Back in December 2010 I wrote an article about how you could use Batlyrics, a site which combined Song videos and lyrics, as a corpus to find examples of grammar or vocabulary you wanted your students to focus on: 'Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus'
Since writing this article I've spotted another useful feature of the site, and that is the addition of an embed code button. This is really helpful, because now it means that you can select the song you want to use, copy the embed code and then embed it into your own web page or blog and write your activity around it. This is particularly easy if you use the Posterous blogging platform, as all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code into and email, add a title and instructions and post it off to post@posterous.com.
A few seconds later you should get a message back with a link to your published activity. Then you just share the link with your students.
I've just spotted this wonderful online library for young learners called MeeGenius. It has a great collection of classic stories and fairy tales that are delivered as illustrated online books.
The library is very easy to navigate, just click on the book you want. You can personalise the books my selecting the names of the characters in the book, though you have to register to save these, or just read through by clicking on the button to read and clicking to turn pages. You can also click on the 'Play' option and when you do this you hear the book being read to you with the words being highlighted as you hear them. This is a great site to help younger learners with their reading. the stories are ones that will probably be familiar from their L1 anyway and this combined with the audio support and word highlighting should really help not only with their reading but also their listening skills and pronunciation. There is also a mobile app for iPhone- iPad - iTouch, but it isn't free (the website is free). I bought it for about 2 euros and it works pretty effectively. You still have to download each book before you read it, so this is best done on a wireless connection (so you aren't paying mobile rates) but it is then stored on your device until you want to read it.
The site and the app are really good recommendations for parents if you want to advise them on how to support their kids learning development and help them to read with the kids.
I have to admit that I find teaching grammar a bit on the boring side and finding good examples of grammatical structures in interesting authentic text can be quite time consuming, so when I saw this lyrics search tool Lyreach I was instantly impressed.
All you need to do is type in an example of your grammar structure and you can then find it in a whole range of different song lyrics.
This links to the lyrics start to show beneath the search box as you type, and then you just click on the sentence to link to the correct verse from the song. You'll see the part of the song highlighted and there's a link to a clip from Amazon.
Unfortunately the clip is only the start of the song and may not have your grammar example in, but it is easy from hear to find the clip on YouTube or find the clip and the rest of the lyrics together using a tool like Tubeoke that matches clips to lyrics.
So now using these two easy tools you can find lots of authentic examples of your grammar points in song lyrics and create quick activities based around them. You could even paste the lyrics from the verse into Wordle and use it as a prompt to get the students to drill, memorize or review the verse after they listen.
I've just been trying out a great new tool called Wetoku. Wetoku is a video conferencing tool which enables one to one live communication which can easily be recorded and then saved for comment or embedded into blogs or websites.
Here's an example of what the finished product looks like. This was a quick interview I tried with Graham Stanley of the British Council in Barcelona. (The width of the player is 514 pix so it doesn't fit so well in my 400 pix content column)
Creating an interview is really easy. You just log in to the Wetoku site (still in beta at time of writing) Click on 'Start Your Interview' add the information about who is being interviewed etc. Then click 'Next'. You should then go to the interview interface and get a link to send to your interviewee (by email). Once the click the link they'll appear next to you and you just need to click on the record button and start your interview.
When you are finished, stop the recording and watch it. you can then either record it again or click 'Done'. When you click 'Done' you'll see the interview and be able to share it using the URL or embed code. Visitors to the site can also leave comments on the interview.
All your video interviews are stored in your profile and it is possible to go back and edit the information on them, but not the video itself.
How can we use this with students? This is a fantastic tool for setting homework or distance learning assignments for our students.
They can interview each other in pairs then post the videos and you can leave feedback for them in the comments section.
You can record short video tutorials with them and they can watch afterwards and review.
You can create interviews for them to watch and comment on them.
They can create their own interviews for their blogs
This ability to record and watch the interviews again / comment on them makes this a really useful teaching tool. The sound quality is pretty good so students can really hear them selves quite clearly. This is an ideal tool for getting them to reflect on and try to improve their performance.
I hope you enjoy this tool and please feel free to leave any suggestions or links to interviews you create below.
I've just been playing with a really nice tool called Xtranormal that enables you to create nice animated movies. You can create a scene an a series of movies simply by choosing back drops and characters, writing your script for them and then just drop on different actions and sound effects.
This is an example that took me about 10 - 15 mins to create (Took me a while to work out that you had to write the script first - Der!!) In many ways this is a similar tool to one of my long term favourites DFilm, which I wrote about some time ago in Make you own animated movies, though this is perhaps even better as the characters take your script and actually say it using the wonders of text to speech.
Xtranormal is a great tool for generating listening and writing activities, as well as being a lot of fun. I hope to be publishing some teaching tips for it soon.
At present the site is still n beta and it says that it is free to use for now, which makes me think you should use it now as they might start charging soon.
I've just been playing with yet another beta site Audio Puzzler. The site has a small but growing collection of novel dictation puzzles. The audio files are displayed as small balloons which the user clicks on. They then hear the text and type in the words. Once they have done this they have to drag the text into the correct order. This is a nice variation on the standard dictation activity , because it demands that students not only recognise the words, but can make sense of the text.
Audio Puzzler is part of a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology and they are keen to receive feedback from anyone who tries the puzzles.
Let's hope this keeps developing as it looks like a really useful tool to help EFL ESL students develop their listening abilities.
Babbel is one of the few really effective vocabulary building websites that I've seen on the web. It's actually a social network and can help you to make friends for language exchange etc, but the core of the site is it's interactive multimedia vocabulary building exercises. These work with words being presented along with images and the sounds of the words. The exercises then move on to recognition of the sounds of the words and then you have to spell out the words for the images as you see and hear them. I know this all sounds a bit PPP (Present, Practice, Produce) but for EFL or MFL students working alone, I still think there is some value in this. The site isn't only for learners of English, but also has exercises in Italian, French, German and Spanish.
This is one of the great strengths of the site because it draws on students from more languages, it makes it possible for students to connect with and practice their language with users from the target language.
As always it would be wise to be careful with this and to protect your students' privacy etc, but there certainly is some potential here and I do like the design of the vocabulary building activities so for that alone, it's worth the free registration.
I first wrote about the ECL (Education Clip Library) a few months back, but now I've finally got round to exploring it and I have to say it's a really impressive resource.
There are about 5k + clips at present and once you are registered there is an option to request a clip on a specific topic if you need one. The clips are arranged by age suitability ( 3 - 1 years or 11 - 19) as well as topic. All the clips I looked at also had a transcript underneath too, which is always really helpful for EFL and ESL students.
There is a good collection of Business related clips for anyone teaching Business English or Business skills.
There is also a huge range of historical footage going all the way back to the 1930's
The user interface is simple and clean and the clips stream pretty quickly and still look okay when played full screen.
On the whole this is a really nice resource for EFL , subject specific or CLIL lessons.
Apply for you password now as it may take a little while to get one.
If you like using authentic video materials with your students but don't have the time to put together the materials then this could be the site for you.
Yolango has a huge collection of short video clips from a whole range of sources and they come complete with transcription and a range of language learning activities for each clip.
Anybody visiting the site can watch the clips and read the transcriptions, but if you register and log in you can also get access to 'fill in the blank', comprehension questions and vocabulary definition type exercises. Students are graded on these exercises and get the results on a scoreboard. This is a great way to set motivating homework for your EFL ESL students and make sure that they do it and see how well they do it.
The collection of clips available is very varied and there are many that would be ideal for Business English students too.
When I first checked this site out a few months back there were some clips that were of a more adult nature, but I can't see these anymore. All the same be careful with less mature students. Certainly a great site for adult learners though.
Great new for those of you who like developing authentic EFL ESL materials around news clips.
CNN is now making available an embed code from each of it's video news clips, so we can now embed these into blog pages or online multimedia materials and develop great authentic and up to date EFL ESL learning materials for our students.
Here's a nice example of what the embedded player looks like.
Any ideas about how you would use this? By all means send in suggestions.
I was really pleased to be offered a sneak preview of the fantastic new Lucky Voice Karaoke website which is still in private beta.
Karaoke can be really motivating for some students and as we all know, song is a great way to improve our EFL / ESL students' pronunciation.
The site itself has a really easy to use interface. Once you select a song to sing along with it comes up in a big pop up window which you could display full screen on an interactive whiteboard if you are brave enough to work with a whole class on a song. The words of the song change colour as you should sing them.
You get a bit of help on the chorus, when the original singers join in. If you are using this with students it might be a good idea to play the complete song by the original singer before starting to get them to work on the songs on the site. That way they'll get a better sense of the timing and when to start singing.
You can find more ideas for using karaoke with EFL / ESL students on my Learning Technology blog posted under the title of 'Karaoke with a Social Network'
The selection of songs is also quite broad with quite a lot of up to date songs as well as some older classics. They also have some ready created playlists which are quite handy.
This will certainly be a useful site once it goes public and is one of the best designed Karaoke sites I've seen.
I hope you and your students are able to enjoy it soon.
EFL / ESL students really enjoy watching video clips but often find authentic materials difficult to cope with due to the variety of accents and the speed with which native speakers communicate.
Yappr offers a good solution to this problem with a huge collection of transcribed video clips. As students watch the clip, they see the script appearing in a window alongside.
The videos are separated by level; easy - medium - hard and are also categorised by theme, such as sport, cartoons, nature etc. There is a 'sexy' category too, but this is mainly made up of music videos and commercials and I don't think there is anything particularly 'adult' about it.
You can watch all the movie clips without registering, but if you do register there is a social networking element to the site and you can also get involved with uploading and transcribing videos for the site.
This is a really useful tool for students and teachers. It would be nice if you could turn off the transcription and try to get students to work it out for themselves first, but if you wanted to do this, you could just find the same clip on YouTube and then send the students to Yappr to check their transcription.
Digital sound effects can come in really handy for multimedia materials design projects and to inspire the imagination of our students.
Soundsnap is a really nice site which has a good size collection of free sound files. They are neatly catagorised and easy to search and you can preview them before you download them and most of them come in a variety of formats from wav, mp3, aiff.
You can register, but you don't need to.
Earlier this year I wrote a posting on my technology blog which looked at SoundTransit and I suggested a few teaching tips and ideas there, most of which would apply to these clips too.
I was really interested to see this report from Reuters on how a school in Thailand is using karaoke to help nurses learn about cardiology! Have a look here to read the article that goes with this: Karaoke for the heart at Thai medical school
There might be a short advertisement before the report starts.
I was particularly interested because I posted a short feature on my learning technology blog about using karaoke only last week.
Now I'm wondering if karaoke learning is just and Asian phenomenon or whether this would work with other students.
Has anyone else been using karaoke with their students? I'd love to hear from anyone who has or from anyone who has other karaoke type websites to share.
SnapYap.com looks like a nice free tool for sending video messages. It doesn't involve downloading any software as it uses the Adobe Flash plugin. You just have to allow access to your webcam and microphone.
You can either exchange messages with other registered users, email links to your messages to people or send them a link to your messages page.
I haven't tried this yet, but I think it could be quite an interesting communication tool and a nice way of developing materials for students and it's free!
This week the Big Think is running a feature to coincide with Black History Month. It includes videos from Black American leaders from a wide range of fields and backgrounds giving their thoughts and reflections on race and identity issues.
This is great material for basing lessons around and should promote a lot of discussion within your classroom.
As ever with sensitive issues, you'll have to handle this carefully, but watching the videos is a good way of raising awareness, without having to tackle the issues head-on.
Since writing this article I've spotted another useful feature of the site, and that is the addition of an embed code button.
This is particularly easy if you use the Posterous blogging platform, as all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code into and email, add a title and instructions and post it off to post@posterous.com.
