10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses

Over the last few years I've done a lot of work developing writing and redeveloping online courses and course materials. In the initial rush to get learning online many organisations got themselves a Moodle platform and then attached a whole load of PDFs and .docs, added some forums and the odd video clip and called it an online course. It's no surprise then that drop out rates for online learning courses have been so high.

The advent of Web 2.0 though, brought a whole bunch of new tools that course designers could take advantage of to make content more social, interactive and engaging.

Here are some of the tools I've been using recently to embed a bit more interactivity into the courses I work on.

Storify - http://storify.com

Storify is a great tool for collecting together  a mixture of web based resources and references into a web based widget that you can then structure into a digital research paper. You can easily pull in comments from Facebook, Twitter or Google searches as well as a range of other social media sources. You then add blocks with your own commentary and reflections. The whole thing can then be embedded into a webpage. This is a great tool for developing digital literacy and referencing online sources.

• Here's an example of a Storify text designed to share information about Wordle.

Tricider - http://tricider.com

Tricider is a great tool for crowd sourcing opinion. You start with a single question problem and then you or your students can add possible solutions to the problem. Students can also add some pros and cons to the solutions and vote on the ones they prefer. These can be embedded into webpages and can give far more structure to online discussion than things like threaded forums which often become garbled and confusing.

• Here's an example discussing the pros and cons of Moodle (Feel free to participate)

Urtak - https://urtak.com

You can use Urtak to create simple social questionnaires for your courses. Although the responses are quite limited (Yes / No / Don't care) This can still be a useful tool for quick straw polls before developing deeper discussion through a forum. It also give students the chance to compare their opinions anonymously with those of classmates and also add their own questions to the questionnaire. The questionnaires can also be embedded into web pages and materials.

• Here's an example of a questionnaire about Education Today

Intervue.me - http://intervue.me

This is also a tool for creating questionnaires, but in the case of Intervue.me the questions can be open ended and the respondent leaves their answer verbally using a web cam. Intervue.me can't be embedded into pages , but you can link to your questionnaires and you can download the video clips of the answers as mp4 so you can then use these in materials you develop and as the basis for further discussion.

• Here is an example of a questionnaire asking teachers about their use of technology

VYou - http://vyou.com/

You can use Vyou embed a video booth that students can go at any time of day to ask you questions. The video booth gives the impression that you are always available and builds some presence on your course. The messages students send you are delivered to an inbox and you are notified so that you can answer them. Vyou also has a very handy mobile app so you can answer the questions where ever you are on your iPhone or other mobile device.

• Here's an example of my own Vyou Q & A page on this blog

Keek - http://www.keek.com/

It's a good idea to get students to keep a learning journal on any course they do. It can feel a bit dull though writing journal entries to yourself, so why not get student to create a video based learning journal using Keek. They can add entries each day just using a web cam and microphone and you can leave video comments on their entries. Students on your course can also be encouraged to 'follow' each other. Individual entries can also be embedded into web pages which can enable you to build pages that share insights from your course participants. Keek also has a free mobile app that allows you to up date from mobile devices such as iPhone.

• Here you can see some examples from Keek users

Bundlr - http://gobundlr.com/

This is a really useful tool for sharing theme based collections of bookmarks. It creates a very visual record of the book marked links which you can then embed into your course pages as widgets. This can be a really useful tool for setting research tasks based around a group of online resources.

• Here you can see a bundle of links relating to digital storytelling

Zooshia - http://zooshia.com/

Zooshia is a handy tool for creating widgets from social network sources that can be embedded into web pages. The widgets show a dynamic stream from whatever source we select. This can make suggestions for twitter or facebook people to follow much more informative and can also allow you to embed dynamic widgets from YouTube channels which will make your content much more dynamic too.

• Here is a widget I embedded into my blog showing the postings to my Facebook page

Present.Me - http://present.me/

Present.Me  can help you create online presentations from your PowerPoint slides. You can then add your talking head commentary to your slides and embed the whole thing into your online course. This works well as a lecture replacement and having a presenter that you can actually see along side your slides can help add to the engagement with your learners. You can embed this into your page and build a forum around it for follow up discussion.

• Here you can see a useful series of presentations showing you how to create a good presentation

Goanimate - http://goanimate.com
 

Online course content can become very dry and serious, so why not spice it up by creating a few animations using something like GoAnimate. It's a an easy tool for creating short animated dialogues that can be exported as video clips and embedded into your course. You can use these to introduce topics or raise issues for further debate.

• Here you can see a selection of channels that have been developed using animation

I hope these ten tools and the links from them have given you a few ideas into how you can spice up your online courses and make them more engaging and enjoyable and help you to retain students. Please leave a comment if you have suggestions for other free tools you have found useful for developing online content.

Related links:

• 10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses
• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations
• Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students
• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create Video Questionnaires
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

Best


Nik Peachey

Cropping YouTube Videos to Create Activities

Using YouTube videos with students can be really great, but finding a video with the exact language you want and at a suitable length with too many other distractions around can be really difficult. That's why SafeShare.TV is so useful.

• SafeShare.TV is a tool that has two primary functions. The first is to enable you to share YouTube videos using a direct URL that frames the video without the advertising and other distracting features that might cause students to wander off into less suitable materials.
• The second and perhaps even more useful function of SafeShare.TV is that it enable you to crop the video clip so that only a particular part is shown. This is particularly useful when you want to build activities or tasks around clips that focus students on particular linguistic features.

How to use SafeShare.TV
First find a YouTube clip that has a section that you would like to use. I chose this one from ‘Room with a View’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tehft3GDw6k. At 9 mins it's quite long so I just wanted to use a few sections.

Copy the URL and then go to: http://www.safeshare.tv/. Paste the link into the field then click on ‘Generate safe link’.
This will create a new link to the video which you can then use with your students to show them the clip.
When the students open the link they will only see the single video clip with it’s title, like the example below.

If you want to crop the clip so that only a short part of it shows, then generate your safe URL and then click on the link that says 'Do you want to only share a part of the video? click to crop.' This will open a small video viewer. Click the video to watch it, then click on ‘Set Start’ at the beginning of the segment you want students to see. Watch the segment and click ‘Set End’ at the end of the segment. Now click ‘OK’

Once you have clicked 'OK' your safe link will be adapted to only show the section of the video you have selected. You can then either copy the link to share with students or share it through a variety of social networking mediums.


Here's a quick video tutorial showing how to do this.


You can download this video here or download a copy for i-Touch or i-Phone here

How can we use this with students?
Clipping videos makes it much easier for us to create activities and tasks that focus on specific areas of the video clip without having to watch the whole thing.

• You can select example phrases to show the use of language in context, such as a telephone call or a scene that shows someone booking into a hotel etc.
  Here’s an example: Booking a hotel room This was trimmed from a much longer clip on YouTube
  
• You can show students the beginning to a clip and ask them to predict what’s ‘going to’ happen next.
  
  Here are two examples:
  1. What's going to happen?
  2. What's going to happen?
  

• You can show the beginning and end of a clip and ask students to predict what ‘has happened’ in between.
  
  Example:
  They watch this one
  Then this one
  

• You can show students a number of sections from the same clip and ask them to order them either by using linguistic or visual clues and explain their rationale.
  
  Here are 5 clips for you to try to order:
  Clip 1
  Clip 2
  Clip 3
  Clip 4
  Clip 5
  

• You can show each student in a group a different sections of the clip (like the 5 sections above) and then ask them to work together to describe the part they watched and put the different sections into the correct order as a group.
• You can use the sections to focus on the use of specific structures, like this one for ‘should have’ Should have clip or this one for the use of 3rd conditional 3rd conditional clip
  
• At the end of these types of activities you can show them the complete clip. http://www.safeshare.tv/v/Tehft3GDw6k
  

What I like about it

• It’s free and easy to use
• It gets your students right to the part of the video you want them to see
• It allows you to easily split videos into shorter clips
• there’s a simple ‘bookmarklet’ that you can drag to your favourites bar, then whenever you find a YouTube clip your want to use you just click on it to get the SafeShare.TV link.

What I’m not so sure about

• Sometimes it doesn’t work on my MAC
• It would be great to have an embed code as well as a URL

Well those are some suggestions to get you started cropping YouTube videos. I hope you find them useful.

You can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL students here.

Related links:

• Quick Twitter Video Activity
  
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages
• Animated Music Videos for EFL
• Creating multimedia stories
• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Great Video Commenting Tool

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Wise Quotes with EFL ESL Students

I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.

You can search for quotes by keyword, look at quotes of the day, browse quotes by topic or just click for a random quote.


That isn't all, iWise is compatible with Twitter and allows you to re-tweet quotes or subscribe to and follow tweet feeds from your favourite sources of wisdom.


If you decide to search by topic etc, it even pulls in tweets from Twitter too.


So how about some quote activities with our EFL ESL students?

Here are some suggestions:

• Get students to find a random quote and translate it into their own language or find a parallel quote in their own L1.
• Collect 8 - 10 quotes on a similar topic and get students to discus them and see which ones they prefer / most agree with.
• Get 8 - 10 quotes and cut them in half to create a matching activity. Get your students to match the two halves of each quote.
• Get you students to match the quotes to the writer of the quote.
• Give your students a list of 6 - 8 topics and ask them to find their favourite quote on each topic, then compare them in class and discus / have a class vote on which is the best (students should try to convince others in the class that theirs is the best quote)
• Get two+ quotes on the same topic. Print them up and put them around the class get the students to stand by the one they most like / agree with and discus why.
• Choose 2 -3 people and get your students to find their best quotes, then compare that quotes and try to decide which of the people is the wisest.
• Give the first part of some quotes to your students and see if your students can write an ending to it.
• Find some quotes about someone and see if the students can guess who they are about.
• Use a single quote at the start of each lesson to lead in to the theme of the lesson.
• Use a single quote at the start of each lesson as a warmer and ask students if they agree / disagree with the quote. They could give it marks out of ten too. Keep a league of favourite quotes.
  

Why do I like it?

• It's free and really simple (but also quite complex)
• Some amazing features that really take advantage some Web 2.0 technology
• Lots of fast and varied ways to access the quotes
• There are loads of quotes from a real range of sources
• There is an iPhone ap which can enable you to get all this information via your iPhone or iPod Touch so great for mobile learners

What I'm not so sure about

• The site is so dynamic that you can see then loose quotes pretty quickly if you are just browsing.
• Some quotes can be a little abstract!
  
• The site is free, but the ap isn't, but it is very cheap (59p in UK). Here's a video showing how you can use it.

NB: I have bought the ap, but haven't tried it yet so this is NOT and endorsement of the ap.

I hope you enjoy iWise and the ideas here. Please leave a comment if you have any other favourite quote sites or suggestions for how you have used quotes with students.

Here you can find more online reading activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

• Get the News Through Images
  
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
  
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Create Image Books
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

Back in November 2008 I published Part 1 of a series of articles intended to explore the use of WebCams in education. I have now finally got round to writing Part 2 which is a collection of 20 activities EFL ESL teachers can do with their students.

Here are some links to useful free video communication tools that you could use for these activities.

MailVu is a simple to use app which runs in the browser and enables students to record a short message which can be sent by email.
EyeJot is another simple video email app which also has a mobile version.
Skype is of course the mainstream choice for synchronous communication.
Oovoo is a Skype competitor which also enables the recording of video interviews by capturing both interviewer and interviewee.

20 WebCam Activities

1. Chinese - video dictation - whispers - Use the video email feature to record a short text. Send it to the first of your students. Ask your student to write down the message and then record it themselves and send it to the next student. Each student should rerecord and send the message on to another, until the last student sends it back to you. You will then see how accurately the message matches to your original text.


2. Interactive video learning diary - You could get students to create an interactive learning diary, they could email you their video summary of what they feel they have learned each day and you could then respond. The videos would form a good learning record and students will be able to look back at them later and see how they have improved - quite literally - and also hear the improvements in their speaking ability. This is also a great way to give your students one-to-one-time which can often be a problem in class.



3. Class survey - Action research - You could send a video message to your students with a class survey question that they could respond to. This would be a good way to carry out classroom research, decide on learning goals and make sure that all students had a means to feedback to you in private and on an individual basis.

 They could also create their own questions and send them to each other, then feedback in class.

4. The witness - Show half of your students a video clip or picture, that includes a number of people (scenes from films with bank robberies, where a number of people are involved are quite useful for this). Then ask the students to imagine that they are one of the people in the film or picture and they need to describe what happened. Ask them to record a video statement giving their account of what happened in the first person. You can then ask the other students to imagine they are detectives and watch the clips your students have created and make notes to piece together what happened. Afterwards they can watch the original film clip together in class and you can see how well they did and what they missed.

 Here's an example bank robbery scene

• Bank robbery - The Young Ones - BBC comedy


5. Favourite poems or haiku - Students could record themselves reading their favourite poem or haiku, you could then embed the videos into a web page or blog as a class poetry collection.


6. Video twitter - Using the feed feature you could create a kind of video Twitter, with your students video micro-blogging about learning English, their day at school, or any topic they find interesting.


7. Text and video error correction - Using the video email feature, you could record a video of yourself reading a text, then add the text within the email message. You could include some errors in the text and get them to watch the video and correct the errors.


8. Create a collaborative story - Email students a video with the first line of a story and ask them to record your line of the story and add their own, then pass it back, or pass it on to another student. This way you could build up a story between the group over a period of time.


9. Tip of the day - Send you students a learning tip each day by video email. These could be exam tips, study tips, recommended website etc.(The URL for the website would appear in the text part of the message below the video.)

10. Video dictation - Send a video email of yourself dictating a text and ask your students to watch and write the text in the email and send it back to you for correction.


11. Vocabulary record / word of the day - You could ask your students to create a video to record the words and example sentences. You could also do something like this yourself as a kind of 'Word of the Day' channel.


12. News Reports - Ask students to read the news ( in English or their own first language) and then produce a video news report on one of the main stories that they are interested in.
 They could also create their own local or school video news channel for other students to subscribe to.

13. Present continuous (sound on or off) - You can record video clips to demonstrate present continuous sentences. You can do this with sound on or with sound off and the students can guess the sentence
.

14. Questions for response - You could set up clips with questions and ask your students to respond online. They could also set up a sequence of their own questions for other students to respond to.


15. Guess the object - You or students could record a description of and object and viewers have to listen and guess what the object is. Getting students to create these clips will help them to be concise and really identify the key concepts behind describing objects.


16. Sales pitch - A variation on the idea above is to ask students to produce a video trying to convince users to buy a particular object. Again this helps them to identify key concepts, gives them practice with using language of persuasion and it may well help them to push for faster speaking speeds and better fluency.


17. Moods - You can create video clips of yourself or your students expressing different moods. This can help them to learn the vocabulary of the moods, but you could also use it to get students to predict the cause of the mood ( and practice present perfect; "He's angry because he has just been made redundant." etc.)

18. Live tutoring support - Video conferencing is an ideal tool for supporting distance learners and doing 'face to face' tutorials.


19. Video interviews - You could get in touch with someone for your class to interview. Just have one computer plus camera set up in class, and a visiting expert, friend or colleague on the other end for your students to interview. They could also interview an expert in groups from home with a conference call.
 The interview doesn't have to be done 'live' it could also be done through a series of email video messages sent to the interviewee.You can try it here by watching this video and then clicking reply.

20. Video lesson with conferencing - You could use the conference call to videocast your lesson or presentation to a group of distance learners.


I hope you find these suggestions useful and manage to use some of them with your students. Do drop me a line if you have other recommendations for useful video conferencing tools or activities. You can find more video related activities for EFL ESL here.

Related links:

• Very Easy Video Conferencing
• Online Video: As Communication
• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages

External links:

• Reach Out and Chat With Someone-Virtually!

Best

Nik Peachey

Using Online Sticky Noticeboards

For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to.

• You can see a wall that I created here with some notes about Web 2.0 Tools for EFL ESL Teachers.

It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are:

• Uploading an image
• Choosing colours
• Adding title and subtitle
• Creating your password
• Deciding who can see and add to your wall

Once you have done this you just click the big 'Done' button and you are almost ready to start adding content to your wall. Before you start to add content you'll need to check your email account where you should find your password. Then you just log in to your wall and double click on the wall to start adding the sticky notes.

The sticky notes are quite simple, you just add some text and you can either link to an image, a video or a web page.

The nice thing about this is that when users click on the link it opens in a pop up browser over the wall. This means that you can use your wall to focus students access to sites like flickr or Youtube and stop them drifting into other content. It also means that you can use the wall to set up specific activities and get your students to post their responses on the wall (as long as you have selected 'Everyone' to allow others to post to the wall)

So how do we use this with students?

• We can create video tasks and get students to post responses to the wall by leaving it open for everyone to contribute. Here's a wall that I created about Ramadan. This wall has been left open for anyone to contribute to.
• We could use the wall to collect different links to various resources around the web for students to explore, a little like a web quest or treasure hunt.
• We could give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.
• We could get students to create fan walls based around a favourite band or celebrity.
• You can use the wall to collect and share resources like this one on IELTS
• You could use the wall to set up video or image based activities. Here's a video activity that I have set up for teachers based around a Mr Bean Video. Feel free to contribute.
• This activity uses an image to get students to practice using present continuous.
• You can use the wall to create debates. You can do this either by posting your own contentious opinions or using videos from sites like BigThink.com and get students to respond. This could be a way of dealing with sensitive issues and enabling students to be able to express opinions that they might not feel comfortable doing in the classroom. Here's an example
• We can even create grammar walls and get students to post what they know and examples of different verb tenses or grammar points.
• We could even get students to post their wishes on it using third conditional.
• Or last but not least we could use it to notify our students or parents of homework assignments and keep them up to date with what's happening in class.
  

What I like about WallWisher.

• It's free and easy to use and requires a minimum of registration info
• I like the way the links open in a pop up over the page
• You can embed the wall into a blog or website
• Your wall produces an RSS feed which can make it easy to keep track of what is being added
• Students can get involved and post brief comments or create their won walls
  
• It can be used collaboratively
• Great way to create easy online learning tasks
  
• It looks nice

Things I'm not so sure about

• It would be nice to have a few more controls about who posts to the wall. At present it's either only the creator or everyone! Would be nice to be able to invite people to post to it.
• I'd also like to be able to add / embed more than one link into a sticky note so that you can include an image or video and a link to a site, but you could get round this by adding more than one sticky.
• Would be nice to have a bit more control over how the embedded wall appears in a web page. Here's what mine looks like.

Well I hope you like WallWisher and find it useful. If you have other ideas for how to use it please do post comments and links.

Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• 80 + Online activities for students
  

Best

Nik Peachey

Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook

As ever I'm a fool for technology which can make images entertaining and personalise them, so when I saw this I couldn't resist it.

Nik Peachey or Austin Powers?

This site is called Yearbook Yourself and is based around the concept of the end of year school books that are so popular in some countries. The site enables you to upload an image of yourself and then import it into the style of a yearbook from any year between 1950 and the 2000s. You can then download the images as jpg files.


The site also gives you a little bit of information about what was popular in those years and plays a small music clip from that year.


So how can we use for teaching ESL EFL students?
In order to use it with your students, you or they will need to have a digital image of themselves. Ideally it should be a head and shoulders portrait with the student face on to the camera.
Here are some ideas for activities:

• Create a yearbook for your class. You could do this by getting the students to select the year when they were born and then convert their portrait to a person from that year. You could follow this up by asking students to research some important events from that year. This is easy to do, just by going to Wikipedia.org and doing a search on the year. Here's one I did on 1954 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954 The page lists lots of interesting events. You could follow this up by getting students to find out about what their parents were doing the year they were born. They could ask their parents if they remember any of the key events from that year. The students could then report back either orally or in writing to the rest of the class next lesson.

• Students could decide which year they like best. Give the students a list off 3 - 5 years and then they should create an image of themselves in each of those years (get them to do this at home). They could then email in the images or bring them to class to show and tell the other students which year suits them best and why they would like to have been around in that year.
  
  
  The 70s didn't really suit me!
  

• You could create two images of yourself and then put students in pairs. Without showing the images to each other the students would have to describe the images and decide if they are the same image or different images. Here's an example of two of myself.

• If your students are interested in fasion you could ask them to create an image of themselves in a particular year and then research the fasions from that year. This site may help them http://www.fashion-era.com/
  or
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fashion_design
  

• Comparing students' lives with those of their parents may also be interesting. Ask the students to find out what year their parents were 16. Then ask them to create an image of themselves from the same year. Ask the students to write a text about or discuss how their lives at 16 are different from the lives of their parents at 16.
  
  
  I don't look much like my dad!
  

• Ask students to create an image of themselves from one of the years and then imagine what that person would be doing now x years later. This is a good way to get them thinking about their own future.

Why I think this is a good site for EFL ESL

• It's free to use and quite quick and easy
• I really like the novelty of seeing your image transformed
• I like the year book concept and the brief information and sound clips from the different years.
• Personalisation of tasks is always more motivating for students
  

What could be better

• It would be nice to be able to try your image in different years before you decide which one you want.
• There are some links to advertising and products in different shops. Easy to avoid though.

Anyway, I hope you and your students enjoy creating some stimulating EFL ESL materials with this site.

Related postings:

• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL

Best

Nik Peachey

Immersive Image Environments

If you enjoy working with images with your EFL students, especially on an IWB (interactive whiteboard) or a data projector, then PicLens is exactly what you need.

PicLens is a plugin (small program) that works within your web browser (there are versions for Firefox, Safari and IE 7) and it converts many of the standard image sharing websites, like flickr, Photobucket, Google Images, Yahoo Images etc. into "3D immersive environments"!

To understand what that mean have a look at this short flash video tutorial which shows how to use PicLens.

Click here or on the image to view the movie (5Mb Flash)
OR
Download a version of this movie for i-pod / i-tunes here

At the click of the mouse the normal 2D web pages are converted into a wall of images which you can explore and enlarge.

How to use this with ELT students on your data projector or IWB

• Pull up a wall of images and describe one while your students try to guess which one it is. Then get a student to describe an image and the others guess which one. (This will work best with quite similar images). You can then get students to do this in pairs.
  
• Type in a search term and ask students to describe the connection / relevance of the image to the term (This works best when you enter abstract nouns like politics, alienation, paranoia etc.)
• Use the resource for any new vocabulary words that come up in your lesson. Simply collect the words, type them in and find images that relate to the word. (This won't work for every word)
• Get students to compare and contrast two images (A common task in EFL exams such as FCE)
• Play just a minute and select an image for each student, they then have to talk for one minute about that image with repeating them selves or pausing (This is difficult to do, so don't expect too much) award points for the student who manages to speak for the longest.
• Put students with their back to the images, select one and the other students (in two teams or groups) have to describe the image to the student who can't see it. The student then has to guess which image they described.
• Pull up a single image and ask students to think about the photographer's intention.
  
• Why did the photographer take the image?
  
• What did they want to say?
  
• What is their relationship to the image content?
  
• What were they doing before, after they took the image?
  
• Etc etc.
• Students can select their favourite image and explain why they like it, or the one they like least.
• Students can try to use their imagination to describe the space around the image that you don't see.
  
• What's happening around the photographer that you don't see?
  
• What is the photographer wearing?
  
• What's happening behind the photographer?
• Describe the photographer (age, gender, nationality, personality etc.)
  

What I like about it

• The Plugin is free and very simple to download and install and less than 2 Mb
• The interface is really easy to use and very attractive
• It really highlights the images and frees then from the textual distraction that you often find on a web page
• There's no advertising on it
• You get access to some really fantastic images in class without having to download them or violate anyone's copyright
• The most recent version also enables you to create immersive walls of videos from YouTube !!! Fantastic!
  

What I'm not so sure about

• As with any image sharing / search bank you have to be careful with younger students that inappropriate images don't appear. You can get around this though by setting up your own account on something like Flickr and only using specific images from your account. This could be time consuming, but if you got other teachers and students to help, it could be a fantastic resource.
• If you are on a slow connection it could take a bit longer for the images to load.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it from here:

• Version for Internet Explorer 7
• Version for Safari 2 + 3.0
• Version for Firefox

This is a really great tool for the connected ELT classroom and also great to use at home. I hope you are able to enjoy using it with your students. Do drop me a lne with any other ideas and activities you use with it.

Best

Nik