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

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