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.