CivieBlog

I’ve been having a look at a new website (still in beta) which I think has some great educational / language learning potential. It's called BigThink.com

The site is designed to create debate and get people thinking about some of the big issues in life. It contains video clips from a very large and broad range of experts giving their opinions on various issues. users then have the opportunity to vote on whether they agree, respond to the questions raised or rate the speaker.

The site also provides people with there opportunity to upload their own questions or statements via video, audio, slideshows or text.

• You can browse the different topics in the ‘Ideas’ section http://www.bigthink.com/ideas/
• You can also see which of the various experts have contributed an opinion and browse them http://www.bigthink.com/experts/ . The range of experts is really very impressive and these include Ted Kennedy, Richard Branson, Jimmy Wales ( founder of Wikipedia) among a great many other.
• There are a really nice choice of questions set up that the experts are giving their opinions on.
  

These are some really good examples

• If you had $100 Billion to give away, how would you spend it? http://www.bigthink.com/features/91

• Where do human rights come from?
  http://www.bigthink.com/truth-justice/1941

• Is globalisation killing local culture?
  http://www.bigthink.com/features/150

• Can technology make us happy?
  http://www.bigthink.com/science-technology/517

I set up a free profile and even added my own question, only to find (rather embarrassingly that I couldn’t delete it, so here it is, direct from my office in Second Life.

• The future of education?
  http://www.bigthink.com/policy-politics/education/3227
  

Here’s a tutorial created by the site owners that I have embed into this page. It tells you a little about how to use the site.
How to use big think: http://www.bigthink.com/features/101



At the time I started to write this there were 2897 ‘ideas’ added to the site so there’s plenty there for students to look at.

If you decide to post your own idea, you can do this in either the form of a statement or a question (statements give users a chance to vote - agree - disagree and add a comment, questions allow users to respond)

How to use this with students:
Here are some suggestion for how you could use this site with your students. Be aware though that this is authentic material and the language level in some of the expert videos is quite high.

• Discuss some of the questions or statement in class then check with the expert on the site

• Get the experts opinion then discuss in class and see whether your students agree
• Get your students to prepare their own opinions and video them for their own class Big Think (could add it to the site or just use Big Think as a model for a classroom activity)
• Get students to watch some of the videos and rate for how interesting they are
• Ask students to find the expert they most agree with
• Ask students to find one that they disagree with and prepare a response (then respond on the site or in class)
• Ask students to summarise an opinion they have viewed
• Ask students to view an opinion and then defend that opinion in a class debate (even if they don’t agree with it)
• As the teacher you could set up some questions that you would like your students to respond to, or you could get your students to set up questions that they would like you or their fellow student to respond to
• Get students to create a big think question to add to the site. (Review later and see if there are any answers to your question)

What I liked about it
There's certainly plenty to like about this site even though it's still in beta at time of writing

• It’s free
• These are real experts many of them well known which should be pretty motivating for students
• The site is well designed and has a pretty clear and easy to use interface. Creating and adding your own question or statement is pretty quick and easy once you’ve created your profile (just three steps)
• You can choose your form of media, so even if your students don’t have any kind of digital recording equipment, they can still contribute to the site using text.
• If you click on the small email envelope icon on the video player you can send a link, get code to embed in a webpage (look at this earlier tutorial to see how this is done), or add it to your Delicious, Facebook or Digg accounts.

What I wasn’t so keen on

• It takes a while to get registered. The process itself is quite quick, but you need to click a confirmation link which is sent to your email address and this took a good hour to arrive, so it’s best to get yourself and / or your students registered well in advance.
• I’m not sure whether there is any editing or censorship before comments and opinions go live. The potential for abuse and misuse is huge. The site is very serious and if user don’t take the site seriously it could easily be swamped by rather uninteresting and poorly thought out opinions. With most Web 2.0 sites the vast majority of what is on them is rubbish, but the remaining 5% is pure gold.
• I also noticed with my own question, that once you add one you can’t get rid of it or edit it (which I would now like to be able to do). Adding this feature might help to ensure higher quality through self censorship.

Despite these slight drawbacks I think this is definitely a useful site and it has loads of potential. Do drop me a line if you use it with your class.

best

Nik

I've just seen this site which is aimed at helping people to set up language exchanges. It's a kind of social networking tool. It's called Friendsabroad.com. You simply put in your language and then the language you want to learn and then you can also choose the country where you would like to find the person. Click on search and you get a list of people who fit your criteria.


You have to register, but it is free, then you can get in contact and start chatting, emailing through the platform (no email addresses are disclosed) and can even leave voice messages.

No 'teachers' as such are involved, there are however a coupe of useful tools on the interface to help you.

There is;

• a text to speech converter, so that you can type in a phrase and see how it is pronounced
• a multilingual dictionary so that you can get help with translating
• a phrase translator. Type in any phrase you want and get a translation of it

On the whole I think this is a great idea. It looks like there are quite few people registered already, though many of the ones I came up with on my search hadn't been active for a while.

Still a great idea and if enough people get registered this could be a real winner.
I'd love to hear from you if you've tried it.

Best

Nik

I spotted 3B Village about a year ago and initially I was impressed, but some recent developments have, I feel, put this on the map as a really useful educational tool.

What is 3B Village?
3B Village is an amazing cross between a 3D virtual chat room and a web browser. Using the free software you can visit or create your own 3D rooms which have walls lined with webpages that you can click on to visit. You use an avatar to wander the rooms visiting various websites whilst text chatting with other virtual visitors.

• Watch a demo here: Exploring 3B Village (2.4Mb Flash)
  

The learning potential for this software is huge and I can see how it could be especially useful for creating webquests or web based treasure hunts and other collaborative tasks for groups of students working virtually / at a distance. The software has none of the versatility of virtual worlds like Second Life, but partially due to that it seems like a much ‘safer’ environment to take students into and a much simpler one for teachers and students to learn how to navigate.

It is very easy to create your own rooms for your class and then just invite them along. You can create a room by specifying the URL of particular resources you want to share with your students or you can generate a ‘quick room’ using a range of other sources, like Flickr , Google, MySpace and you can even generate rooms full of YouTube videos.

I created a room just by doing a search in YouTube based on ‘Shakira’ I then create a quick room by pasting in the URL of my search results and within less than 5 clicks and 5 mins I had room full of videos to wander around.

• See how it looks: Shakira video room (2.5Mb Flash)
  

I also created a gallery type room by typing the word ‘family’ into Flickr and generating a gallery based on the results.

• See how it looks: Flickr gallery room (2.0Mb Flash)
  

Here’s a quick tutorial movie to show you just how easy it is to create a room

• Creating a quick room using Google search (1.5Mb Flash)
  

How to use this with students

• Create webquests and store the resources in a special 3B room(s) so that groups of students can work together virtually analysing data and searching for and sharing information
• Create film shows from Youtube that students can watch together. They can then do their viewing tasks together and discuss them as they watch.
• Meet together virtually and discus / share web resources
• Create your own collection of bookmarks to share with your class
• Students who have a 'MySpace' can convert it to a 3B room and show their classmates around. This should help to build up a sense of presence and familiarity with virtual classes, something that is often hard to do.
• Get your students to create their own collection of study bookmarks as a project to share with other students
• Create rooms based on materials from Flickr and get students to meet virtually to discuss the images
• Students can work together to create a 3B room or village which represents their town or country
• Students can visit a 3B city and write a report on it, plan a visit to that place based on the resources they access there.
  

What I like about it

• A nice collection of rooms already created including some for kids
• You can either create rooms quickly using searches through various online content such as Flickr, YouTube, or Google, or you can hand pick websites to create a customised room specifically for your students
• It’s simple to use
• It’s free
• At 14Mb it’s not too huge a download
• Love wandering round the YouTube video type rooms and this may well be a way around institution that block YouTube!!?
  

What I'm not so sure about

• No MAC version yet
• Would be great if it had voice chat too
• It’s definitely for broadband users only
• A lot of the ready made rooms seem to be aimed at online shoppers
• There aren’t many casual visitors, so it’s not a place where students are likely to bump into people for casual conversation. Though that could well be an advantage too.
  

For anyone involved in distance education or any kind of online courses, I think 3B Village could make a really valuable contribution.

To use 3B Village you’ll need to download and install the 3B browser software from.
http://download.3b.net/
There’s no MAC version yet, but they are working on it.

As ever, I would love to hear from anyone who uses this with their students. Please feel free to leave comments, though they will be moderated.

Best

Nik

This is something that caught my eye last week. I just couldn't resist adding a feature about it here, though I think this does come with some warnings and reservations.

Pictogame.com is a website which enables you to create your own games very easily with just a few easy steps. All you need to do is:

• upload a picture,
• select the part of it you want to show
• choose a game type
  
• add in a title and description.

Then you simply click to see the completed game. You need to register to upload and save the game, but it's free and very quick to do. There are quite a few different game types to choose from, but there are lots of examples on the site that other people have made, so you can look at those to help you decide which type to make.

Here's a rather annoying game that I created in less than 5 minutes



So how do you use this with students
You could just create a game using a picture of yourself and use it;

• as a filler for those students who finish early if you work in a media lab / connected classroom.
• as a nice 'leveler' to make a game for your students with a picture of yourslef and shows that you have a sense of humour.
• to include a messages in the game like, "Hey! Remember to do your homework"

You could get students making games as a short task using either pictures of themselves or of well known celebrities.

• This will give them some practice at following instructions and they could work in pairs to discus the type of game they would like to create and who it would be for
• You can have a class competition for who can create the best game. Get students to vote for the best one and justify their choice
• Some of the games include quizzes to test general knowledge
• Get each group of students to create a different type of game and then describe to the other groups how the game is played
  

What I like about it

• It's free and very easy
• It's a nice simple fun task that you can get students to do as a filler
• Students can share the games quite easily either via email or through blogs or other online forums
• It can easily be integrated with other Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, Blogger etc.

What I wasn't so keen on

• Some of the games are unsuitable for younger kids
• You need to make sure that students don't misuse the site and create unpleasant games using photographs of other students

This isn't the world's most useful site for developing language, but if used properly it's one that you can use to lighten up your course and your students can have some fun with.

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who uses or has used this with their class, just to see how your students reacted and what you did with it.

Best

Nik

With the growth in interest in mobile learning and the ubiquitous nature of the i-pod among our younger (and increasingly older) students this piece of software looks like a really useful tool we can use to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The software I’m referring to is I-Quiz Maker. You can download I-Quiz Maker for free at:
http://www.iquizmaker.com/

Once you’ve installed it you can make quizzes using either True / False question types or Multiple Choice questions. The quizzes a very simple to make and you can make as many questions as you like and as many quizzes, as you like.

• This demo tutorial shows you how to create the quiz

This looks like a really useful tool to:

• help revise and develop your students vocabulary. You can write a vocabulary quiz and up- date it each week with new words that your students have learned
• get the students to create quizzes for each other and share them
• set up revision exercises

Although there is a bit of work involved in creating the quizzes, once you made them you’ll be able to keep them and use them again with other students.

Once you have finished creating your quiz you can then export it to your desktop and it can be uploaded to the I-pod through I-Tunes. The only catch here is that you and / or your students will need to buy the I-Quiz game for your I-pod. It is really cheap though (less than 1 US dollar / 79 p in the UK) and it does come with some ready-made quizzes.

What I like about it

• You can set the quizzes so that students get a maximum number of questions in each game and so that they loose after a specific number of wrong answers. This should make it more competitive.
• The game will randomise the questions so you could input 50 questions and they would get 10 or 20 random questions each game.
• It’s very easy to use and is just simple point and click
• You can update quizzes so that they grow as your students’ knowledge grows
• There's a version for PC and for MAC!
  

What I’m not so sure about

• Students will need an i-pod, they can’t just run the quiz on their computer or i-Tunes
• The game is only compatible with Fifth generation i-pods (This may become an advantage as more people trade up to more modern versions and the older ones become available more cheaply second hand) which isn’t much help for students with older i-pods.
• I couldn’t get the user manual to download so there wasn’t much documentation to help me learn how to use the software
• I think there may have been one more question type, but I couldn’t get the button for it to work ??
• Students will have to buy the I-Quiz game (though as I said it’s quite cheap) and that means setting up an i-tunes account.

On the whole though, despite the above drawbacks, if you have a classroom full of students who carry i-pods about then this could be just the thing for you.

Let me know how it goes

Best

Nik

This is the third part in a series that I’m writing on how to use word processors to create computer-based materials. This one looks at how we can create interactive multiple choice activities using 'dropdown' menus.

Multiple choice must be one of the most common question types in the history of education. I’m sure we all answered them when we were at school and we have all given these question types to our students.

When I was at school, we used to call them ‘multiple guess’ questions, because we knew that even if we didn’t have any idea what the correct answer was, it had to be one of the choices, so we had a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance of guessing the answer correctly.

In the movie tutorial you will see how to insert the dropdown menu, add your choices and also add a ‘help text’ which can be used to give clues or the correct answer.

• Dropdown tutorial movie
  

Students access the ‘help text’ by clicking on the dropdown field and pressing F1 on the computer keyboard.

Here’s document with some interactive fields in. Click on them and then push F1 on your keyboard to see how they work.

• Dropdown examples

There are a range of ways you can give clues

• Direct students to a part of the text
• Remind them about time relationships (for verb tense exercises)
• Remind them of context
• Remind them about part of speech or word morphology
• Give them pronunciation clues (it sounds like)
• Give a translation
• Remind them of the unit of the coursebook / lesson when you covered the topic

Adding clues, rather than correct answers, will help to make the exercises developmental rather than a test of knowledge / memory.

You also need to be careful in your choice of words both when you select the word that you want to use from the dropdown activity and when you add your choices.

If you are selecting words from a text, then look for clues within the context which will help the students to deduce which word is correct.

When you add the ‘distractor’ words, try to make them reasonable alternatives. You could use this exercise to focus students on common problems, by using errors from their own written texts and the correct version as alternatives. If you do this, don’t focus only on their negative aspects, but also try to include some of their positive aspects of their work, like good use of vocabulary.

Anyway, hope you find this useful and by all means leave a comment if you have used this feature in other ways.

Best

Nik

I recently came across a very impressive piece of software for making Machinima. It’s still in Beta at the moment, and it’s free, so I’ve spent a bit of time looking at it and seeing how it works.

For those of you who don’t know, machinima is a form of animated cinema, which is produced in computer games or virtual worlds. In some case the animated characters are ‘played’ by avatars and in others the characters are figures within a virtual world which are controlled by a ‘producer’.

Moviestorm offers the second of these two options, so once you have downloaded it from the Moviestorm site, you no longer need an internet connection and you can work alone or with a group to produce your machinima project.

The software is pretty impressive and can enable you to do many things. You can;

• create stage sets and characters,
• place the characters on the set
• get them to move and interact with each other and various props
• place cameras around the set to film the action from different places
• create and record a script for your characters
• lip-sync the animated characters with the recorded dialogue
• cut, edit and render your final movie in a format which can easily be distributed on the web or CD.

So this is pretty much all you need to get started creating machinima movies.

• Here’s a demo movie to show how to create the action
• Here’s a demo movie to show how to film the action

So why do this with students?
The learning potential of the software is huge, even if you don’t ever get your students to a stage where they can produce their own movies.

• You can get them to create characters and change them to practice language of description
• You can use it to practice a whole range of clothing, colours and textures
• You can get them to create a set and place things to practice prepositions of place
• You can create your own movies to demonstrate a whole range of prepositions of movement, various tenses
• You can add dialogue to the movies to demonstrate functional and intercommunicative language

Personally I feel though that the software is ideal for project work. You can get your students working together in groups on their own machinima projects. They can right a screen play and a script it. Record themselves and lip-sync to the animated characters, decide on and create their own scenes and stage sets. Even the act of learning ho to use the software would make for an excellent project. There is an online forum where users of the software can exchange ideas and help each other.

You would probably need to run the project over the space of a few weeks or even months and be sure to specify to students before they begin how you intend to evaluate their work on the project. I’m sure that most students would find this a motivating and creative way to practice language.

What I liked about it

• It’s free, not too difficult to learn and doesn’t involve any programming skill.
• Once you’ve downloaded it you don’t need an internet connection to use it
• The tool set is great and you can make the animated characters do a whole range of things and film them from loads of different angles
• It’s fun to use and learn and easy enough so that you can install the software and produce a short clip within an hour
• Any films you produce with the software are your own property and you have the right to sell and distribute them!!

What I wasn’t so sure about

• It’s a big download (almost 200Mb) so you’ll either need a good connection or a lot of patience to download it.
• There are expansion packs with more stage sets, props and characters but you have to pay for these (not that you really need them)
• There’s no MAC version and you need a pretty good graphics card and a lot of RAM for it to run easily

On the whole I think this is really one to watch. As more people start using it and the forum / user community builds up I think this will turn into an excellent resource.

If you want to find out more about Machinima have a look at a few of these links.

Machinima.com
The home of machinima and probably one of the biggest collection of machinima films and links.

Machinima and education
An interesting article from Futurelab on the uses and benefits of including machinima in education


SecondLifeVideo.com
A site designed to help machinima creators within the virtual world of Second life to upload and share their creations.
Here’s a widegt from their site that shows some of the arts machinima being created in SL



Wikipedia
More information and a definition from Wikipedia

I hope you enjoy the software and I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets their students working with it.