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

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

Todays Meet

What is Todaysmeet?

Todaysmeet is a great web application useful for mainly brainstorming and discussing ideas. One can create a room which others can join and everyone in this room can post their ideas - it pretty much is an internet bulletin board. 

How do you use it?

When you open the site, you are able to name and create your room straight away.

You can also set the time in which the room will be kept open. Once you have decided on the name and how long you want this room for, you can click on the "Create your Room." button and you will be sent directly to your room.

Above is what the chat room will look like. You will now have to choose your 'name' which will be displayed to other people inside, by typing on the blue text-bar. Once you have done this and click on join, you will be able to type your message for your room.

For other people to join your room, they will need the name of the room you chose when creating it. For example, if you chose your room name as "Classroom", then the URL address(website address) for the room will be "www.todaysmeet.com/Classroom". So now you are all set for your class to discuss and share ideas. 

The most recent messages will be displayed on top of the message box, and this causes the older ones to disappear below the border of the box. However, you can click on either the "transcript" or "projector" button, and it will display all the memos written by everyone in the room. You can then proceed to save this as a webpage - unlike the room, once saved as a webpage this file is in your computer permanently(unless you decide to delete it, of course).

Benefits in the classroom

• Very easy to use
• Great tool for brainstorming activities 
• All students(even the shy ones) can participate in sharing and expressing their ideas and opinions
• Teachers can collect and save everyone's ideas
• Many students like using computers in a classroom - especially in classrooms of East Asia, where the idea of using computers in a language classroom is still new in most schools
• Students can also use the room to practice writing skills while participating - for example if you instruct them to write in full sentences only, they will need to think about the linguistic aspects(such as grammar) while participating in the discussion

Limitations

• There is a character limit of 140, so it is inappropriate to have long sentences or paragraphs
• There is a risk of some students trying to do something else with the computer(accessing facebook, games, etc)
• Control of students can be difficult - students could easily create an alias and spam useless messages
• There are other applications/websites that can easily do what Todaysmeet does(facebook, skype group chat) for smaller groups