MyBrainshark

MyBrainshark is an online presentation tool, where users can upload their powerpoint presentations and/or pictures and record their voice or add music. They can also share these presentations to others via embedding, e-mail, facebook, twitter and so on.

How do we use it?

It can also be used to present:

• Narrated Documents
• Videos
• Voiced Photo Albums
• Podcasts

If you want to know how to create podcasts using MyBrainshark then click on the image below:

Teachertrainingvideos.com is owned by Russell Stannard and has a lot more tutorial videos and information on a lot more web tools helpful to ELT. It is a great site for teachers so go check it out!

How can we use MyBrainshark for Language Learning?

Teachers can set presentation tasks to students either for homework or as individual projects. This not only means that the students can practice their reading and writing skills, but also listening and speaking. When they gather and analyse their information there is a lot of reading going on, and creating their powerpoint presentations will help them practice writing. 

 What MyBrainshark enables is the listening and speaking practice. Since they have to record their voice to work well with their presentation, they will listen to their recordings and change them until they are satisfied. Once they are done they can send their presentations to the teacher via e-mail or other communication tools.

A more obvious use for MyBrainshark is to provide an online lesson. This is mostly beneficial for distance learning courses, but it also can be to actual classrooms. If a class is cancelled due to an emergency, teachers can still provide lessons to students, for them to view it at their own leisure.  Also if there were some students who missed an important lesson, using this will help them catch up on anything that they have missed.

Example Presentation

Benefits and Limitations

• Free to use
• Boosts students' confidence doing presentations
• Flexible in terms of skills
• Teachers can easily send important lesson materials to students
• Can be shared to anyone easily
• Easy to edit and improve previous presentations
• Free version limited to 15 minutes per presentation
• Takes a lot of time to produce one presentation
• Cannot work without internet
• Formatting issues when converting powerpoint files

Linoit

Linoit is another great tool for sharing thoughts, but what separates this from tools like Todaysmeet and Solvr is that we can post more types of data such as videos and pictures as well as texts. Users can post their ideas on linoit just like a bulletin board. It also offers the users the ability to choose their own organisation style; for example they can choose to colour code for different types of information.

How to use Linoit

Additionally, each post can be given a tag, which will be displayed on the bottom right corner of the sticky. The example picture below has the tag "definition".

There also are 5 buttons on the bottom right corner, and they are(from left to right):

• Edit - allows you to edit your sticky, including tags and colours
• Set due date - brings up a calendar to choose a date. If you were using this tool to plan future events, this button will be very useful
• Send this sticky - allows you to send the individual sticky post to someone else using lionit or directly to their e-mail
• Copy to another canvas - allows you to copy individual sticky posts to different canvases
• Peel off - removes the sticky

How can we use Linoit in Classrooms?

I think this is a great tool not only for sharing ideas but for engaging in critical thinking. Lets assume individual students were set a project to find out and present a certain theme, idea or object, using Linoit as their presentation tool. 

As they search for pictures, videos, articles and others, they are suddenly exposed to a vast amount of information. They can't fit all that in Linoit, and so what occurs in the students' mind is filtering. This means analysing a lot of information and deciding whether they are suitable and ideal. 

Another interesting thing that students will often do is try organise their canvases in a visually appealing way, or simply "neat and tidy". This also affects how much information they are going to display/present, and in what way. 

Linoit can also be used to activate schema in the beginning of the lesson. A teacher can create a canvas filled with information all indicating a chosen context. Once the context is revealed, students could contribute more ideas and/or opinions to make the lesson more interactive.

Brainstorming activities can also be done on Linoit - it can be a place where a group of students post their thoughts, comments, and problems on their group canvas. If it is a long-term project, then they can create posts and set due dates so that they are aware if they are ahead or behind their plan. It really is a great repository tool for students to use. 

Example Canvas

Click on the above image to view the canvas in Linoit. This was a project of our class where we had to find useful Android, iPhones and Ipad apps for ELT - Yellow posts are the apps, green are interesting ideas/research articles, and blue is a summary of the video.

Benefits and Limitations

• Free and simple to use
• Supports English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean
• Highly interactive in group/pairworks
• Engages critical thinking
• Exposes students to a lot of information
• No word limit on posts
• Great for starting lessons
• Great for summarising lessons
• Could become very messy if too many people are working on one canvas
• Takes up a lot of time
• In big groups, it will be hard to edit and organise posts
• No other shapes available to be posted. 

Breaking News English

This is an excellent site for teachers, simply because it provides vast amounts of up-to-date materials. The students can also use this website to practice their language skills, as it offers a lot of quizzes and many other types of exercises.

How can we use it?

http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

Copy and paste the above web address or simply click on the picture at the top of this post, and you will be directed to the website. On the homepage you should see the most recent chosen topics from which you can choose. 

Of course, if you wish you can navigate all the lessons the website has, or you can either search for a particular lesson or click on the predefined categories at the bottom of the page, which should look like the following. 

Once you have chosen the lesson, you can see the reading material and the long lesson plan as you scroll down. There are infact two versions of the lesson plans, the long one you can see when scrolling down and a mini-version. 

As you can see the lesson plans have versions where it is much easier to print. There are so many materials in this site that I will not be able to cover them all. The activities are divided into categories and skills quite well. Essentially, the teachers can take their lesson materials according to the lesson plan from these categories, but I feel it will be more effective when used by the students. Apart from the lesson plans, all these activities are interactive. 

For example, the text jumble activity provides students with a tiles containing parts of text from the main reading material, but their order is mixed up. The students will have to re-order them in the correct order. If they find it too difficult, they can reduce the number of tiles, and if they find it too easy, they can also increase it, by using the buttons on the bottom right. They can also easily check their progress by enabling "Auto check" or check whether they ordered them correctly after by using the buttons on the bottom left. 

Other activities are just as interactive as this one, and if a teacher was to organise these materials in the classroom without computers, he/she can print this out and cut the tiles and distribute them to different groups in the class. Most of them are not difficult to reproduce into printable materials except for quizzes. 

Benefits and Limitations

• Up to date news topics which can be engaging to students
• Easy to produce lesson materials even if there are no computers for the whole class
• Materials for all levels
• 40+ activities on most lessons
• Good for practise outside of lessons
• A lot of advertisements
• Can be confusing when navigating
• Some news topics can be offensive to certain students
• Teachers will need to decide on the materials more carefully
• Although the topics may be authentic, the actual reading material is not

Solvr

Solvr is another web application which can help list and share; similar to Todaysmeet but with a few more functions. It can record every idea, comment, or problem the participants post, with a voting system to show whether the post was helpful or are agreed by others. 

How do we use it?

The video above pretty much shows most of the functionalities in Solvr. As you can see from the early of the video, without the URL that it provides on top of every "problem" users create, others will not be able to enter this discussion forum.

Two functions that the video does not mention are voting and editing. Unlike Todaysmeet, where once you post your idea its there set in stone. Solvr allows participants to edit any comment/idea/problem, hopefully to simplify and clarify what the original poster wrote.

"Votes", as I mentioned before, can be used to show agreement/acknowledgement, which is also not present in Todaysmeet.

How can we use this in classrooms?

I think this tool will be particularly useful when used before a class debate projects. Students from each side of the debates could create their own Solvr discussion page and go through possible problems that they need to discuss and find solutions, and even discuss how to present their thoughts, what kind of data they need to collect and so on. 

However, this tool is not limited to discuss ideas on debates; students can use it to outline a role-play task, presentation projects, and many more. 

Another way Solvr could be used in a classroom is brainstorming vocabulary around a theme, making the students add definitions, example sentences etc. Teachers can assign different themes to different groups, and have their results sent to the teacher via e-mail, or even present it to the whole class in the lesson if possible.

Also, Solvr can be more useful than a form with pre-defined questions when getting anonymous feedback, as it allows more interaction between the students. By utilising the vote function we can easily tell how many people feel the same way on a certain issue, for example. 

Benefits and Limitations

• Quick and simple to use
• Encourages interactive exchange of ideas
• Great for interactive homework
• Full editing enabled
• No word limit when posting
• Anonymous, so shy students can come forward more easily, and be honest
• Encourages critical thinking skills
• Each problem is given an individual "branch" for corresponding solutions/ideas
• Open to abuse because its anonymous
• Still undergoing tests, so prone to bugs
• Difficult to fully manage an online debate
• No other way to save than printscreen

IDroo

IDroo is a great tool, providing a shared whiteboard for people using Skype. People who have been invited to the whiteboard can view, edit, save and share any whiteboard that the person is participating in.

How do we use IDroo?

The above video shows what tools there are, but it does not really show how to invite your students or how to manage the whiteboard pages nor tabs.

On the top right hand side of the IDroo window when you start the program, there is a box labeld "Participants". We can easily add people by following the instructions inside that box. Upon clicking it should give you a list of people who you can share the whiteboard with. All you have to do is click on the desired participant and click "add", and they will be sent an invite to join your whiteboard.

Just below the Participants box, there is another labeled "Pages". This works very similar to the powerpoint or IWB page selection functions. All the pages on the whiteboard will be shown here, but the pages from other whiteboard tabs will not be. You can add a new page by pressing the + button at the bottom left of this box, and can delete any unwanted pages by first clicking on the undesired page, then clicking on the trash button located on the bottom right corner of the pages box.







Another function IDroo has is that it can keep one whiteboard independent of another. We can do this by using the tab functions.

As you can see, there are 3 boards currently open. As mentioned before, these boards are completely independent of each other, meaning that each board can be shared to different people at a certain time, and the pages in each boards are not linked also.

Additionally, there are Mathematical formulae which can be used embedded inside the tool, but this function is not so helpful in teaching English. unless the students are learning how to say/read Mathematical symbols.

Any particular implementations for Language Learning?

IWBs are used a lot in today's classrooms, and this is just an online version of it... almost(IWBs actually offer a lot more functionalities than IDroo). So the usefulness of this tool I think is pretty self-explanatory. A distance learning classroom which is connected by Skype, and the teacher and the students can interact in real time. 

Making use of the tab functions, a teacher can divide students into groups, and instruct them to create a board just for their group, and work on their projects, without interference from students in other groups. When they finish, each group can invite everyone in the class to share what they have done. 

Most importantly, because this is an add-on application for Skype, the entire class could be in a conference call, and flexibly move in and out of the main group conversation(the one with the entire class in it) and their own group conversations(for their groupwork), then the teacher/s can instruct and/or help them, given that they are in the individual groups' conference calls. 

Benefits and Limitations

• Free to use in a non-commercial use
• Great for one-on-one, group tutoring
• Great for distance learning classes
• Various uses for big groups
• You must have Skype and IDroo installed for this to work
• Open to abuse - everyone who is invited can alter the whiteboard
• Conversations can turn very chaotic when everyone speaks
• Easily replaced by webinar tools

Vocaroo

Vocaroo is a great web2.0 tool for recording and sending voice messages. Users will be provided with a link when they finish recording, which they can share via e-mail, facebook, twitter, and so on.

How to use Vocaroo

How can we use it for Language Learning?

Using this tool as a part of a task can be very beneficial to students. For example, lets assume the students have received a homework to do a voice recording of them describing their favourite restaurant, and the recordings are to be sent to the teacher via e-mail. Not only does the students get the initial speaking practice, but after their first recording they may feel unsatisfied with it. What often happens is that students retry multiple times before sending their work to the teacher. 

Another benefit to this is that shy students normally dislike doing presentations in front of the class, and this gives them an opportunity to practise their speaking just like everyone else, whereas inside the classroom they tend to be quite reluctant.

Also, when this tool is used autonomously, I think it can boost a learner's confidence in speaking and listening. The learner could say a sentence, and listen to it for corrections on intonation, pronunciation and so on, improving his/her speaking and listening. This hopefully will result in positive participation in the classroom for the learner.

Benefits and Limitations

• Bypasses the conventional recording procedures(voice recorders, extracting data from the recorders then putting them onto a CD, etc)
• Extremely simple to use
• Great for speaking tasks and practice
• Easy to share with whoever the user wants 
• Students are able to listen to their recordings multiple times and improve it until they are satisfied

• Without a microphone, this tool is completely useless
• Vocaroo currently is only accessible through internet - it is unavailable offline
• Technical problems can arise - if the Vocaroo server unexpectedly shuts down in the middle of a recording there is no way to recover it
• The sound quality is not ideal

Language Guide

A great site for learning vocabulary for beginner learners

The video pretty much shows how the site is used. It is a great website considering how many categories it provides(the sound and video becomes unsynchronised in the video, but it is the only one I could find). 

As you can see from the video, when hovering over any of the pictures, the spelling of the word appears where the mouse cursor is and a recorded voice tells the user what it is. This is great for students struggling with pronunciation. On top of that, some parts of the objects/animals are also provided for students("Scorpion"'s "Stinger" and "Finger"'s "Fingernail", for example)

For me, the best part of this website is that it is multilingual. 

 On the top of the page, students can decide which language to view the categories of vocabulary. The voice and spelling is still in English, of course.

Benefits and Limitations

• Offers a wide variety of vocabulary
• Good for beginners wanting to improve their vocabulary and pronunciation
• Simple to understand how to use
• Multilingual options
• Much better suited for self-studying rather than classroom teaching(will depend on the task)

• Although there is a good selection of vocabulary, students are limited to the provided words
• Quite impractical for efficient use in the classroom(will depend on the task)
• No specific activities on the site