Video communication apps and mobile learning

One of the great things about mobile devices such as tablets, iPads and phones is that most modern devices have good quality cameras and microphones built in. This opens up a really wide range of potential for communication and speaking practice that used to be such a struggle to organise on older laptops and desktop computers.

App developers have also been quick to exploit the potential of this powerful tool and in this post I'd like to look at some of the tools that have been created and how they can be used for language development.

Mailvu for asynchronous messages

Mailvu has been a long time favourite of mine, mainly because the web based version is so easy to use and doesn't require any downloads. You just point your browser at: http://mailvu.com/ and as long as you have the Flash plugin installed on your computer you can start recording immediately. Mailvu also provides mobile apps for iOS, Android an Blackberry. These are easy to use and it allows you to send short spoken messages which don't require the viewer to have any specific software or to download large video files. They just click a link and watch your message. This kind of cross platform compatibility is really important if you are working in a BYOD environment where students could be coming to class with a wide range of devices.

EyeReport for picture in picture

EyeReport  puts an interesting twist on the video communication genre by adding the ability to record video on video. By this I mean that students can upload or record a video on their mobile device and then add a video commentary over the top explaining or commenting on what they see in the original video. This opens up a whole range of potential activities that we can get students doing. They could add commentary to sporting clips, give guided tours of places they have visited, explain processes or even make their own documentaries. Once students have completed their recording these can be shared to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or emailed directly from within the app.

CoachesEye for video annotation

CoachesEye is a similar app to EyeReport (though this one is no longer free) but is much more feature rich. Like EyeReport you can record video commentary over video, but with CoachesEye you can also add annotations and you can stop and control where you insert your comments into the video. This app was designed for coaches to give detailed feedback to athletes on their physical movements, but it's a great app to get students creating and talking about their own videos, and also a useful tool to use when observing teachers for training purposes.

Storytime for bedtime stories 

Storytime is another app which puts a new Twist on the video communication genre. It combines video conferencing with reading stories out loud. The app was designed to enable parents to read to their children from a distance and it contains a number of books you can choose to read and while you read you can discuss the books, ask questions and point to things on the page whilst chatting with the video window at the top. This is great for doing online tutoring with younger learners. There is quite a range of books from very basic and up and they are nicely illustrated.

Teleprompter for controlled speaking practice 

Teleprompter is an app that I wrote about a while back when it was still free (iPhone for Speaking Homework ). The app is what it says, it allows you to import text and then it scrolls through the text while creating a video of you reading it. This is great to get students doing controlled speaking practice and then watching and improving their speaking. You can set texts which include a range of sounds which they find difficult and then watch them together and help them to understand what elements of their pronunciation are causing problems.

Keek for video journals

Keek mixes web with mobile in the form of video journals. Users can post short messages of up to 35 seconds from their mobile or computer and these are published to the web or can be browsed through the app. This would be a great tool to use as a daily learning journal, but it's probably best used by adults or more responsible teens. It seems to be a very popular tool with teens in the USA and there is a wide range of content that students can browse through, some of which is not best suited to educational purposes, but as a concept this is quite a good app. If you prefer your students to be sheltered from this kind of popular culture app, then you can still take up the idea of the video learning journal and just get them to use their built in video camera app and post the messages to a Dropbox site.

Six3 for video messaging

Six3 is similar to MailVu and also compatible with most platforms, but it gives you the choice of recording private or public message and has an additional filter feature which can help to improve your appearance on the video. It's called Six3 because you have 63 seconds of recording time in each message. Like Mailvu, the messages are also sent via links through your email, but they can also be posted directly to Twitter or Facebook from within the app.

Skype for synchronous online tutoring

Skype has been around for a good while and was one of the first video based communication tools to break into the mainstream. It's being used by many online schools to deliver live online lesson from teachers to all parts of the globe. One of the great things about Skype, apart from the reliability, is that it keeps developing and adding new features. The recent addition of video messages that enable it to be used as an asynchronous tool will really help to widen its scope for use as a language development tool.


Built in camera app
With all these apps and the possibilities they offer, it can be easy to overlook the obvious. Most modern mobile device come with a built in video camera application and you can always use this to record and send video message. This has the advantage that messages are very safe from third party app providers and any possible security breaches, but sending the video clips to someone else often involves sending the whole clip via email which can be slow and require good connectivity.

For more ideas and activities for using video and webcams to develop languages see my posting 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

Why use video communication?

• Well one of the best reasons to use these kinds of apps is to get students speaking. Speaking homework has always been particularly difficult for students, but now you can ask students to produce spoken homework which you can watch and assess.
• Video as a communication genre is likely to become increasingly important as a 21st century digital literacy, so it's important that our students have practice and are able to use this communication genre, just as they do with speaking on the telephone or writing emails.
• Video can draw students' attention to many of the paralinguistic features of communication that are hard to highlight in a crowded classroom.
• Enabling students to record themselves speaking and then to watch themselves can be very enlightening for students as they can then start to self assess their own performance and look for ways they can improve. It can also encourage some students to try harder, because they know that someone else might see the video.
• Video can be very engaging and can be played repeatedly so it gives students the chance to listen again and in more depth.
• Video communication can help teachers to build a stronger sense of connection with their students, especially with online course when you might never physically meet your students. Conveying some sense of your personality, sense of humour and character can be very difficult in written communications, so video has some really big advantages.
• Giving students 1 to 1 time and having the time to just sit down and spend a few moments listening to a single student without the noise of others around can be really difficult in the classroom, but having a short recorded video clip of our students can really enable us to focus on their specific strengths and weaknesses and enable us to give them some really personalised feedback.

Potential problems

• As with any kind of online communication, make sure your students know how to protect their privacy and also themselves from harassment. Be sure to have a transparent and open policy on any kind of harassment so students know what is likely to happen to anyone harassing and how to report harassment.
• If you are using video communications with younger students also make sure their parents know what you are doing and why you are doing it and get their approval (in writing if possible) and if possible get them involved too.
• Make students aware of the difference between poor quality speaking and poor quality audio. You don't want them to think they sound bad if the real problem is the recording quality and interference from background noise etc. Help your students to understand how to get he best quality results from whatever recording tools they have, by finding somewhere quiet to record and experimenting with the best distance from the microphone.
• Helping students to look their best on video will also help to boost their confidence. Getting the camera angle right and having the light coming from the right direction can also have a big impact on how students look, so helping with this can be part of the learning experience. There is a useful article here which may help: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/look-good-on-webcam/
• Always remember and remind students that anything they do or say on video can potentially be seen by other people for years and even centuries to come, so whenever one of these apps is used, encourage them to think about what they are doing and saying and keep in mind that it could be seen by people they know and people they might yet meet as well as strangers who they might never meet. It's important to remind students of how they want to be perceived.

I hope you enjoy these apps and that they help to get your students speaking. Please leave a comment if you have any favourite video communication apps that you use to get your students speaking.

Related links:

• Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments 
• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best

Nik Peachey

Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile

A couple of years back I wrote about a really nice web based tool called Xtranormal and since then I've heard from so many teachers saying how useful their students have found it, so I was delighted yesterday to find that the same makes had now produced a free mobile / tablet app called Tellagami. The app runs on a mobile device and allows users to add animated speaking characters to a selection of backgrounds or to the users' own images. You can then either use text to speech to write a script for the character, or you can record your own voice and the app will lip-synch you text to the character. This is very quick and easy to do. Here's how.

Open the app an click on create.

Then choose your background, either from the ones provided, from your own image library or you can take a photograph of wherever you are at the time.

Then you can choose the character you want to use and customise their appearance.

Next you can select an emotion for your character.

Lastly, you can either type in your message or record it directly onto your device. You can record up to 30 seconds of spoken audio.

Once you animation is complete you can either send it by email, share it through various social networks or just save it onto your device to show it in class.

 You can complete the whole process in just a couple of minutes.

I think this is a great app to get students speaking either in the classroom, at home or while they are out and about in the world.

Some learning activities for students

• Ask the students to create 4 - 5 animated images explaining their route to school.
• Get students to create animated images of 4 - 5 of their favourite places around their town.
• Get students to take pictures of objects and create an animated video dictionary.
• Get students to talk about images of people in their family.
• Create some animated images of different steps in a process (making coffee, tea etc) and then get the students to watch and put them in the correct order.
• 
  
• Get students to create an animated image journal by adding one new image each day.
• Get students to take pictures of their favourite book covers or film posters and then record a review.
• Get students to create animated video cards on special occasions.

 I'm sure there are lots more activities you can think of.

What I like about Tellagami

• It's free and very easy to use.
• It encourages students to speak.
• It can be used effectively outside the classroom.
• Students can use it to pull some aspects of their own life and experience into the classroom.
• It produces very professional looking results.

Possible problems

• At present it's only available for iPhone / iPad so that limits who can use it.

 So if your students have iPads / iPhones and you ant to give them motivating speaking assignments for homework, Tellagami is a great tool to use for the job.

I hope you find it useful.

Related links

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL  
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials
• Extending a Sentence

Best
Nik Peachey

Create Video Questionnaires

Intervue.me is a new website I have been using recently. It's another website that is based around the use of webcams. The site enables users to create questionnaires and then get the recipients of the questionnaire to leave video recorded answers. The site is very easy to use.

Register the go to 'My Dashboard' and click on 'Create New' to start your first questionnaire.


First you decide on the levels of privacy you want for the questionnaire and whether you want people to be able to leave anonymous answers or add comments to the answers.


Next you click on 'Start adding questions'.
You can type in your question and give more explanation below the question if you think that makes it clearer. You can add as many questions as you want. You'll also need to click on 'Edit title' so that you can give your questionnaire a name.


Once you have added all your questions you can just click on 'Share' or 'Invite' to either get a URL for your questionnaire or to email it to specific people.

Then once people receive the questionnaire they just click on the questions and record their answers using the webcam in their laptop.

To see all the videos you can just go to 'My Dashboard' and click on the 'Videos' tab.

Here are some example questionnaires I have created. Feel free to leave an answer to any of the questions.

• Blended learning
• How digital is your classroom?
• Mobile devices in the classroom

How to use Intervue.me with students

• Create comprehension check questions to go with reading homework so that students also do some speaking for homework.
• Create opinion polls for students to answer.
• Make action research questionnaires
• Play the alibi game and get students to explain where they were and what they were doing at particular points in time.
• Ask students about childhood memories.

What I like about Intervue.me

• It's very quick and easy to create questionnaires
• It's a great way to provide speaking practice for students.
  
• You can add more detail and explanation to the questions.
• Students get to practice their digital communication skills.
• Students will be able to watch and listen to their replies and rerecord them so this will focus them on accuracy.
• It can be more communicative and engaging than writing down answers as students can also see the other answers that have been recorded.
• You can create long questionnaires or very simple single question ones.

What I'm not so sure about.

• It could take time to get students feeling comfortable in front of the camera, so you might need to help them a little and get them to think about lighting and getting the correct distance from the camera.
• Be careful about enabling anonymous replies or comments as this could be abused.
• Students need a laptop with a reasonable quality microphone.

I hope you find Intervue.me useful and that your students get plenty of speaking practice.

Related links:

• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create a Video Dictation Activity
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Teach Yourself to Teach with Tech
• Get your Students Listening and Interacting with Native Speakers

Best

Nik Peachey

Get your Students Listening and Interacting with Native Speakers

Listening in the EFL / ESL classroom can be a pretty dull business. Usually it consists of students all listening to the same thing at the same time and doing the same tasks. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you feel the urge to get away from the course book and get your students listening to and interacting with some real native speakers from the safety of their computer then why not check out some of the people on Vyou.com ?

I've already written about how you can set up your own Vyou Q&A video booth, but it's also well worth looking round some of the people who are already there and seeing if there are any your students would be interested in, as a lot of the people there a quite young and some are quite interesting and quirky and Vyou offers your students the opportunity not only to listen to them and hear a range of accents, but also to ask them questions, though the answers might take a while to come.

It's very simple to use. You just go to : and there you can either search through some of the featured people or you can click on channels at the top and look through the more topic related people.

Each person has their own video channel and you can either type in questions below the video or you can click on the questions on the right of the video to listen to the answers to questions that have already been asked.

Here are a few people your students might find interesting.

This one is a British guy called Jonny and he claims he will write a song about any subject that readers suggest. There a quite a few there already: http://vyou.com/Spontaneoussongs
This one is Loren Rochelle for North America. She works in 'Social Video seeding' (Yes that seems to a job these days). She answers questions about a wide range of things from the personal to the trivial: http://vyou.com/lorenrochelle

It's also worth checking out the channels.

If you and your students are more interested in literature then there is an ask the author channel where writers answer questions about literature and their books: http://vyou.com/channels/simonandschuster
If your students are more interested in music, EMI also has a channel where you can submit questions to some of their recording artists: http://vyou.com/channels/emi

So how can you exploit this with EFL / ESL students?

• Show students some of the people and get them to think of questions they would like to ask. Then get them to submit the questions (try to get them to submit questions to a few different people) then in the next lesson they can see if they have any answers and share the information they got from the answers (Also good for lessons on reported speech).
• Ask students to choose one person each and give them 5 - 10 minutes to discover as much information as possible about that person. They can then discuss and share the information in class.
• Collect some of the questions that have been asked and get students to think of possible answers, then watch and compare to their own answers and see how much they have in common with each person. Then get students to find the person they are most like.
• Get students to watch two different people and then compare and contrast their character and interests.
• Get students to think of one or two good questions and submit them to a range of people. Then in the next lesson students can check the answers and decide who they think gave the best answer.

What I like about this Vyou

• These are real people that students can interact with.
• The use of the looped introduction videos gives a real sense of presence and this can be much more motivating and engaging for students.
• There's a real wealth of listening materials with various accents on a range of topics.
• The answers are quite short so they aren't too demanding on students concentration despite being 'ungraded' and authentic.
• Students can listen multiple times.
• I've looked at quite a few channels and there doesn't seem to be anything inappropriate or offensive.

What I'm not so sure about

• Some of the channels allow for anonymous submission of questions, so students might be tempted to ask something inappropriate (though they are unlikely to get an answer.)
• It is possible that your students might stumble across something they might find offensive or some bad language, but I haven't found anything like this yet.

Well I hope you try Vyou.com and that your students find it engaging, entertaining and useful.

Related links:

• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create a Video Dictation Activity
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Teach Yourself to Teach with Tech

Best

Nik Peachey

So Ask Me a Question

I recently spotted this very interesting site called Vyou.com which exploits video to create asynchronous conversations. I find it interesting because of the simple way it creates presence. As you can see below, it looks like the person (me in this case) is waiting ready for your question.

All visitors need to do is type a question into the text line below the video and the creator will get a message with the question and post a reply. You can try it if you wish by posting a question to me. I'm not sure yet how long it will take for me to answer though.



This is very quick and easy to set up. You just go to the site and register for free, then once your registration is validated you record two short video clips. One is the one you can see above and another for unanswered questions. As questions are answered they appear below the 'waiting' video.

It's also a bit like Twitter in that you can 'follow' people and build up a group of followers. These people all receive notification of any video responses posted.

I'm trying this out because I think it's a great way of getting students to speak to each other and ask you or each other questions. All you need is a webcam and a microphone.

How to use this with students

• You could set up your own grammar or vocabulary answers site and students could send you questions.
• You could get students to ask each other questions about a story.
• You could play animal, mineral or vegetable and each students has to ask question to see what you are thinking about.
• You could just get students asking and answering questions about their likes and dislikes etc.
• I think this would work particularly well for class exchanges with students from other classes or countries.

What I like about it

• It's free and very quick and simple to set up.
• There's a real feeling of presence and that someone is there waiting for your question.
• I can generate some real spoken interaction.
• It's a very simple idea made very effective.
• You can embed the video chat into your blog or site.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Of course something like this is very much open to abuse, especially as it allows anonymous questions to be posted.
• The widget which I've embedded into my post is a bit big and it would be nice to have smaller sizes.
• A lot of the example conversations that have been created on the site are a bit adult in nature and certainly inappropriate for younger learners, so if you use it, be sure to use it with adults and embed it into a blog or site so that your students don't wander round the site.
• WebCams aren't generally very flattering, especially in a bad light, but you can always wear a big hat or dark glasses.

If you do give this a try, please do follow me and I'll reciprocate, as I'd like to find out a bit more about how this will work in practice. You can visit my profile on the site at: http://vyou.com/nikpeachey . There you will be able to see a better view of the full size widget.

I hope you find this interesting.

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
• 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

Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL

I've just discovered Wordle, which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us user name into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage.

Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like.

The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on line. To see how this is done watch the tutorial movie below.

• How to create a Wordle word cloud
• You can download a higher quality Quicktime version here (Right click and the 'Save as')
• Or download for i-pod / i-Tunes here
  

How to use this with EFL ESL students
This is a wonderful flexible tool to use with students.

• Revision of texts - You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the text. You can build up a bank of word clouds over a semester and pull them out at random to get students to recall the texts they have studied and the key vocabulary in them. You could also see if they could rewrite or reconstruct the text based on the word cloud.

• Prediction - You can create word clouds of texts before the students read or listen and ask them to make predictions about the content of the text based on the word cloud. They could also check any new words from the word cloud that they are unsure of before they read or listen.

• Dialogue reconstruction - You can create a word cloud of a dialogue students are studying and use it as a prompt to remember or reconstruct the dialogue.

• Short poems / Haiku - You can generate a word cloud from a short poem or Haiku, then ask students to create their own work based on the word cloud. They could then see how close they came to the original.
  
  

• Text comparison - You can create word clouds from a number text genres (news article, poem, story, advertisement, dialogue etc.) and then see if the students can decide which genre each is from and why. You could also do this with a small collection of poems short stories or articles. Then students could read the complete texts and match them to the word clouds. Here are two poems. One is from Shakespeare and the other is from Robert Frost. Try to decide which one is from Shakespeare. How did you know?
  
  
  

• Personal information - You could get your students to each create a text about themselves and then turn it into a word cloud. You could them put the clouds up around the class and see if the students could identify each other from the cloud. They could exchange clouds and use them to introduce each other.

• Topic research tasks - You can create a word cloud based around a topic you want students to research. You could use a page from Wikipedia to do this, then use it to find out what students already know about the topic by asking what they think the relevance of each of the word is to the overall topic. They could then go to Wikipedia and find out more. Then report back on their findings using the key words as prompts. Here's an example I created by cutting and pasting the intro text on Cairo
  
  

• Learner training - This is a good tool for students to use regularly to help themselves. They can regularly make copies of the texts they study and pin them up to revise them or keep them in their gallery on the site. They could even create word clouds of their study notes to help them revise.

What I like about it

• It's free, quick and very easy.
• You don't need to register or part with an email address so it's a low risk site to get students using.
• The word clouds are very attractive and will stimulate more visual learners.
• Having key word prompts is a great way to support more fluent language production, but avoids having students just reading texts.
• It's nice that the students or you can customise the design and choose colours and fonts that they like.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Would be nice to have a more effective embed code for blogs (There is one, but it's not very effective) I've used a work around to embed these ones.
• Saving the word clouds as PDF is possible, but again a bit tricky unless you have a MAC (That's another good reason for getting one)

I've really enjoyed trying out this site and creating word clouds. Hope you do to. I'm sure the list of suggestions above is by no means exhaustive, so if you have any ideas for how to use this with your EFL ESL or other students, by all means post a comment and share your ideas.

Related links:

• Prompting reading speeds
• Animating vocabulary
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Picture phrases

Activities for students:

• Learn Some Cliches
• Using Word Clouds to Remember Words
• Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends

Best

Nik Peachey

Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students

It's amazing how you can spend ages looking for something you want and then when you find it a whole bunch of other things come along with it. That seems to be the way things have happened for me with video conferencing. I found and posted about tokbox last week and then came Bubble Comment this week which I wrote about on my Quick Shout blog, and now Bubble Joy!

Bubble Joy is a way of sending short (60 seconds) fun video messages to people.


Click here to see the live video message (only good for the first 50 visitors)

They have a selection of message cards and you just record your video message to go in the middle using a webcam and microphone. The whole thing is very quick and easy to do.

So why use this with EFL / ESL students?

• It's good listening and speaking practice
• It's good fun and easy to do
• It's communicative
• It's creative
• It's free, easy to use, doesn't require registration
• Nice selection of cards

So how do we use this with our ESL / EFL students?

• Well a lot of the suggestions that I mentioned in my posting Video conferencing for EFL will also work with Bubble Joy, but be sure to remember that with Bubble Joy you only have 60 seconds, and the video card expires after it has been viewed 50 times.
• You could also try using it for specific occasions (there are cards specifically for Christmas, Easter, Valentines etc.)
• You could also get students to create messages that match the other themes (What would you say from inside a lion's mouth, inside a shark, on safari) and then build a story to go with the cards explaining why this happened.
• Students could also plan an imaginary holiday and then send a card to tell other as about it (on safari, riding in a hot air balloon etc.)
• Students could use one of the TV or stage designs to give a brief news report. They could each report on their day in class or what they did on holiday, at the weekend or on a class visit.
• They could use the stage or TV designs to record a joke each and then send them round and vote on the best one.
• The cocktail glass card could be used to create warnings against the dangers of alcohol.

See the full range of Bubble Joy designs here:

What I'm not so sure about

• Students need to email the cards, so to avoid them having to share their email addresses it might be better to have the students send the cards to you and then you grab the links and share them in class or on a web page etc.
• It would be nice to be able to upload your own frame to put the video in.
• 60 seconds can be a bit limiting
• Shame the cards expire after they have been viewed 50 times

Well I hope you enjoy Bubble Joy and that it helps you to spread some joy among your students.

Here are some related links:
Great Video Commenting Tool
Video conferencing for EFL
Send Free Video Messages

Best

Nik Peachey

Video conferencing for EFL

It's not often that you look at a product and think 'Ah! That's exactly what I've been looking for! And it's free!' But tokbox does seem to be that kind of product for me.

For some time now I've been looking round for a suitable video conferencing type application and while there have been a few that look okay, like SnapYap which I reviewed a week or two back, when I saw tokbox this morning I realised that here was a video conferencing tool that had exactly what I wanted and a bit more.

Here's a quick video demo of what it can do.

• To view the demo in a new window click here (3mins - 3.5Mb)
• Download the demo as Quicktime movie (5Mb)
• Download the movie for i-pod (7Mb)

So what do I like about it?

• It's free and doesn't require any downloads.
• I was registered and signed in without disclosing any personal information (apart from email address) within less than 3 mins of finding the site!
• It has a range of ways to communicate including group video conferencing, person to person live video calls, video email messages, and a video feed.
• You can embed videos or your call messages into blogs websites and a whole range of social media sites including Facebook and Blogger.
• You can report inappropriate use and users who are doing 'unsuitable' things with their accounts get deleted.
• Students can use it privately, with groups of friends or publicly.
• I like the inbox idea so you can check your video mail and get alerts sent to your own email inbox when someone wants to call you or has left you a message.
• It has a really nice clean easy intuitive interface.
  

Here's a quick message that I created to show you the kind of quality you can get.

So how could we use this with ELT or EFL students?

• Chinese - video - 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.
• 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 learnt that day and you could then respond. Your videos would form a good learning record and students would be able to look back at them later and see how they had 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.
• Class survey - 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.
• Different perspectives - Show some 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 a video giving their account of what happened. 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. The 'detective' students should then try to recreate the scene using the student videos to guide them. Afterwards they can watch the original film clip or picture together and see how well they did and what they missed.
• Favourite poems or haiku - Students could record themselves reading their favourite poem or haiku, you could then embed the videos into a webpage or blog as a class poetry collection.
• Live tutoring support - This looks like an ideal tool for supporting distance learners and doing 'face to face' tutorials.
• 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.
• Video lesson with conferencing - You could use the conference call to video cast your lessons to a group of distance learners.
• 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.
• Text and video message - 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.
• 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.
• Tip of the day, word of the day - Send you students a tip or word of the day by video email. These could be exam tips, study tips, recommended websites, or words and definitions.
• 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.

So why use video conferencing with your EFL / ELT students?

• It' a great real life IT skill as these kinds of tools are going to become a normal part of our day to day work and pleasure daily routine.
• IT adds an element of personalisation to your lessons and materials and can make it easier to build up rapport, especially with distance students.
• It can help you get some one-to-one time with your students.
• You can use it to create some really nice personalised materials.
• Students can use it (with caution) to find people with similar interests to talk to or to do learning / language exchanges.

Possible problems

• As ever be sure your students are aware of how to protect their privacy and that they don't share any personal information or contact details with people they don't know.
• Try to keep any video messages you make quite short or they will become slow / bandwidth heavy to watch. This is almost certainly a tool that will be more useful to broadband users.
• Students are going to need a webcam and a microphone of course.
• Even though inappropriate use can be reported, someone has to see it to report it, so if that is going to be one of your students, make sure they know how to report anything that disturbs them.
• You have to be careful with any tool that enables mass communication, even if it's only email, but despite that I think that tokbox is a fantastic product and one which can really enhance your teaching and your students learning. I think they have come up with a fantastic product that could become a market leader in the field of web based video communications.
• Appearance is important, so watch out for bad hair days, hangovers ad make sure you wear something nice and try to find a room with some good natural light.
  

Fantastic! Hope you and your students enjoy it. Happy EFL video conferencing

Nik Peachey

Similar postings

• Make your own chat room

Teaching Speaking in Second Life

For me, one of the main blocks to really developing online language learning courses has been the inability to supply real communicative speaking practice. VOIP software like Skype has certainly pushed the bounds of what is possible, as has the development of more effective web based video conferencing platforms, but in my opinion the biggest step towards making this possible has been the developments made in virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life which not only enable the use of voice, but can also help students to develop an understanding gesture and spatial relationships while speaking.

For anyone interested in giving it a try, here are four basic tutorial videos to help you get started with how voice works in Second Life and how you can use it for pair and group work.

Setting up voice
This video shows you how to activate the voice client and make sure that the quality of your sound is good. It also shows you how to select the correct input and output devices for sound in case you are having any problems.



Using the active speaker window
This video shows you how to find and use the active speaker window. This enables you to find out who is within 'voice range' of you, as well as enabling you to balance out the volume of the voices around you and even to mute other speakers if you just want to listen in to one person.



Using 'IM Call' for pair and group work
If you have large groups of students all in close proximity to each other, running activities like pair or group work can be chaotic as everyone hears what everyone else is saying. This video shows you how to use the 'IM Call' feature to put the students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people they are working with. Then you as the teacher can move between the groups monitoring, without having to hear the whole class all at once.



Balancing out relative volumes
Second Life has a lot of different sound sources, such as the ambient sound of trees and water around you, the sounds of gestures, background music, media players and th voices of people speaking. This video shows you how to balance out the sounds and turn off the ones you don't want to hear.



I would be really interested to hear comments from anyone who has used Video conferencing and or Second Life. Which do you prefer?

If you are new to or haven't tried Second Life yet, then I hope you find these videos useful and they encourage you to try it out. The videos were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best
Nik Peachey

My other postings on Second Life and virtual worlds

• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

Visit my YouTube Channel to watch more of my videos
http://youtube.com/NikPeachey

Pronunciation goes 2.0

I've been looking this week at Forvo, which is a kind of web 2.0 pronunciation site. The site allows users to request, and add audio clips of the pronunciation of different words from a huge range of languages, so if you want to know how a word is pronounced you can either do a quick easy search for the word and then listen to it, or if the word isn't already within the database, you can add it and request a pronunciation.

The site also categorises words into lexical areas such as brands, acronyms, sports etc which is very handy

You can also be helpful and add the pronunciation to words which have been requested in your language.

The site offer free registration, but you can find words, request words and pronounce words without registering. The benefit of registration is that you'll be notified when someone pronounces your word for you.

What I like about it

• It's a great idea and it's free
• Very easy to use interface
• Lots of different languages
• Sound clips load quickly and a reasonably good quality
• Registration isn't required
• Potentially a huge and growing resource

What I'm not so sure about

• Like most things on the web, especially Web 2.0, you can't be sure of the quality or authenticity of what you are getting, so if you are using this with students check out the words they are after and make sure the quality of the pronunciation is good (My litmus test was 'aluminium' and it feel somewhere between the UK and US versions)
• Watch out for students who want to pronounce the (four letter) words that they shouldn't be using (though probably better for them to pronounce them well than badly)
• It would be really nice to have regional variations of the pronunciation, but I guess that's broadening out the amount of work a bit far.
  

How to use this with students

• This is a nice self access resource for students to check their pronunciation
• You could give students a list of words and get them to find out how they are pronounced
• Get students to add some words that they want to be able to pronounce
• Use the site to dictate words while students listen, then get them to go to the site and check that they have got the right words
  

This is a really nice application of the Web 2.0 concept to pronunciation and it will be really interesting to see how this site grows and develops.

Hope you enjoy it and can get your students involved.

Best

Nik

Iconic teen video

Using video clips with teenagers can be enormously motivating for them, IF you get the right content. Getting the content right involves taking a look into the lives of our students and finding out what kind of things they are watching.

One of the most high profile examples of this is LonelyGirl15.
LonelyGirl15, which became a Youtube phenomenon, depicted a young teenage girl talking to her camera and discussing some of the intimate, bizarre and often incredibly trivial issues of her life. The ‘show’, a series of 2 -4 minute clips, was soon attracting audiences of millions and it soon emerged that it was a ‘fake’ and that the LonelyGirl15 was an actress working with a small film crew and script writer.
Since then the show has transformed into a sort of on going thriller. there is now both a UK version, KateModern as well as the original LonelyGirl15 series.
For more information on the plot and background see: LG Pedia

These two shows provide a huge potential source authentic language as teenagers in the UK and North America speak it. It’s also wrapped up in a context and genre which teenagers / 20-somethings can identify to. Though using this material isn’t without its pitfalls and drawbacks.

What I like about it

• The clips are short, but self contained and will download quite quickly.
• They really show the way that English is being used by young adults.
• The clips are quite enigmatic and the story is inferred and implied rather than depicted, so the material can be useful for developing students thinking and deductive skills.
• Many of them deal with young people’s issues and attitudes
• The characters seem like very ordinary people
• The clips can be very engaging

Here’s a just a couple of examples, from a collection of hundreds of clips which I think could well be usable.

From LonelyGirl15: Boy problems



From LonelyGirl15: Parent problems



From KateModern: A proposal



From KateModern: The order




Some ideas for using this material with students

• Students to watch a single clip and make deductions about the story, what’s been happening to the character, what the relationships are to other people mentioned etc.
• Students to watch different clips then build up and exchange character information and try to decide what the relationships are between various characters
• Students view the clip without sound and make deductions about the topic and mood of the person
• Create gist or specific information questions
• Get your students to watch and then write questions that they would like to ask the character
• Get your students to create and video their own response to one of the characters in the videos
• Get your students to watch for cultural information and look for things that would be different with their own culture (clothes, household objects, way people interact, gestures etc.)
• Get students to watch and compare a clip from the UK and the North American series and identify differences in the use of language.
  
• Get students to watch and compare a clip from each series without sound and look for cultural and environmental differences between UK and North American culture
• Create discussion classes around some of the issues touched on in the clips
  
• Students create their own localised version of the series.

What I'm not so sure about

• Some of the clips contain violence and bad language and show young people drinking. This is something you might actually ant to deal with in class, or avoid altogether, so be careful which clips you choose.
• You might have to be prepared to defend your use of this kind of material if your students go home and start watching it in front of their parents
• Much as I find this view into the world of 'young people today' (Did I really write that?) quite intriguing I also find it slightly disturbing

Anyway, whether we like this kind of content or not, it does seem to be the kind of thing that is becoming increasingly popular as internet entertainment, and if we really want to engage with our students and engage them in our classes, I don't think we can afford to ignore it.

I would also love to hear from anyone who has been using LonelyGirl15 or KateModern with your classes, so please post a comment and share your experience.

Best

Nik

Tackling political issues

Big Think is running some really nice clips from two speakers on a range of political issues at the moment. Here's a nice taster to view with an opinion on "Is it fair to ask developing countries to go green?"



The speakers are:

• Lawrence Tribe, an American constitutional scholar and University Professor at the Harvard Law School.
• He talks about such things as globalization of the law and who is responsible for fixing the environment
• Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation
• He talks about whether there is a clash of civilisations and whether the US should talk to Syria
  

The videos are all quite short snippets even though the language level is quite high, and if you get your students to register and log in, they can then vote on whether they agree with the speaker or not.

These videos could provide a good route into what can be a difficult and controversial topic to deal with in the classroom.

I think we should be dealing with these kinds of topics, but personally I feel as a teacher it's our role to help students articulate and understand each others' opinions. I generally try to avoid adding my own.

You could also have a look at my previous posting for more ideas on how to use Big Think

• Video debating website

Hope these are useful

Best

Nik