You can see how a stock of these on your computer would be immediately more memorable and appeal to the visual learner in everyone. 
•  I also like the idea of students pasting texts about themselves into wordle, printing them off, randomly distributing them and asking each other questions to help identify the writer. Beginner literacy students can use it more like a word search, looking for recognisable words they have recently met in a text. 

The previous two word clouds are made with http://www.wordle.net   

At the moment, these tools seem to me to be wonderful for teachers and classrooms.

However...
I haven't found enough ideas for students working on their own.  I've tried a few word cloud tools and there are pros and cons with each: some (like Wordle) don't save easily except by screen capture though they can be captured onto a smartboard or printed off; others come with a thesaurus, though this is not very ESL friendly.

A gorilla joke

 

A gorilla went into a pub, walked up to the bar, and ordered a whisky. The barman was rather surprised, but he gave him the whisky, and then he thought, gorillas probably don’t understand much about money, so he asked him for £15. The gorilla gave him the money and started drinking. There was a silence for a few minutes, and then the barman said, “Excuse me, but you don’t often see a gorilla in a pub.” “It’s not surprising,” said the gorilla, " with whisky at £15 a glass.”