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. 

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