Month: March 2009

Do you spend too much of your classtime discussing? But you don’t want to give up the discussions because they’re valuable pedagogically? You may want to consider “outsourcing” some of the class discussions to an asynchronous platform: Voicethread. Go to: www.voicethread.com

A voicethread is a collaborative, multimedia (audio and video) slide show and allows people to leave comments in five ways: using voice (with a mike or phone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). You can share a voicethread with students, teachers, friends, colleagues, and family.

Let’s say you have a presentation in class and you would like all your students or peers to comment but there’s not enough classtime left. So you open a voicethread, send everyone an invitation so that they can leave their audio-/video comment. Each participant will see all comments. All they have to do is create a password, upload a picture and record themselves (so they need a mike).

Here’s another example of my current class: We used to spend a lot of time presenting in class. Instead, each student now records his or her presentation on Voicethread, and all students watch and comment on each other’s presentation. So we “outsourced” the entire activity without losing interaction.

Camstudio is freeware that records all screen activity from your desktop into AVI or Flash movie files. It’s particularly useful for software demonstrations. It not only captures your screen activity but also your audio narration. It’s downloadable at www.camstudio.com.

I just created a tutorial for the use of Audacity because I don’t want to use classtime for technology demonstrations. What strikes me as very important is the use of the shortcut keys: F8 to start recording and F9 to stop recording. In my first test run, I just clicked on the record button but then couldn’t stop the recording. I had to shut down my computer to exit the program. So in my second test run, I just used the shortcut keys and it worked out very smoothly.

So why should you want to use Camstudio: It’s timesaving to produce a video on frequently asked questions in relation to software use in the classroom or any other subject matter.

You don’t have to repeat the same demonstration or information in class again and again. Instead, upload your screencast to your Moodle.

Dimdim is a free online web-conferencing tool that allows you to host or attend meetings of up to 20 people from any location in the world.  Once you sign up for an account and set up a meeting room Dimdim allows you to share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required to host or attend meetings. As long as anyone has internet access all they need is to know what the name of the meeting is. From the dimdim website they just click join meeting, type in the meeting name and then voila they’re in your meeting! It’s very easy.

Dimdim is similar to the Elluminate course management platform but it is free so it is more widely accessible. Meeting hosts can share documents that they have open on their computer via “share desktop”, they can take everyone to a website and scroll through it together, or they can use the “white board” to have people edit a document together or do an activity jointly. So it could be great to use in a distance classroom or group project setting.

Skype is another synchronous interaction tool that allows people to call, text chat or video call anyone in the world for free as long as both people have internet access and the Skype software downloaded on their computer. Skype is also starting to add features such as mobile skype which allows people to use their cell phone to call either another Skype user, a landline or a mobile phone number.

How could Skype be used?
A guest speaker could “Skype” into a classroom to deliver a lecture and students would be able to ask questions for them to answer.
A language learner could have a “Skype-pal” to practice talking to from the country that speaks the language they are studying. The video function would enable them to communicate even more effectively and share aspects of their life.

This vocabulary trainer will be especially interesting for you if:

• you’re teaching an EAPP class or
• if you’re a MIIS student and are trying to build up your academic lexicon.

My students have tried out three different online vocab trainers, and this vocabulary trainer has emerged as the winner in terms of usefulness and user-friendliness. The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of words that appear with high frequency in academic texts. The website contains 150 interactive gap-fill exercises to review and recycle the general word families contained in the AWL.

PDF-to-WORD is a free converter that lets you create editable DOC and RTF files. If you have PDF content that you’d like to use in WORD, EXCEL or in a POWERPOINT, you can upload the PDF file at www.pdftoword.com, and the converted WORD/RTF file will be sent to your email address (if it’s not in your inbox, check your spam filter).

So, let’s say you find an interesting journal article that’s only available as a PDF. You want to use it in class, but the font size is way too small, it’s single-spaced, and you only need part of the article. Upload the PDF to the PDF-to-WORD converter. Download the converted WORD file from your email, enlarge the font size, double-space the text and delete the passages you don’t want – your students will be grateful (and their eyesight too).