Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

The Problem With PowerPoint is an excellent article from the BBC.

I’m adding it to The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations.

Screencasts are audio-narrated “tours” of what you see on your computer screen (they don’t have to narrated, but it works much better if they are). Screencasts that I have seen are primarily used to show how to use various computer applications. They are wonderful teaching tools, especially for technological dummies like myself.

They can also be used as good speaking opportunities for English Language Learners.

I’ve written a lot about how I use online video games with ELL’s. One thing I’d like to do is have students play video games using “walkthroughs” (instructions and hints about how best to “win”) and create instructional screencast ”walkthroughs” that would teach other students how to play the game.

Of course, students could also just leave a stationary picture on the screen and talk about it.

In order to make it on this list, the application needed to be accessible to ELL’s and not require any downloading of software, since downloads are problematic for many schools.

Here are my picks for The Best Tools For Making Screencasts:

As regular readers know, my favorite is Screentoaster. It couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve recently added both the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen.  After that’s been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.  And it’s free. I’ve also placed it on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

DemoGirl also has a screencast on how to use that application, but it might not include its newest features.

Screencast-O-Matic is also nice, but a bit more complicated than Screentoaster.

Two newer apps that look good are Screenr and Screenjelly.

The great site Teacher Training videos has a screencast on how to use Screenjelly.

And, though I’m limiting this list to apps that require no software download, I do feel I have to at least mention Jing, which is a very popular free tool available by download. Teacher Training Videos also has a screencast explaining how to use Jing.

If you think I’m missing any tools, or if you have other ideas on how they can be used effectively with students, feel free to leave a comment.

You might also be interested in the other nearly 350 “The Best…” lists.

And you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free, too.

Mary Ann Zehr has written a great article titled Oral-Language Skills for English-Learners Focus of Researchers.

It’s definitely worth a read….

How To Give A Lousy Presentation is the title of a short and simple Business Week article.

I’m adding it to The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations.

This is a very interesting post about the Glance Test:

“…slides should be processed in 3 seconds or less. It’s impossible for people to process your slides and your words simultaneously. The test gives you a quantifiable way to test a slide’s viability as a glance medium by calculating a signal-to-noise ratio for individual slides.”

This can be a very useful tool for both teachers and students to keep in mind when developing any kind of presentation slides. I’m adding it to The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations.

The great news about Myna, a new audio recording tool, is that it’s great for students to use for speaking practice and to create podcasts. The bad news (for me, at least), is that I’ve already prepared several year-end “The Best..” lists for posting over the next month that I know have to change in order to add Myna to them…

It’s really quite a simple tool for use by English Language Learners or anybody else…after you watch the short demonstration video. It was confusing to me prior to watching it.

It’s easy for users to add music that’s already in the Myna library to their recording, and certainly easy for them to record their own voice.

It’s more complicated than some of the other applications on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English, but students will love Myna (and I’m obviously adding it to that list).

Thanks to both Read Write Web and Free Technology For Teachers for the tip.

Jason Renshaw has begun writing a series of posts sharing useful ideas on using speaking activities in the ESL/EFL classroom.

They are definitely worth a visit.

Mary Ann Zehr has written a very useful post titled A Rationale for Teaching Oral English to ELLs. She shares what she has seen in schools, which mirrors my experience — as students get older, there is a tendency to spend less time on listening and speaking, and more on reading and writing.

She also points to a very well-researched post in a new ESL blog by Ballard & Tighe, Publishers. The post, titled Speaking Of Writing: The Significance Of Oral Language In English Learners’ Literacy Development, is also worth a read.

Lingt Language lets teachers create virtual classrooms with assignments — specifically for students learning a second language.

The element that really makes it stand-out is the ease of use for creating and doing verbal assignments.

It’s particularly useful, it seems to me, for online classes. I don’t think I’d be interested in making time to do it for students who I see everyday. However, I could see it being a neat way for students to create assignments other students to complete.

What do you think of it?

Thanks to Peter Vogel for the tip.

VoiceThread, which is on several “The Best…” lists, and which my students use a lot, just announced several new improvements.

Both Joyce Valenza and Alice Mercer have written extensive posts about it, so I’d encourage you to read them.

Here’s a short quote from VoiceThread’s announcement about just one of their new features:

We’re very happy to announce that over 700,000 historical images from The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery are now freely and instantly available whenever you’re creating a VoiceThread. Our new Media Browser allows you to search or browse these primary source materials – maps, photos, drawings, paintings, posters and more, and then import them directly. Links back to the original location of the images on the web are automatically inserted to make citing and attribution easier for you and your students

There are a number of excellent sites that English Language Learners can use to practice their English, and you can find many of them at The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Most of them, however, require using a microphone, which is fine for when we’re in the computer lab at school, and fine for the minority of my students who have Internet access at home, but not very helpful for those without that kind of access. That makes using the computer for speaking homework not really an option.

There are other apps, like Google Voice, that allow people to record audio by phone, but require some work by the teacher to post the audio on the web (admittedly, not much work, but I’m always looking for ways to reduce my workload, not increase it )

So I decided to create another “The Best…” list, and this time focus on free applications that would allow students to use a phone to record audio directly to the web — without me having to be an intermediary. I was looking for sites that would allow me to just listen and leave comments, but not require me to actually post it.  It would serve as an “audio journal” for students.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Students To Record Audio By Phone:

I like Snapvine a lot, and have already written about it several times. It’s basically an audio blog.

Utterli also looks good to me.  It’s free, and you can write text,too. It’s sort of like a “micro-blog” with audio.

I just learned about ipadio from Cliff Mims today. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks similar to Snapvine and Utterli.

Both Alice Mercer and ELL Classroom have written about Dropio, though it appears to me that it doesn’t quite have the journal-life function that I’m looking for.

Please let me know if you have other suggestions.

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Audio Pal is a new tool that lets you easily record a message — either by using a phone, computer mike, or text-to-speech — and then add the embed code to your blog or website. Students can update it as often as they want, and get as many different ones that they want. It’s pretty neat. No registration is necessary, and it’s free.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Recordr is a new site that lets you record either a video or an audio of you speaking, and which you can then embed on your website (you don’t have to register in order to use it). I learned about it from The Make Use Of blog.

It’s still in beta, and it showed. I tried it a number of times, and only worked smoothly for a small number of my attempts. More importantly, you can access other people’s recordings from the site, and when I accidentally clicked on one the video wasn’t inappropriate for the classroom, but the advertising sure was.

Perhaps in the future Recordr might be a good option for ELL’s. But for now, stick with the better tools on the The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English list.

I recently received my invitation to join Google Voice, Google’s new phone tool. You can read all about it at Lifehacker’s guide.

In terms of teaching, I could see it as an easy way for English Language Learners, particularly those with no Internet access, to practice speaking “homework.” They can call my Google Voice number, leave a message, and I can then access both their audio and an automatically generated written transcript of what they said. I can then easily embed both on a classroom blog.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Other ideas on how to use it in the classroom?

Idioms and slang are tricky, but important,  parts of any language.  I’ve found that students really enjoy learning them — especially if the teaching is done in a fun way.  There are certainly lots of enjoyable classroom lessons that can be done on this topic, and there are several good websites that students can use for reinforcement, too.

So, here’s another (short) “The Best…” list…

My choices for The Best Sites To Help ELL’s Learn Idioms & Slang include:

In2English has an excellent series of Animated Idioms exercises.  They include an animated cartoon with text and audio explanations of each idiom.  This site is clearly my number one favorite on the list.

On The Tip of My Tongue is a great site from France that teaches English idioms through the use of cartoons, audio, and games.

NDI English Village has the idiom in text form and illustrates it with a picture.  Then it shows several sentences using it correctly with audio support.  When you go to the link, click on the blue colum in the middle to see the different idioms.

The Slang Game teaches English…slang and idioms.

Slang-o-lator is a neat, colorful, game that first shows an image along with a slang phrase (”hanging out”).  Players then have to choose the correct definition.

The Biz Idiom game can be fun.

Here’s a game to test your knowledge of English animal idioms.

Try The Great Walk game from English Portal Games.

Eye On Idioms is an activity from Read Write Think.

The Idiom Connection has written explanations of many idioms (though they’re not presented in the most accessible way). However, they do have a lot of good quizzes.

Teaching and Learning Idioms: The Big Picture is a helpful article by Eve Zyzik.

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

Chirbit is the newest addition to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

After registering (which is very easy — I love sites that don’t require an email activation), you can very easily make a recording or use a text-to-speech feature to create audio.  You’re then given a unique url address for the recording.  It’s as simple as that.

It has other capabilities, too, including responding to the audio message.

My summer school Beginning English Language Learners have been working together in pairs to create some VoiceThreads. You can see them at the Student Showcase blog.

They’re simple introductions explaining what they like to do for fun, the food they like to eat, their ethnic background, their favorite book, and their future goals. They used images they took with our digital cameras as well as photos off the Web. The whole process probably took a total of three hours between registering at VoiceThread, creating a storyboard, uploading images, and recording the narrative. It probably would have taken less time if we didn’t regularly have technical problems with some of our computers not recording.

Feel free to leave comments on them if you’d like (you have to be registered at VoiceThread to do so). I think you can see why VoiceThread is number one on two of my “The Best…” lists:

The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English

The Best Web 2.0 Applications for ESL/EFL Learners — 2007

Students will next be writing a fable that they will demonstrate in a VoiceThread.

After next week, I’ll be adding some of these VoiceThreads to The Best Online Examples of My Students’ Work.

Mingoville, which was the number one site on the The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners — 2008 list, announced today that they’ve begun a “virtual world” feature for ELL’s.

Mingoville is an exceptional site from Denmark designed to teach Beginning English Language Learners. There are many interactive exercises and games, it’s very colorful, and there are both listening and speaking activities, including a voice recording feature. You can experiment with it as a guest for a few minutes, but then you have to register. It’s completely free, and registration takes about twenty seconds.

I haven’t tried their virtual world out yet, but it definitely looks interesting.

Starting next week, I’m teaching three weeks of summer school to Beginning English Language Learners.  One of the projects I’m planning to do with my students is have them create VoiceThreads.

Is anybody else out there teaching summer school to ELL’s during the same time and would like to have their students comment on mine and mine on theirs?  If so, I’m very flexible on the topic of the VoiceThreads — I was going to keep it very simple and have them work in small groups and describe themselves and the books they were reading.  But I’m open to hearing other ideas, too.

Carla Arena and Ronaldo Lima, Jr., EFL teachers in Brazil who have participated in our International Sister Classes Project, are having their students use the web to help refine their English skills and to help others learn some Portuguese words. I hope you’ll help them.

They are using VoiceThread to have students explain and demonstrate — in English — different Portuguese words.  They are then inviting visitors to repeat those words on the VoiceThread, and then promise to provide subsequent feedback to speakers — again on the VoiceThread (thought that kind of feedback might be problematic if they get a lot of people participating).

Go to the Portuguese Challenge and try it out. This is a great idea that any language class can do, too.

Anybody can listen to it.  If you want to record, though, you have to have previously registered with VoiceThread, or register then (it’s free).