Vacaroo

A platform for students to talk about anything they like. They can record their voices and send it to teachers for feedbacks.This tool could develop students speaking skills and build confidence in speaking.

What is special about Vacaroo?

• Free and easily accessible.
• The recording procedure is simple and easy.
• The recorded voice is clear.
• Record voices, send them to teachers for assessment or feedbacks
• Used to practise speaking skills

Limitations of it?

• Dependant on internet connection. No internet, no Vacaroo.
• Limited for 5 minutes recording. Any recording more than 5 minutes should be done many times.

How it can be used in class?

I would suggest that teachers ask students to Vacaroo everyday and listen to their own recordings and their friend's recordings too to build their confidence in speaking.
Teachers could set a topic for the students to speak on or ask the students to make daily recorded journal.

Say Hi to The Zimmer Twins!

Zimmer Twins is a website that encourages students to create and share their animated videos.

Students an create their own movies, choose characters, action, and expressions. It is a fun moviemaker designed for educational purpose such as language learning. Students can use to create impressive cartoon animation.

How it can be used in class?

I would suggest that the Zimmer Twins can be used in the Production stage after they are given sufficient practice on language function in the Presentation and Practice stages. Students are required to create a dialogue of seeking and giving advice using their own language. They are given freedom to create their own storyline and dialogue. The rationale of this activity is to get the students apply the language learnt on their own. In short is to practise language for purpose.

Another activity could be creating ending for a story. Teacher provides an introduction of a story for students to continue and create their own ending. Students can use their own creativity to complete the story and plan the resolution of the story.

Pluses

• It's free for both craetinga nd watching prepared animated movies.
• Enhances students creativity- Three characters to choose, a range of settings, actions and expression. 
• Practice for writing dialogue or story telling - Bubbles for students to write on their dialogues on their own.
• Storyline can be more than 10 slides.
• Sound effects are available. 
• Automactically teaches students about different kind of expressions, settings and verbs.

Minuses

• Too complicated for beginner- too many things to choose.
• No voices for dialogues

 

clicknlearn

Interactive learning! That is the best phrase to describe this tool. It is interactive because it gives the students chances to learn language in a fun way and at the same time communicatively and productively. It offers the students countless topics or world issues to select on according to their interests such as culture, gender discrimination and global warming, which should suit with their levels:easy, intermediate and difficult.

How to do it?

Just http://clicknlearn.net/

Enter site and Click English!

Choose any topic of your interest!

What is good about this tool?

1. It is free. Thus,it can be accessed anytime.

2.Attractive animations and illustration may interest the students to explore the web and try all the interesting tasks,

3. Most of the exercises provide rules and relevant examples prior to the real tasks so that students are clear of what is expected from them in completing the tasks.

4. Some exercises involve drilling and repetition which may help students in enriching their vocabulary and getting the right pronunciation.

5. Clear instructions. This could avoid confusion and encourage the students to follow the task until the end without being sidetracked.

What is not good about it?

1. Some exercises may not be reliable and up-to-date. For example, issues such as child labor and war may not be able to provide the latest news of worldly issues.

2. Some exercises involve too many drilling that sometimes make the learning of language unnatural.

3.Some exercises employ lengthy texts that may discourage students from doing the exercise engagingly.

Breaking News English

Listening is one of the core skills in learning English language. If the activities are designed properly, listening somehow can be connected to some other fundamental skills of language such as reading, speaking and writing. Thus, designing interesting yet meaningful listening activities is significant in order to encourage the students to take interest and get engaged in the listening activities. Thus, Breaking News English can be one of the practical yet interesting tools in teaching listening. 

Breaking News English is a tool that gives practices to students to learning English through listening. Students can listen to current events and affairs topic around the world such as sports, business, entertainment, technology and science.  By using this tool, teacher can choose the level of exercise to suits the students’ level as it consists of easy to hard level of lessons. 

How it can be used in classroom?

Pre listening

Teacher activates students’ background knowledge about the topic such as “Earthquake”.Teacher let the students listen to the tape recording about the news once.

While listening

Teacher asks students to work in pairs to work on the exercise which requires students to fill in the blanks with appropriate answers. There are some other ways to do while listening activities:

Post listening

Teacher replays the recording and let the students listen once again. Students then can add up their undiscovered words.

Pros 

1. This lesson is free!

2. While learning English, students can also increase their general knowledge of world current issues. 

3. Improve listening skill. Listening to the tape prior to actual task requires students’ full concentration so that they could answer the questions in the following tasks.

4. Not only the students can enhance their listening skills, they can also increase their vocabulary banks and improve grammar aspects. 

5. It gives students training on how to get the gist of a text which through looking at keywords .It contains “Sentence jumble” where students are exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and different kind of word order. It gives students practices in the future when they encounter new text.

Cons

1. Lessons using Breaking News English are somehow website-dependant and undoubtedly, they need internet connection to make them happen. Without computer and internet access, the lessons will not come true!

2. Cheating. Students may directly answer the questions while listening to the recording.

3.If the task requires students to work in pairs, there may be some possibility for the students to speak in their mother tongue. Working in pairs and a lack of teacher’s monitoring could resort the students to use mother tongue.

In conclusion, intervention in the middle of the lesson is essential in order to check language usage in terms of grammar, spelling and pronunciation.

Hello Bubblr!

Again! A simple and easy way of learning English language.

Bubblr is a tool to create presentation by adapting Flickr.com photos! Just search any related images that you want to put on your slides and add bubbles to them. Then, just type on anything to describe the pictures and press go! As simple as that. This tool also will save your work into the archive, only after you are done with the slides and save them. If you happen to leave the page, you can just pay archive a visit and re-search your own slides. Like Dvolver, Bubblr can directly be emailed to yourself and anyone and be embedded into blog. So, your work will not end on Bubblr only, it can be spread to and shared with all people around the world!

How to use it in class?

Teacher could ask students to do the task individually. Give freedom to students to choose their own topic according to their own interests and preferences as this could motivate students to be more anticipated with what they are doing. Then, teacher could ask students to present it to the rest of the class which means this can be some sort of oral test or preparation for public speaking to the students. Perhaps, teacher could ask students to post it on blog and vote for the best video.

It can also be used in pre writing stage where the students can brainstorm or make mind map in the version of slides. This is to encourage students to write better on the following draft as they have already outlined some ideas before writing.

Advantages

1. An easy and quick way to do a simple slides presentation. It is undoubtedly FREE!

2. There are plenty of beautiful and fascinating pictures to be put on the slides. There are three different bubbles that can be embedded on the slides to describe the pictures or add dialogue into them.

3.  It can be shared with others through email or on blogs.

Disadvantages

1. The slides cannot be rearranged. Once they are set up accordingly, they cannot be moved alternately.

2. The shapes of the bubbles are limited.

3. The bubbles can be enlarged by in a limited size that the description of the pictures cannot be too long.

4. The saved slides emailed sometimes does not turn out as the same as the original one.

5. No animation or slide transition and sound effects.

I personally think that Bubblr is just useful to get students to start writing. It is suitable as warming up stage or brainstorming ideas. This is because there is nothing much that the students can do to show their state of language, which means there is not much performance of students that teacher can use as evidences to assess the students work especially in terms of writing skills. However, it can be employed for speaking tasks that the students can utilise Bubblr to make a quick presentation to be presented to the class.

Dvolver

Dvolver is a website that can be used to make animated videos. It provides a number of characters for the students to choose and make dialogue between the two characters. It also enables some types of animation for the characters to move.There are also some background musics available for the students to select on to make their dialogues alive and interesting. As the movie making is done, users can email the movie to themselves or to other people such as teachers or friends.  Dvolver can be used as a platform for the students to be a beginner-script writer as they are to choose the title for their own videos and  acknowledge their names as directors.

What is good about Dvolver?

Free of charge! It can be used in unlimited times. 

It is fun and motivating as the students are given the chances to create their own dialogue by choosing their preferred characters and script.

It enhances students creativity and imagination for it allows students to create a title for their videos and produce their own scripts.

It can be interactive if the students are making the videos in pairs. They can brainstorm and discuss what will be presented in the video, especially the content of the dialogues.

What is not good about Dvolver? 

The characters are quite limited. The possibility for the students to use similar character for different videos is high. Students might use the same characters because not all characters are attractive and appropriate for some context.

There may be some possibilities for the students to use too informal language or 'trendy' language such as short forms and acronym.

 

How to teach in class?

Example of lesson: Asking for and giving advice.

Teacher may give the students a situation for the students to solve.Individually, the students are required to produce their own dialogue regarding the problem provided by the teacher. The teacher can then ask the students to email to the teacher or post it on blog. The teacher may share all students' works to the class. From here, the teacher can ask the students to watch and comment on each others' videos.

Why is it good to post it on blog?

1. It acts as motivation and instil ownership. Knowing that there are people who are going to watch their video, the students would feel encouraged to do the animated movie,

2. Teacher can monitor and assess the students usage of language. From that, the teacher can provide feedback for the students on the students' presentation and language.

What Dvolver offers you!

Oh, myBrainshark!

Turning your existing presentations and marketing materials into powerful, voice-enriched, trackable video in seconds?

myBrainshark has the solution for you!

It is a free online video presentation. It enables you and you, the users to upload your Powerpoint presentation and add voice into it. myBrainshark makes podcasting easy. Add audio to your blog and build a following using myBrainshark and a telephone or computer mic. Your video links can be shared with contacts & social networks via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. Your website or blog could be now enhanced with an embedded video using myBrainshark. It is as easy as cutting and pasting! Also, post myBrainshark videos to YouTube with just one click of your fingertip. 

Advantages

1. It is free- it can be used by all users.

2. It is good to practise before presenting.

3. It is good for students to keep their presentation and see how they can develop their presentation. teachers can give feedback too. From the feedback, students can improve and make amendments on their presentation to make a better presentation. 

Disadvantages

1. It is one-to-one communication. Knowing that the teacher will not be able to look at the students face-to-face, the students may not be spontaneous. They may prepare their own texts and just read directly from the texts.

2. Virtual audience reduces the students' nervousness of public speaking, It does not really prepare students for a real presentation.

2. Body language, gestures and facial expression are not available. This hinders the connection between the audience and presenter.