Second Life Teacher Training Videos

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.


The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.

Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2.

Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want.

This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback.

I've always avoided using audio on my own blog ones as I'm a bit self-conscious about my voice and I've felt that using text makes them easier to understand and keeps the file sizes a bit smaller. Any feedback on this would be very welcome as I'm considering changing over and using voice more.

Anyway. I hope you like the videos and find them useful. There's also a wealth of other useful materials on Russell's site, (as I said in my review of it last year) so be sure to check out the rest of it when you get a minute.

Best

Nik

PS: The image above is of my avatar in my Second Life office. Feel free to visit and look around. It's on Edunation Island at: http://tinyurl.com/ytz5go

Creating multimedia stories

I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!

Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.

• Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.
• Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two versions
• Silent with better image quality (2.1 Mb wmv)
• Lower quality one with music (500k wmv)

I know there are a lot of online Web 2.0 ap that do all of this too, but for those of us with slower, unreliable or more expensive connections, it's nice to have a bit of software that can do the job for us without using any bandwidth at all (apart from downloading it of course).

You should be able to download Photo Story 3 from here.
It's a 5 Mb download, so that shouldn't take too long even over a dial up connection.

How to use this with students
You can use it to create multimedia materials for your students, whether is for use in class or to take home for homework. Here's some things you can do:

• Create some narratives for them to view
• Create narratives which illustrate grammar points
• Create a series of pictures and words which illustrate different sounds from the Phonemic alphabet

Having software like this that can produce a professional looking end product can be really motivating for students and really help them to push themselves to produce accurate polished work. Here's some things you can get your students to do:
It's ideal for presenting the results of project work.

• Get the students to take photographs and upload them to tell their own stories to the class
• What they do each day
• What they did at the weekend / on holiday
• Stories about their family
• Get some pictures from Flickr and get the students to order them and create a story around them.

What I liked about it

• It's free
• Easy to use and quick to learn
• Really liked some of the filter effects
• Liked the way you can easily create a wide range of background musics
• File sizes were quite reasonable and exports pretty easily for a number of different devices

What I wasn't so keen on

• It's a shame that it's so limited in the the formats that it exports to (mainly different sizes of wmv) , but I guess there are plenty of converters you could use if you wanted to change it for an i-pod or something like that.
• I also thought that a bit more control over how the text was placed over the images would have been really handy.
• There's no version for MAC of course, but if you have a MAC you won't need this as you get lots of nice stuff that does all this for you ready installed when you buy it.

Photo Story 3 isn't a revolutionary piece of software by any means, but I'm sure it can be used to really engage your students in some enjoyable learning.

Hope it works for you

Best

Nik

Picture phrases

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show of images with words.
Here's an example of what it produces. This one is based on the old expression;

• "You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink"

Here's another based on the first verse of a Shakespeare sonnet (130)

• Sonnet 130

Once you have created your picture phrase you can either send it to a friend by email or go to the archive and find it to copy the URL.

If you want to see just how quick and easy it is to create these then

• watch this short Flash tutorial movie (800k)
  

How to use this with students
This is going to revolutionise learning, but I can think of a few nice tasks you could use this for.

• Get students to illustrate a short poem or haiku.
• Create some idiom movies to help students remember them.
• Use the site to make revising / presenting grammatical structures structures a bit more interesting.
• Get students to write a short story and create an image version of it.
• Discuss why certain images seem more or less appropriate to illustrate various texts.

What I like about it

• This is a really simple free site that you can use to quickly create materials
• Nice variety of images

What I wasn't so keen on

• It would be nice to have an embed code for these so that you could add your finished sentences to your blog, rather than a hyper link back to the site
• Be careful some images are not appropriate for younger learners
• Some people tend to abuse sites like these, so be careful of inappropriate sentences or immature students who tend to play around.

Hope you enjoy this simple tool and find some good uses for it. Drop me a line if you have any others to suggest

Best

Nik