CivieBlog

There's been a fantastic discussion in my post - Touch Typing - Cursive Writing - Why?

I never know how to alert people, so I thought I'd just post.

Chatmaker helps you to do just that! I'm amazed at just how easy things like this have become these days and it's free! I used this website to create this chat room:
http://www.chatmaker.net/chatap/rooms/NikPeachey/
It took probably less than 2 minutes!


Here's a quick tutorial showing how it was done.
Chatmaker tutorial (Flash 202k)

This is the kind of thing that you used to need your own server and a lot of knowledge to create, Now anyone can do it.

How to use this with your students
Creating a chat room especially for distance students can be really useful, but don't just expect them to use it. You'll need to set them some goals and tasks.

If you can get your students using it, then you'll also need to decide what level of English you want them to aim for. Do you want them using text speak? e.g. "W8 4 ME, I’M L8, SOZ "OR Would you prefer them to express that in 'plain English'; "Wait for me I'm late . Sorry". Both have some value, but make it clear to students which you're after.

If you want to develop their 'text speak' then there are some good materials here on one of the British Council's sites for teachers.

Some possible tasks you could set could include:

• Interview role plays (make one student a reporter and they have to interview another student by chat.
• Mystery guest. Tell your students that they will interview a famous person and they have to ask questions to guess who it is (You could answer the Qs yourself OR get a student to pretend to be thee mystery celebrity)
• Interview an expert. Get students to interview an expert on a specific topic. they should research the topic first to make some interesting questions, then interview each other to see who is the real expert
• Chat room Quiz. Get the students to write general knowledge questions to quiz each other.
• Trivia Quiz. You can be the quiz master, ask questions and award points to the student who gets the answer first.

This kind of text chat interaction can be really useful if you want to work on both accuracy and fluency because it pushes students to produce language in 'real time' , but you also have a written record which you can copy and past into a word document and get students to analyse and correct.

It's worth being aware that in chat rooms sentences don't necessarily come on screen in the order they would in a face to face conversation. You may get two questions appearing and then two answers. learning to cope with this can be a challenging but useful skill. You can also use this as a follow up exercise and get the students to put the sentences in the order that they should have appeared.

What I liked about it

• Extremely easy to use and create
• Very simple interface
• Very fast to get working

What I wasn't so sure about

• There is no logging in required, so you can't really tell who it is you're speaking with and so there's no accountability for what people say.
• If you use this with your students I would advise creating a new room each time and as close to your meet up time as possible, that way it's unlikely you will get any unwanted visitors

Happy chatting and if you do drop by the chat room I created we might just have a quick chat.
http://www.chatmaker.net/chatap/rooms/NikPeachey/

Best

Nik

A Picture's Worth is a really wonderful site which collects together images with short essays (300 - 1000 words). It's based on the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. The pictures and essays are sent in by site visitors.

There's a gallery section where you can browse all the images and essays which have been sent in, as well as a feature section which has some of the most popular images. There is also a link to Google Maps which will show you where the pictures have been taken.

This isn't your average Web2.0 site. If you want to submit a picture and an essay you have to send it to the editor / site owner who decides if it is good enough

These are some of my favourites.

• Nice story here about a pink VW Beetle
• As a contrast I also like this one of a ladybird, though as much for the story as the image

How to use this with students

• Get them to start their own Picture's Worth. This could be a website that you put together or just with pictures and paper around the class
• Your students could submit their entries and try to get them published on the site
• Ask your students to choose a picture, read about it and then tell the other students (summarise) what they read
• Print up a few images and essays and see if the students can read and match the correct image to each essay
• Get your students to look at some of the essays and submit their comments to the site.
• Use the site as a stimulus to have your own show and tell in class and get students to bring in some photographs to talk about

What I like about it.

• This is an excellent source of authentic materials for your students
• The essays are short and written in very plain English
• The images are really striking
• Most of the essays are very personal and emotive
• The overall quality of the site content is fantastic
• You can see how many people have viewed each image / essay
• You can leave comments about the pictures

What I wasn't so keen on

• I would like to be able to submit my own pictures and essays and have them published immediately. Though the moderation of the images by an editor does ensure the quality of the site
• Would be nice to have some embed code, so that you could embed the picture + essay in another site or blog to write about it.

Well I'll be sending in my own essay and photograph soon. Not sure if it will ever get published though.

Hope you have more success
Best
Nik

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