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

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

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