Monday, December 03, 2007

Stuff for your blog

Today I came across two interesting widgets/sites that could prove very useful in teaching EFL/ESL. Thanks to Theodora, I found out about Snapvine's nifty little application which allows you add voice/video to your blog. A great idea for those students whose typing skills are weak or who hate writing in general. You can even start a video/voice blog.




The other application is Voicethread which also allows you to add the spoken word to your blog. I haven't tried it out yet but it looks very interesting and beautifully designed. Thanks to Joe Dale for that. As he says;

"Jo Rhys-Jones creator of the Ning network Talkabout Primary MFL has written a great post on ideas for using VoiceThread for teaching primary languages which beautifully exemplifies some of the potential of this powerful tool.

e.g.

  • using the doodler feature to label, annotate, trace a route on a town plan and play games such as noughts and crosses
  • differentiating according to ability
  • encouraging independent work in the target language
  • reinforcing adjectival agreement
  • creating evidence of pupils' work
  • engaging pupils with technology
  • encouraging pupils to leave comments in a moderated environment
  • singing a rhyme using a picture prompt
  • using authentic digital photos from the country whose language you are learning
  • as a prompt for discussion
  • describing the weather using an authentic image from the net
  • creating a dialogue or open ended text from a picture prompt
  • inviting your partner school to comment on a protected VoiceThread
  • letting pupils choose the images that appear in the VoiceThread
  • scanning in or photographing images pupils create themselves."

2 comments:

Theodora Papapanagiotou said...

It is great, isn't it? the only drawback is that you need a microphone, which is not expencive, but not many people have it and -at least from what I've heard - they don't buy it because they don't "need" it!!
Thanks for your message (I'll leave one for you as well when I find the time!) and for dropping by - I'll have lots of stuff going on on my blog till Xmas!! Take care!

teacher dude said...

I saw a microphone for 1.90 euros in Plaisio which does a good job. Also most laptops have a mic built in.

Take care.