Exploiting a Video Viral

For a long time now I've been fascinated with viral marketing campaigns and the way advertisers use these to promote their products. What's really interesting about them is the advertisers ability to come up with really novel and original ideas to capture our attention and make us want to share with others. My Fame Star is a great example of this and one that we can use to create lesson materials.
What it does, is enable you to upload a photograph and then create a story around it.


It then converts this story into a small video report. Here's an example I created called 'How my past caught up with me.' (You'll have to watch a short advertisement first)

Example: Click here if the video doesn't play

How to use it with students

• Create a video about yourself or a fictional character and ask your students to watch it and make notes about your life story.

• Get your students to create their own stories then put them in pairs to listen to each others' story and make notes of the variations / differences.

• Use it as a prompt for students to write a newspaper story. You could get the students to watch the video clip and then convert the story into a newspaper clipping. You could add some realism to this by asking your students to use the Newspaper clip generator from one of my previous postings (Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts)

• Ask students if they can think of any real celebrities whose story is similar to this. Get them to tell the class or write the story of a similar celebrity.

• Discuss the use of 'viral marketing' sites like these as advertising.

• Do they think it's useful?
• Do they know of other viral marketing examples?
• Does it have an influence on their impressions of the company / product?

Have a look at an article I wrote here to find a out a bit more about viral marketing

What I like about it

• It can really personalise the lesson and materials
• It's fun and free (despite the advertising)
• It's easy to use
• Great stimulation for the imagination
• It has an embed code so you can embed the video into a blog or wiki
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Shame about the advertising, but I guess everyone has to make a living
• If you email it to someone the default is to accept promotions of the company's products (I deselected it)
• Sometimes the embed code doesn't work so well but can be improved with a bit of code editing.
  

Well I hope you and your students enjoy this and by all means post links or comment about any other ideas or materials you create with this tool.

Related links:

• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Create an English Cartoon
• Animating vocabulary
• Make you own animated movies
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts

Here's something that's fun for the weekend and beyond. A site with a collection of image and gif generators that you can customise with your EFL ESL students and add their texts to. This is an example one I created with talking flowers giving a warning about the environment.

• The site also offers talking squirrels

• Talking cats

And a few other things like tomatoes, owls and a wizard. There's also a generator that helps you add a text to a packet of cigarettes and also a newspaper which I really like. It's really easy to do, you just add your text to a field and click the generate button.
You can then either download your image or get an embed code to add it to a blog or website.

So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?

• We can use the animal and vegetable animations to get students to express opinions about different topics we discuss. It can often be hard to motive students to do this and using a tool like this reduces their 'exposure'.
  

• We could get students to create an animal or vegetable very short story.

• We could use the cigarette packet generator for a competition to think up the best reason not to smoke (could use this for modals of obligation too - you shouldn't / mustn't smoke because..)

• We could use the newspaper gif to get students to write a short news stories about how they became famous, what they did at the weekend, their last holiday etc.

• They could also use the newspaper gif to write some classroom or celebrity gossip to share

• We could write news stories for the students as a prompt for questions - Write a short news text for them with the headline - 'Teacher Found Murdered' - add a few details and get them to write short questions to ask you more about the story. You could even develop this into a role play with students having to think of an alibi to explain where they were at the time of the murder and get some students to act as detectives and interrogate the other students.

• You could use the newspaper gif to create an editing task by creating a text with a number of your students' common errors in and asking them to act as newspaper editors and find the mistakes.
• You could use the newspaper gif to get students to convert a popular story form literature or folk tale (Romeo and Juliet, Goldilocks and the 3 bears, Cinderella etc.) into a quick news article. This is a good activity to practice summary writing skills.
• You could use the Ninja or Wizard animations to get students to create short advertising slogans.
  

What I like about this site

• It's free and really easy to use.
• Once you've created your images and animations you can either download them or get an embed code and add them to a blog or website.
• It's fun and adds an element of motivation to simple quick writing activities
• Ideal for warmer.
• It's all very 'low tech' and you don't need broadband.
  

What I'm not so sure about
You might have to be careful that students don't write too much. the wizard and ninja texts need to be very short.

Well I hope you find these useful and please leave comments with any other ideas or links to any materials your students create using these.

Related links:

• Animating vocabulary
• Make you own animated movies
• Picture phrases

Activities for students:

• Extending a Sentence
• 60 Second Writing Activity
• Create an English Cartoon

Best

Nik Peachey

Personalised flashcards

Flashcards have always been one of my favourite teaching tools and with the FaceinHole website I've found a place where I can quickly create my own personalised ones.

The site is easy to use. You just need either an image of yourself that you can upload or a webcam that you can take a picture with. Then you choose the picture you want to put yourself into and upload your image. With a bit of resizing and colour adjustment you can have a set of your own personal flashcards in just minutes.

Then you can either embed them in a webpage like these ones, have a link to them on the site or print them up to use them in class as flashcards.

How to use these with students
These kinds of flashcards can be used for a multitude of purposes.

• They are great for generating stories / personal anecdotes ( The time I met Paris Hilton etc).
• You can use them to practice a range of grammar structures. The ones below could all be used for 'used to' and students could either ask about the experience or you could make up anecdotes to tell them.
• You could get your students to create their own flashcards using their own images and then come to class and tell the class about their imaginary experiences.
• Often when students have to talk about their own experiences, they can't think of much to say. Hopefully these flashcards will stimulate their imagination and they can have fun making up stories and anecdotes.
• You could even try to convince your students that some of these are true! (I actually used to have long hair and go dancing with Paris Hilton!)
  

Here are my 'used to' experiences.

• I used to play football for Manchester united
  
• I used to go dancing with Paris Hilton.
  
• I used to be a stunt man.
  
  
  
  • I used to have long hair.
  
  
  
  
  • I used to be a bit of an ogre.
  
  
  
  
  • I used to play in a band.
  
  
  
  What I liked about it
  
  • Lots of different pictures to choose from
  • Quick and easy to create the flashcards
  • Lots of fun for free and registration necessary
    
  What I wasn't so sure about
  
  • Would be nice to have some more ordinary images and perhaps different places around the world.
  • It only worked with jpg images, not with gif
  • Watch out. Some of them are less suitable for younger learners
    
  There's so much you can do with good images and personalised ones can be even more stimulating. I hope you find this useful and you get your students creating and talking about some great images.
  
  http://www.faceinhole.com
  
  Best
  
  Nik

Soundscapes from Soundtransit

Sound Transit is a really wonderful formulation of an idea. It's not just a huge collection of Mp3 sound files from all over the world, but the sounds have been tagged by country and described and a visitor to the site can take a sound journey around the world.

You just choose your country of origin, your destination and how many stops you want to make. You then get offered a choice of itineraries with stops at various destinations and descriptions of what you will hear there. You choose the one you want and then the site edits together the individual sounds to create a unique sound journey for you. You can then download your mp3 sound journey, listen to it online or send it to a friend.

• To try this go to the Book a Transit part of the site. It's just like booking a flight on an airline website (except that it's free and a lot more user friendly!!)

Alternatively you can search the database of individual files by country, keyword or creator and just download the sounds you want. All the sounds are licensed under creative commons 2.0 so you can save and reuse them according to the limitations defined by that license.

• To access the database of sounds go to Search for sounds.

How to use this with students

• You can use the sounds for visualisations. Get the students to listen with closed eyes then write about what they heard. Or they can create a story from what they heard.
• You could collect four or five clips for students to listen to and then get them to create a chapter / episode of a story around each one.
• You could use them for grammar practice ( e.g. present continuous "Someone is speaking." etc.)
• You could get the students to use the site to plan a holiday with four or five destinations then use the descriptions in the itinerary to say what they 'will / are going to' do at each place. They can then choose the best holiday. For past tense practice they can tell other students what the did on their holiday while the students listen to the sounds.
• For vocabulary practice they could just listen and say the things they hear. This will probably involve a lot of guessing, so you could extend this for practice of modals of probability (e.g. It might be someone eating, It can't be in Argentina. That must be a car door etc.)
• You could use this site to give students inspiration to collect their own sounds and to tell the rest of the class about them. They could even upload them to the site and share them.
• They could create their own sound journeys ( e.g. Going to school, what they did at the weekend etc.)
• You could play 'Guess the sound' as a warmer with student and award points to each student or team.
• You could ask students to find their favourite sounds or talk about what the sounds remind them of. (e.g. This is one of my favourites. It's the call to prayer. This one was recorded in Delhi, but it reminds me of when I lived in Cairo. I went out to Giza one evening and listened as thousands of mosques from all over Cairo erupted in to a grand symphony of sound.)
  Listen here
• You can use the sounds to create atmosphere for story telling activities or student plays
• You can play the John Cage game and just get the students to sit silently and listen to the sounds around them in the school classroom ( for 4 mins and 33 seconds) then talk about what they heard. You could also tell them about the famous John Cage composition 4'33" afterwards and ask them what they think of it.
  
• You can play "Where am I?" by playing them one of the sounds and asking them to guess where you are. Try this one. I'm in a cafe in Moscow getting some coffee

What I liked about this site

• It's a wonderful free resource with a huge collection of sounds.
• It can really get students thinking about the sound environment they live in.
• I love the idea that the sounds are tagged to countries and that students can book a sound journey.
• The creative commons license

What I wasn't so sure about

• Some of the sound journeys are quite long if you add a lot of stops
• Some of the sounds are quite unusual and could require quite a high level of language to describe, but I think this just means that you have to choose the activity that you use carefully and be selective.

Anyway. This is a site that I really enjoyed and I'm now determined to go out and start recording some of my own sound adventures. As I'm based in Morocco I thought I would finish this posting with the sounds of the Marrakech market recorded by Reza Tahami.

To download any of the sounds you just need to right click and then click 'Save As..'

Best

Nik

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