It's a bit like a YouTube video dictionary. I've just been having a quick browse and I love it. Great site for native and non native speakers of English. Also great collection of different accents. Even a few 'celebrities' thrown in!
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.
Then click on the words will appear along the bottom. When your sentence is complete, click on the white arrow at the and to watch it.
Then type in the phrase, structure or words you want to find in the text and you'll see the possible phrases from the lyrics start to appear.
Once you select one, you will be linked through to a page of possible versions of the song. Select the one you want and the video of the song should appear with the lyrics underneath.
This is a really fast way to find motivating listening materials for your students that deal with specific structures or vocabulary.
It's very easy to use, you just need a webcam and to set up your account. Once you have done that you can integrate it with Twitter or Facebook (though I would advise that you wait to see how useful it is first) and you can start inviting friends or students to follow you and invite them to leave questions for you. It's a good idea to get started by getting Plank.ly to ask you a few random questions, so that when visitors come there is something for them to see. This is very simple to do. Once you have created your account, go to the 'Inbox' and click on 'Ask yourself a random question'.
Once the questions appears, you can answer it either using text or video, just by clicking the icon on the right.
Clicking the video icon will launch the video recorder window. You'll need to click on 'Allow' so that the Flash plug in can access your camera and microphone.
Then you just click on 'Record' and start recording your answer to the question. You can try again if you don't get it right first time so don't worry too much. If you like your recording, just click on 'Use' .
All of your video answers are collected in your 'Activity stream'so you can go back and edit or delete them later.
The next thing to do is either start inviting friends through Twitter or Facebook, or if you prefer just send the URL of your stream to people who you want to ask you questions. The they can either submit a questions by text or record a video questions for you. You can see my stream and try it at: http://plank.ly/NikPeachey
The activity stream is a little like Twitter in that you can start to follow people or they can follow you, so you can start asking and answering each other's questions and see what questions other people have been asked.
As you capture images they will appear on the right of the video. And you can either give each image a title or leave it blank. You have to give the worksheet a name though.
Once you have captured all the images you want from the video (you can select up to 30) you simply click on 'Print' and you have your worksheet.
You can use these worksheets for a range of activities and with a range of different video types.
You can also click on the videos to play them full screen in your browser (nice feature IWB users)
This is a great way to get students researching information around a topic you want to discuss in class or just creating and exploring conceptual associations. You could do this in class if you have data projector and try to get students to explain the connections, like six degrees of seperations. For example, how did I start with avideo of Marrakesh and end up with one of Shakira dancing?
This is a great tool that you can combine with the work you do on movies. Music is a very strong aid to memory, so you can use the music to prompt students to remember or it can just enhance the atmosphere of your lesson.
The content is really simple to access and is well organised and the video clips are small and short - not really appropriate for a single computer classroom, but great for students doing research or activities work in alone or in pairs on their computer.
I really like the site because the information comes in different media and is very much split into the kinds of small digestible chunks that lend themselves to online study and language development.
Then size it so that your face fills the field using the tools on the right.
Once you have done this more the markers over the parts of the face. Click on 'Continue' and the movie should be ready.
To make a search you just type in your key word and all the results start to appear as images.
There is a safe search option here which is on by default, so that's handy. You can also turn various other options on or off so that you restrict which sources are included in your results.
As I said I think this is a nice search engine to use in class on IWB / data projector or for students.