CivieBlog

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc.
Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project.

What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique.

How to use this with students
When ever I've tried to do drama, video or machinima projects with students, it's often been a bit of a disappointment, they end up producing something that isn't very good or well thought out and they don't really produce much language along the way. With a tool like this you could structure the whole of your project and have them involved the whole time, so that they work together towards the actual project performance over a number of lessons.

There are some useful example projects which are downloaded with the software too and examining one of these could also form the basis of a lesson

A good way to get students into using this might be to take an existing short story and analyse it and input the information from the story into the software to turn it into a play or movie.
There are some nice tips here on common grammar and other mistakes when writing a screen play.

What I liked about it

• It's free and a reasonably small download
• It can be used by groups working collaboratively online
• It can help to give real shape and a professional feel to creative / drama projects
• You can download versions for MAC as well as PC and in quite a few different languages
  
• It's nice to be able to share projects and look at other people's projects on the user community
• It's pretty simple to use
• There are some online tutorials to help you understand the software, though they tend to be a bit long and wordy.

What I wasn't so sure about

• Project work can be quite an undertaking for a teacher and a class and involve loads of planning and commitment. You would need a good bit of practice with the software to make sure you are comfortable with it before launching into a project.

If you are already running drama type projects and want to get students more involved in the creative process and working on their own original projects, then I think this is a really useful professional level tool.

It would also work really well in conjunction with Moviestorm if you were thinking of launching into a Machinima project and would help you and your students to keep track of the work you do within the movie creation software.

I've actually downloaded this myself and started using it with some of my own creative media projects, so I'll let you know how I get on.

Hope you find it useful

Best
Nik

Monkey See is an excellent site which carries a lot of short high quality video content. It is based around the concept of instructional videos; being able to see something in order to be able to do it yourself.
It has short video clips that cover a really wide range of things from parenting tips, relationship advice, to how to set up a home studio, play the guitar or apply red lipstick!

The featured video content is very high quality and each 'lesson' is split into shorted clips of between 1 - 3 mins, so it doesn't take too long to watch.

Visitors to the site can also create their own channel page to show their own videos and become 'experts'.

Some of my favourites are:

• How to audition for a vocal competition
• How to salsa dance (I still need some work on that one)
• How to create a home recording studio

There's also a good section on careers and education which has advice and tips on selecting colleges, doing interviews as well as more business orientated stuff like negotiating and becoming a better salesperson


Using this site with students
You'll have to be careful about which videos you choose for your students. Some of them are quite high level with dense language which contains lots of subject specific jargon. This could be ideal for your higher level or ESP classes, but won't help your beginners much. If you want to use this with lower level students, it's better to focus on the more visual activity related type of videos.

Possible task you could set:

• Develop some specific listening skills questions for your higher level students
• Get students to watch a series of videos and prepare a short essay based on what they have learned from the content.
• Get groups of students each to watch a different clip from a series then share their information together.
• Ask students write the script for one of the clips.
• Ask the students to actually learn how to do one of the things in thee video series and come into class and demonstrate it.

If you have access to video equipment:

• Get students to create their own video series on something they like doing and upload it.
• Get your students to make videos which summaries what they have learned in each of your lessons and upload them
• Get students to make videos which demonstrate different grammar points
• Create your own channel and make some video presentations for your students on how to speak English

Even if you don't have a camera you could get students to prepare some of these for a class performance.

What I liked about this site

• The quality of the video and audio is generally very good and it's free
• There's a really wide range of topics being covered
• If you click on the 'Share this video' button you can get an embed code so that you can add the video to your own webpage or blog. That way your students don't get distracted by other things on the site.
• It's not active yet, but there is a download button that looks like it will enable you to put the video clips onto mobile devices such as i-pod, PDA and phones.

What I wasn't so keen on

• Some of the videos are simply talking heads, so they don't all make the best use of the visual. Still good for detailed listening though.
• There's a very strong North American bias both in terms of accents and content information, but if your students need that then it's an advantage
• Some of the topics covered (how to choose a bikini!) could prove distracting to some students, so be sure that your students stay on topic.

On the whole I think this is a really useful site with a real wealth of authentic materials that can be incorporated into lessons for both the listening / viewing practice and for the value of the content / information itself. Potentially very motivating stuff.

Hope you find some use for it and please leave a comment if you use it or have other ideas for how to exploit it.

Related links:

• Learn a New Skill in English
• Using Product Reviews
• Advertisement Project

Best

Nik

Based on my post LMS RFP, I've been asked several times if I knew where you could find samples of Request for Proposals (RFPs) for custom eLearning development, performance support tools, learning content management systems (LCMS), elearning authoring tools, etc. Today the question was for Microsoft Project. This wasn't something I could directly help the person, but I had the sense that people may be missing some key search tricks that would give them a list of reasonable results.

The keys are:

1. (filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc) - only show me actual documents in either of these formats. This trick works really well when you are searching for content on a wide variety of things, often I add in filetype:ppt as well to find presentations.
2. (RFP OR "Request for Proposal") - find either of these terms
3. (LCMS OR "Learning Content Management System") - find either of these terms

Obviously, substitute the key terms such instead of LCMS. And in the case of something like custom eLearning development, you want all of those terms, so you just add them at the end.

If you string these together in Google, you will find documents that give you suggestions what go in RFPs as well as actual RFPs that people have on the web. You have to scan down a bit, but it's well worth the effort.

• LCMS Request for Proposal Search
• LMS RFP Search
• eLearning RFP Search
• Custom eLearning Development Search

Click one of the above examples, and modify with your terms.

The post questioning Cursive Writing has turned to a few questions of alternative human computer interfaces. This is a fun discussion. Thought I'd post a couple of pictures here that go along with the recent discussion.

A picture of the direct brain interface that allows input direct control of mouse via brain ...


Conceptually what is happening ...


Wearable computing, full high end PC with connectivity ...


Automotive repair interface seen through projection on glasses...


What I plan to look like in 25 years ...

ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 is coming soon in San Antonio. Now that it's less than a month away, I thought I'd sit down and try to do some conference planning.

To help me prepare, I went back to a few previous posts on related topics...

In looking back, I first found a lot of posts that really suggested the key was having a good set of questions to provide a lens onto the conference:

• Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee
• Conference Preparation
• Better Questions for Learning Professionals
• Continuing Thoughts on Questions
• Do Learning Professionals Make the Worst Learners?

I need to figure out what questions I really have for this conference. I'm going to have to think a bit about that and come back to it.

I also found a few posts around practical attendee ideas:

• David Warlick - Conference 2.0 - Ten Tips for Extending your Education Conference
• Session Hopping – A Practical Guide
• Conference Networking Tools
  

Ray Sims had some good practical suggestions in the comments of Conference Networking Tools that suggest how to make contact. It somewhat presupposes you have a purpose. It also supposes you can get into and use ASTD CONNECT for the conference. I don't think I have a login yet. Does anyone else?

I also looked at a few posts more from the presenter / organizer standpoint ...

• Better Conferences - Response Needed
• Conference Breakout Sessions

The better conferences post reminded me that one of the more interesting sessions I've been involved recently were very small (10 person), very early (7AM) sessions that were a moderated group discussion on a particular topic. For some reason, conferences that have table topics never achieve that kind of discussion. Maybe it's the separate space. Maybe it's the moderator preparation. Maybe it's the level of the discussion (more specific question / topic). Maybe it's the expectation of the people attending.

It doesn't appear that TK2008 has any formal ways of doing this. There must be an informal method.

So, my task list:

1. Figure out what my questions are for this conference (really for this year).
2. Plan my sessions accordingly. Review sessions handouts ahead of the conference (available one week before) to figure out what sessions make sense.
   
3. Plan my trip into the Expo accordingly.
   
4. Find informal opportunities to discuss these topics with other attendees.

What am I missing here?

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