Twitter is a microblogging tool that has gotten really popular over the past year. Instead of regular blog posts, Twitter is a service for creating short blog posts (140 characters max.) to communicate with friends, families, and colleagues – hence, microblogging. For a quick introduction to Twitter and how it works, watch this Common Craft video.

So, what does Twitter have to do with language teaching? Well, because there is a character limit, users must learn to write short, concise posts, which is a good writing skill for language learners to practice. Steve Wheeler gives a bunch of interesting ideas for using Twitter in teaching on his blog, including creating a Twitter account and posing as a historical figure and writing ‘tweets’ (individual twitter posts) in the style of that person, or using it for collaborative writing. Twitter would also be a great way for students to meet and communicate with native speakers, or for students studying abroad to keep in touch with teachers and others back home. You could also use it for 20 Question-style games, polling (with Poll Daddy), or to post a “word of the day” (I got these ideas from this slideshow about using Twitter in teaching language). Also, Twitter can be used as a corpus tool – use the search feature to find tweets with a particular word or phrase.

Have you used Twitter in the classroom? What other ideas do you have for using it in teaching?

Inkscape is an open-source drawing tool, comparable to Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw. You can create games for your students, access a huge library of innovative cliparts, or you can have your students create flags and maps. Here’s a gallery with some examples. And here’s where you can download the program. I would certainly recommend that you take a look at a tutorial first.

The website is clean and gives helpful tips for beginners. I think Inkscape is useful if you want to create something sophisticated that can’t be done in an easier way, e.g., with the drawing functions in WORD, because the learning curve seems to be rather steep. But then again, it’s amazing what you can do with Inscape.

After hearing about colleagues at Pomona College using Chinswing (now Voxopop) in language teaching, I decided to have a look myself.

From the website: “Voxopop is essentially a message board/forum system that uses voice instead of text.” Voxopop is reminiscent of Voicethread, which Natalie blogged about yesterday. Both are asynchronous tools for conversation. However, there are two key differences: Voicethread allows embedded media (images and documents) and Voxopop does not; Voxopop allows users to export conversations to iTunes or as an RSS feed – thus, like being notified when a new podcast episode is published, listeners can be notified when someone contributes to a conversation.

Another great feature of Voxopop: users can set up private “talkgroups” that don’t appear on the public search results. This is excellent for language classes particularly, to control who participates in a conversation.

Some ideas gleaned from other blogs and ones I brainstormed for using Voxopop in teaching:

• record a prompt and have speakers of the TL from around the world contribute
• record a prompt for students to respond to
• have students start their own discussions on topics of interest in order to get TL speaker responses
• storytelling
• have students pick sides and debate an issue
• making introductions at the beginning of an online or hybrid course
• have students listen to an existing discussion amongst native speakers

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.