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Jumat, 20 Februari 2009

Getting Video Tasks Online

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I've been aware of 280Slides for some time now, but haven't really tried to use it much as I'm a very keen user of Keynote on my MAC, but this week I was looking around for ways to get video type lessons online and discovered what an incredibly easy and useful tool 280Slides is for this.


Basically 280Slides is an online tool for creating presentations. It works in a very simple way and has a very intuitive interface which is very quick to understand. It has a few basic themes and layouts and you can do all the usual things like adding text, shapes and images to your presentations.

The two key areas though that I like about 280Slides are:

1. It's really easy to import and embed video into you presentation. Just click on the 'Movies' icon add a search term. Find your video and double click it and there it is in the the presentation.

2. It's really easy to share the presentations online. Just click on the 'Share' icon and you get the options to publish to Slideshare, email as a PowerPoint or (and this is the one I like best) get an embed code for your blog or direct URL.



This is a quick easy lesson I created and you can compare the two last options below.

This is the embed version, just click the bottom right icon to see it full screen.


This is the direct link version: Led Zeppelin or the Beatles

How about using this with students
Well as you can see this is a great easy way create materials that exploit video.
  • You can create listening tasks with questions and comprehension questions.
  • You can get students to create their own video related projects by getting them to import video into the slides and write about them.
  • Great for digital narrative which combines video images and text
  • You could get students to import significant news clips and respond to them.
  • You can combine video into grammar presentations with videos that demonstrate grammar points
  • You could just use it to make your presentations and get them online
What I like about 280 Slides
  • Really quick easy to understand interface.
  • Works in the browser so no software to download or install.
  • Great way to make YouTube videos accessible without sending students to the site.
  • Easy enough for students to use.
  • Free and no sign of advertising.
  • The only information they ask for is email address.
  • Really quick way to get materials online without having to illegally download video or have server / web hosting space.
  • Really professional looking results.
  • Embedding the videos into sides with tasks might discourage students from wandering off to look at other YouTube videos.
  • Great to have an embed code for blogs.

What to watch out for
  • It's still in Beta and free and I can't see how anyone makes a living from the site, so they may start charging or advertising, but until then ...
  • If YouTube is blocked in your school, this probably won't solve the problem, though you can get students to access your video activities from home.
  • It doesn't have all the powers of a commercial product like PowerPoint, but how many people use those powers anyway?
Hope you find 280Slides useful.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

Senin, 15 Desember 2008

Online Video: Authentic Genres

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Over the past few years video sharing websites have become increasingly specialised, bringing about the development of different 'genres' of video sharing sites. As online video increasingly competes with TV this has also brought about the development of genres of 'micro shows'. These are complete episodes of shows that take place within 2 - 5 mins. This is an ideal length both for or 'digital native' students with their characteristically shorter attention span, but also for our English language students with their limited ability to cope with longer streams of authentic input. This more specialised content is also ideal for teachers developing materials for content and language integrated learning (CLIL)courses or for teachers who want to develop video projects.

Product Reviews
There are an increasing number of specialised video sharing websites like ExpoTV . This one enables users to create and share videos that review new products. This is a great source of authentic material and a great project for students who can create and upload their own video.
You can find some tips and suggestions for exploiting these sites at: Using Product Reviews

How to Videos
Video is a great way to teach people because you can actually see how they do things as well as listen to them . For the same reason it’s a very powerful tool for conveying the meaning of language. MonkeySee is a really useful website that contains lots of high quality short clips, showing how to do a variety of things from dancing, learning a musical instrument through to sales and marketing techniques and even building sandcastles!

The videos are user generated so anyone can create their own series and upload it.
Read more about how to use these videos here: Using 'How to' videos

Advertising projects
The Rollmio site was created to connect companies with creative amateur marketers. The site publicises information about companies that want web based video advertisements and anyone can then create an advertisement upload it to the site and try to win the contract. This can be a good insight for higher level students into how advertisements are created.

Here you can see some examples that a class of higher level English students created: Ad projects
To find suggestions on how to use this site with your students read: Advertisement Project


Sharing opinions
Big Think is a video sharing website that aims to create debate and the exchange of ideas. They invite very influential experts to record their opinions on a range of topics. Visitors to the site can watch these videos, vote to agree or disagree and also record their own video response. You can also set up your own debates on the site by recording your own opinion, either on the same topics as the experts or on a topic of your choice.

To read more about how to use this resource, go to: Video debating website


Micro soaps
The ability to share short video clips over the Internet through websites such as YouTube has led to the creations of various new ‘micro’ genre of TV programmes.

One very popular example is the 3 minute soap opera ‘ Lonely Girl 15’. This started a couple of years ago with a girl in the USA called ‘Bree’ talking to a webcam about here life. It soon attracted millions of viewers and it was discovered that the girl was a professional actress and the show was being produced by a small company.



There are now many series and a parallel programme based in the UK called Kate Modern. This kind of material, though at times sensitive carries a lot of potential for classroom exploitation. The programmes can be used to portray and contrast the youth culture of USA and UK as well as highlighting linguistic differences. You should be careful which episodes you choose though as some are unsuitable for younger learners.

To read more about thee micro soap operas go to: Iconic teen video

I hope that this posting has given you a look at some of the genres of online video that are available and how to use them. If you have a particular favourite genres please do leave a comment about it.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

Selasa, 09 September 2008

Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL

Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL

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Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots.

Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students.

To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212
The chat bot has beeen programmed with lots of information about Abrham Lincoln and each time you enter a question the bot searches it's log and tries to match key words from your question with its log information.

This all sounds very compicated, but the site actually makes it quite simple to create your own bot which can either be yourself, a fictional character or a historical or real person.

The students can add information to their chat bot in a number of ways:
  • Write diary log entries
  • Email in the information
  • Add answers to random questions
  • Type in questions and answers
  • Ask the bot questions and then correct the answers.
Here are a couple of video tutorials showing how it is done:
So how do we use this with our EFL ESL students?
All of these ways can be very useful for generating meaningful language practice.

The virtual you - Get students to recreate themselves as a chat bot. They can upload a photograph of themselves and generate random questions to answer. You could also get them to write diary entries for a week or two. Then at the end of term you could get the students to share their chat bots and see which one is the most convincing. this is a noce way of combining a range of personal information questions with a learningg diary. You could also create one for yourself which students could interegate or get the URLs of your students' bots so that you could find out more about them.

Your virtual celebrity - You could ask students to do research on a favourite celebrity or person from history and then use the information they find to create a chat bot of that person. A number of these are already under development, though Lincoln is the only one open for you to chat with at present.
Grammar bot - You could get your students to create their own grammar bot with infformation they have learnt about various grammar points.

Vocabulary bot - Likewise you could try to get students to create a vocabulary bot that has definitions for the new vocabulary they are learning.

Topic expert - You could ask groups of students to create topic experts based around various general knowledge areas then they couldd work in teams to challenge each others' bots in a test of knowledge.

Interview Lincoln - Get your students to interview Lincoln and see what they can find out about him. See if they can decide if it is a real person answering them.

What I like about this site
  • It's free and obviously aimed at educationalists
  • I'm fascinated by AI and how it can be applied to language learning and language production so..
  • It's great that they have ma de it easy to create your own bot, with out having to know about the technology
  • I like the selection of random questions it can get students to answers (a task in itself)
  • Looks like it could develop into a novel way of sharing knowledge

What I'm not so sure about
  • The site is obviously still under development andd a few things don't always work (I had a few problems trying to upload questions and answers in the 'Teach' section
  • The site carries some advertising
  • Not sure about the ethics of creating bots of real people (not sure if i would want someone else putting words in my bots' mouth)
  • Bots aren't real people and sometimes they make stupid mistakes, but as long as our students are aware of this then we could maake it part of the challenge. It might well be worth telling your students about 'The Turing Test': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test a challenge designed in 1950 to try to trick people into thinking a machine was human.

Well for all the problems I still think this is a site that students can enjoy and which can encourage them to produce a lot of accurate language in text form (bots don't understand bad grammar or spelling).

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:


Best

Nik Peachey

Jumat, 05 September 2008

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

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One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:
The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey
How To Use
  • Put the link on the
  • Generate Link box with http:// or https://
  • Use  CTRL + V  on keyboard to put the link.
  • Click Generate button to get encrypted link.
  • Click Copy URL button.
    • Done