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‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات vocabulary. إظهار كافة الرسائل
‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات vocabulary. إظهار كافة الرسائل

Creating social phrasebooks with Phraseum

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I spend a lot of time looking at different web-based tools and apps and thinking about if and how they can be used for learning. Sometimes it takes some thought and at other times it’s really obvious. With Phraseum it was instantly obvious that this was a really great tool for learning.


Phraseum allows you to collect words, phrases and sentences from anywhere on the web while you you browse and organise them into social phrasebooks.


Phraseum is a browser-based tool which can be activated from your browser toolbar. Simply create an account and then drag the ‘Clipping button’ bookmarklet to your favourites bar on your browser.


Once that’s done you can just collect any words or phrases that you find online by highlighting them and then clicking on the bookmarklet. This opens up a window where you can add tags to the phrase and add your own private notes and annotations. The tags could be a definition, translation, part of speech or something about the context in which it could be used. You can then save the phrase into one of your phrasebooks. The phrases and phrasebooks can be private or they can be made public and so shared with others.


If you want to include specific words or phrases from a word document or PDF, you can also just type in the words or phrases you want to include in your phrasebooks, but if you save them from the web then Phraseum also stores a link back to the original source, so you can go back and see how the word or phrase is used in context. You can also get a link from the phrase to a translation from Google Translate.


Phraseum is social, so you can share phrases and phrasebooks with anyone else on the site and follow other people if you like the kinds of things they are saving and sharing. You can also click on any of the tags on your phrase to find other related words or phrases which have been saved by other users and add those to your own collection.

If you use social media with your students you can post the phrases you save through various social media channels so this is a great way to feed information and activities into something like a Facebook group or page or a Twitter feed that you use with students.

All of the entries you make to Phraseum can be edited and changed, so students can always add additional tags, change them and add the same entry to multiple phrasebooks.

Phraseum also enables you to follow people in a similar way to Twitter or Pinterest. If you follow people you can see their public phrasebooks and keep up-to-date with what they are saving.



This is really useful if you are using it with students, as by following them you can easily monitor their work and use the comments feature if you need to help, support or encourage your students.

Here are a few examples of phrasebooks I've created:

How to use Phraseum with students
  • You could get started just by creating a few of your own useful phrasebooks and sharing them with your students.
  • If you like to pre-teach vocabulary, a good way to do this would be to create a vocabulary phrasebook from a particular online article you would like your students to read. They can look at the phrasebook before they read and check they understand the vocabulary, or use it as a reference while or after they read.
  • You could also collect a phrasebook with a collections of more random words and phrases and see if the students can predict the genre or kind of text the phrases came from.
  • You can collect phrases into a phrasebook and ask students to suggest appropriate tags to add.
  • If you train your students to use Phraseum then they can start using it to create phrasebooks while they read. They can sort new words into specific groups. They could be grouped according to the source or topic or they could group words according to word classification such as parts of speech or types of collocation.
  • You can get students to share phrasebooks and crosscheck so that they share vocabulary and check that they have similar definitions or translations of the words.
  • You can send students on treasure hunts for specific things, for example searching for business related collocations. If they use this as the tag they will then be able to share their results together (any tag you click on shows you all other words and phrases which share that same tag).
  • Get students to use the phrasebooks to revise and review their vocabulary.

What I like about Phraseum
  • I love that it works in the browser tool bar. This makes it really easy and quick to access at any time you are online.
  • I really like the social aspect too. Being able to share and compare phrasebooks with other people is really useful.
  • It’s great that it makes it easy for students to go back to the source of the word or phrase.
  • Saving phrases really encourages students to think about words within lexical chunks rather than as independent entities.
  • Phraseum can be used in multiple languages.
  • It’s free.
I think this is a great tool to support more of a lexical approach to online learning. It can also support students digital literacy and study skills. I hope you and your students find Phraseum useful. Be sure to share in the comments any ideas you have for using it with your students.

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Nik Peachey

Online Video: For Language Development

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There are now a number of online video sharing communities that are specifically designed to support the development of language and communication skills. These websites don't just provide us with video content, but also the tools to help us make authentic video accessible to learners.

Dotsub
Authentic video can be very challenging for language learners so at times it is useful to have translation in subtitles or a transcription of the text. Dotsub is a website that enables users to upload and add subtitles to their videos. The site is community based, so you can upload your video and request that someone else translates it for you, or you can also help other people by translating or transcribing their video. You can also import videos from YouTube to add subtitles to them.
To find out more read: Subtitling your video clips

LangoLab
LangoLab is a video sharing website designed for anyone who want to learn or teach any language. Users upload videos and add transcripts. Learners can then listen to the video and follow the transcript. They can click on words in the transcript to get definitions, and create their won flashcards to help them remember the words.

To learn more about this site go to: Language Learning through Communal Video

Yappr
Yappr is another community site that allows users to upload and transcribe videos. It is also community based so that registered users to the site can interact, get to know each other and help each other learn each other’s language.

Find out more about Yappr here: Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL

Yolango
Yolango takes things a step further. It not only enables users to create transcripts and translations, but they can also create and do a number activities based around the video. These include gapfil exercises, comprehension questions and vocabulary building tests.

The site is free, but users must register to do the activities. The site will also track their score. The site uses authentic video many of them either music videos or popular movies. It’s more directed at older learners.
Read more about this site: Ready Made Authentic Video materials For ESL EFL

Wordia
Wordia is a user created video dictionary. Anyone can choose a word that they like and create a video talking about what the word means. In this way users of the English language are starting to redefine the language according to popular use.

The definitions that people give are more like short narratives, but this is still a useful resource and you can get your students to create their own online dictionary using 12seconds.tv, like this definition of headache
Read more about Wordia here: Video Dictionary 2.0

Well I hope this gives you some insight into some of the sites that are helping to do the work for us. If you know of any more, by all means do leave a comment.

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Nik Peachey

A River of Images

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I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver, an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site.

This is great because it provides you with and endless stream (or I should say river) of images as you scroll down the page. You can keep scrolling and pull in thousands of images to the page.

This is what it looks like. I started by just scrolling through the random images that appeared when I opened the page, then I went back and typed in 'sport' to see what images would appear.


How to use this with our EFL ESL students
This is a great tool to use with a projector or an interactive whiteboard as we can put it up in front of the whole class. Most of these suggestions would also work if we had students working in small groups or pairs around a computer too.

  • Word association - Get your students to associate words with the images as you scroll through them. 1 student to each image. Once you have got through 20 or 30 words, get the students to work alone or in pairs and try to write down all the words they heard. You can scroll back through the images to help them remember.
  • Brainstorming vocabulary - Type a tag word based on a theme you will be studying into the search field and scroll through images getting students to suggest words that the images evoke on the topic.
  • Rapid sentences - You could do a similar activity to the word association one, by working round the class getting each student to produce a sentence about each image as they appear (one student for each image). This will enable you to push the students fluency, by getting them to think quickly as you scroll to the next image. Again you could consolidate this by getting them to write down or try to remember the sentence that was produced for each image. This will ensure that students do actually listen to each other.
  • Stream of consciousness story - You could make the above exercise more challenging by telling the students that each sentences for each image had to become part of an ongoing story and then see if they can remember the story at the end.
  • Picture grammar drills - You could use the pictures to create drills, by telling the students they have to make a sentence about each picture using a particular verb form. This could be present continuous (describing what is happening in the picture) 'going to' + infinitive (predicting what is about to happen in the picture) present perfect (describing what has just happened before the image was created). This makes drilling a much more engaging and creative activity. Each student could create a drill sentence per image and the other students could copy them or you could go round the class getting a different student to create a sentence individually for each picture.
  • Memory game - Get your students to watch as you scroll through 10 - 20 images. Then stop and put them in pairs to try to remember what all of the images were and describe them. Then scroll back and see how many they got right.
  • What's the association? - If you try more abstract words such as 'skinny' or 'vocabulary', the images produced can have only a very tangential connection to the search term. This is perhaps a good way to get students thinking more carefully about the way the words are used and what connotations they have as they try to explain the connection between the tag word and the image.
  • New words dictionary - As new words come up during the class you can search these and find images which help students to understand the new word. This strong visual should aid their memory. They could even decide on which image best illustrates the word and copy it into a digital vocabulary record of some kind.

What I like about this site
  • It's free and very easy to use
  • The site gives you access to far more images / flashcards than you could possibly ever carry into class
  • There is a constant stream of really high quality striking images
  • One of the things I like is the unpredictability. The images change each time you return to the site and there seems to be a constant stream of new ones.
  • Really nicely designed site

What I'm not so sure about
  • You might find the odd inappropriate image depending on what your search term is and depending on the age and cultural background of your students.
  • The site does sometimes produce some very curious results for some words!
  • Sometimes you can get a sequence of very similar images, if someone has just uploaded a batch of images with the same tag to to flickr.
Well there it is. Flickriver, another really great image tool. I hope you enjoy it and are able to use some of these ideas with your students and of course do leave a comment if you want to suggest other ideas.
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Nik Peachey

A Tool for Comparing Words

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I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in.
There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle, (an alternative is Google Fight) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar.
Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in'

The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context.
If you compare this with the first result for 'operate in' you can see the context is quite different and in this context it has a different meaning.
By extracting these 'real' examples of the way the language is used and helping students to analyse and make deductions about the language we can help students to develop valuable autonomous learning skills.

So how can we use this with our students?
  • This is a great way for students to search and compare the use of prepositions when they aren't sure which is the correct one to use.

  • Likewise it can be really useful for checking collocations and the way they the different words and phrase are used, as in the 'operate' example I gave above.
  • You could also use it to check word forms when checking the different parts of speech of a word. With word like 'economic' and 'economical' which are both adjectives, students can check to see how the different forms are used and when to use the correct one.
  • Students could also use this to check different spellings of words to find out which is correct.
  • When learning or teaching new vocabulary we could use this tool to extract examples of similar words being used in context. We could use these to create gap-fil sentences, cloze texts and other learning materials for students.
  • We could get students to find real examples sentences which use the new words they are learning especially words with synonyms (slim, skinny) or words that have gradients, to see how the different words are used and when to use each one.
  • We can get students to compare British and American words to see which is most popular.
  • Students can compare the popularity of idomatic expressions like 'Raining cats and dogs' vs 'Storm in a tea cup'.
  • Students can search the results for two different words to find out which one has the most uses / different meanings.
  • We can also use this tool for discussion warmers comparing popularity of things. Which of these do you think is most popular?
    Dogs or cats?
    Madonna or Britney Spears?
    Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?
    cook or chef?
    Students can vote on which they think will win and why they think it will be most popular.
What I like about it?
  • Simplicity.
  • This is a free and easy tool to use which gives you much of the power of a concordancer.
  • Because it links in to Google it gives you access to vast amounts of information about the words.
What I'm not so sure about?
  • Because it links into Google to search examples from the internet, you can't control what your students see in the results, so some of the results may link to inappropriate materials.
  • It searches words within text, so it gives youy limited information about how the words are used in spoken language.
Well I hope you enjoy Google Battle and find it useful and if you have any other ideas for using it please do post a comment.

Related links:
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Nik Peachey

Exploiting Image Sequences

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I have to admit that when I first saw Bubblr, I thought it was just a simple tool for adding speech and thought bubbles to images, but when I started to try it out I discovered that it can do far more than that.

You can use Bubblr to search through Flickr images, then drag them onto an image line and create a long sequences of images with text /speech bubbles / thought bubbles etc. These can then be printed, saved online or embedded into a blog.

This quick tutorial shows you how it's done.



Right click to download an .mov version Bubblr tutorial

So how can we use this with our EFL ESL Students?
  • Possibly one of the easiest ways to use this tool is like a picture dictionary. If you have a data projector in your classroom you can use it live to cross-check vocabulary and ask your students which they think is the best image to depict a word. By the end of the class you could have a sequence of images that represent all the new words students have learned in that lesson and then simply upload them to a class blog.
  • This could even prompt some discussion of more complex words. For example, which of these would be the best image to represent the word 'Medication'?

  • Your students could create and save their own vocabulary records and even upload them to their own or a class blog to share.
  • You could use a collection of images based around a theme as a prompt for essay writing or discussion. These are images all based around the key word Poverty.

  • You could create images of poems or haiku by finding images based around key words in the poem. You could use these without the words as prompts to help students memorise poems. Here's an example Haiku

  • You could use it for its intended purpose and create comic strips for your students, get them to create their own comic strips, or create your own strips and ask them to add the text. What do you think these people are saying? Conversations

  • If you are feeling really experimental you could try using a collection of images in place of your power point presentation. You can use images to make a strong visual connection to what you are saying and people are much more likely to listen to you if they aren't trying to read text or bullet points.
  • You could use images to revise different verb forms. Here's an example Haircut


What I like about it
  • The site is free and easy to use and gives you access to a huge volume of images that can easily be searched.
  • You can produce materials and activities really quickly.
  • I really like that you can embed the image sequences into blogs or link to them.
  • You don't have to register or part with any personal information or even an email address.
  • You an create online materials or print up on paper.
What I'm not so sure about
  • You should be careful about letting younger learners use the site as some of the images can be more adult orientated.
  • The search depends on the tags that users have labeled their images with and these can sometimes seem a bit odd. This can be used to your advantage though as you can get students to talk think about the association between the image and the search word.
Well I hope you find this a useful tool and if you think of other uses for it by all means leave a comment.

Related links:

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Nik Peachey

Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL

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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 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:
Activities for students:
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Nik Peachey

Games With a Purpose and a Social Network

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Well who would believe it? A social network built around playing word games with online partners! This may not sound like a great idea, but I have to say that I'm impressed! Gwap (Games With a Purpose) is a collection of 5 basic word games which you can play in collaboration with an online partner (The website automatically finds you one).



The site has a selection of five rather addictive games:
  • The ESP game. You and your partner both see an image and you have to type in as many words as you can that you associate with the image, until you and your partner come up with the same word ( that's the ESP bit). This is great vocabulary practice and pretty addictive too. You play to a time limit ( about 3 mins) and get a score at the end.
  • Tag a Tune. This is a fantastic idea. You and your online partner both hear a tune and you both have to type a description of the tune. You then have to decide if you were both listening to the same tune or a different tune. Great writing practice and again done against a time limit with points awarded.
  • Verbosity ( a variation on the classroom 'Hot Seat' game). You and your partner take it in turns to see and describe a word. The partner who can't see the word has to guess it. When you are describing the word you have specific sentences that you complete as clues. This not only helps to develop vocabulary skills, but also helps develop students abilities to explain new words which they don't understand.
  • Squigl. This is an image based game. You see an image and a word and you have to hold down your mouse and outline the place on the image where you see the object of the word. Great for vocabulary building.
  • Matchin. This is the least useful game in terms of developing vocabulary, but is still quite interesting. You and your partner see two images and you both click on the one you like the most. If you click on the same one, you get points.
All of these games are played against a time limit and you are awarded points, though you work collaboratively with your online partner.

Where's the social part?Well you have the option to start chatting with them at the end of each game and you can also set up a profile with picture and demographic information, which the site uses to help select a similar playing partner for you (though this is optional).

I was actually more interested in the games than the chatting, though with the last game, particularly if you are choosing similar pictures a lot, it might be interesting to chat and find out how similar the person you are working with is. It's also a good bit of language practice for your students if they do, though as ever they should be careful to protect their privacy and identity.

How to use this with students
  • Just get them online and get them playing the games.
  • They could do it from home as homework and you could set them a score to reach, or see who can get the highest score.
  • You could use them as warmers at the beginning of class, especially if you have an IWB or data projector, or as fillers for early finishers in a multimedia room.

What I liked about it
  • It's free, though you do have to register, easy to use and fun.
  • Students work collaboratively rather than competitively
  • The games are really nicely designed, visually very attractive and have good use of multimedia
  • They are 'authentic' rather than being made for language learners, though they are really well suited to the ELT / EFL classroom.
  • The site was set up by Carnegie Mellon University so you can be reasonably sure there isn't some large dark corporation doing unspeakable things with your personal data
  • The site is actually being used as a way of tagging images and audio, so your time is being put to good use and helping the world become a better place ( find out more)

What I wasn't so sure about
  • There's not much I don't like about the site. It's shame that you 'have to' register to play the games, especially as you are supposed to be 13 or over to register, but this is due to the chat functionality.
  • Also, as with any site that contains images, there is the potential for some of these images to be offensive to your students, but there is a small button for them to click to flag offensive content, and that in itself is a good form of training.

Well hope your students enjoy the site and that you don't get too addicted to plan a lesson.

Best

Nik

Your big carbon feet

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I’ve just seen this new website called the Carbon Account. It’s sort of an ecology 2.0 social network. Once you register you fill in details about your household and your travels, the meter readings for your bills and the amount of miles you travel in your car etc and it will then calculate your carbon emissions for you.

You can see what the carbon emissions of other users are too and work at reducing your carbon emissions. You also have the option to network with other site users to offer support and encouragement, so the site is a bit like a weight watchers for the environmentally sound!

If you want to see how it works then take a look at the video on the site at:

The site also has some well written information on what carbon emissions are and how they are calculated. The site owners can also help set up special accounts for groups and give tips on reducing emissions.

This is a really good site to base a class project on.
  • Collecting and inputting the relevant data provides a lot of rich vocabulary work for language learners as well as having a meaningful outcome, and building awareness of the environment and our impact on it.
  • Students could monitor their carbon emissions over the course of a few months and see who can reduce them the most.
The only thing that does bother me about the site, is that it involves parting with quite a lot of detailed personal information, but they do seem to have a sound a very reassuring privacy policy. So why not give it a try with your students.

Hope it goes well

Best

Nik
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‏إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات vocabulary. إظهار كافة الرسائل
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السبت، 15 مارس 2014

Creating social phrasebooks with Phraseum

I spend a lot of time looking at different web-based tools and apps and thinking about if and how they can be used for learning. Sometimes it takes some thought and at other times it’s really obvious. With Phraseum it was instantly obvious that this was a really great tool for learning.


Phraseum allows you to collect words, phrases and sentences from anywhere on the web while you you browse and organise them into social phrasebooks.


Phraseum is a browser-based tool which can be activated from your browser toolbar. Simply create an account and then drag the ‘Clipping button’ bookmarklet to your favourites bar on your browser.


Once that’s done you can just collect any words or phrases that you find online by highlighting them and then clicking on the bookmarklet. This opens up a window where you can add tags to the phrase and add your own private notes and annotations. The tags could be a definition, translation, part of speech or something about the context in which it could be used. You can then save the phrase into one of your phrasebooks. The phrases and phrasebooks can be private or they can be made public and so shared with others.


If you want to include specific words or phrases from a word document or PDF, you can also just type in the words or phrases you want to include in your phrasebooks, but if you save them from the web then Phraseum also stores a link back to the original source, so you can go back and see how the word or phrase is used in context. You can also get a link from the phrase to a translation from Google Translate.


Phraseum is social, so you can share phrases and phrasebooks with anyone else on the site and follow other people if you like the kinds of things they are saving and sharing. You can also click on any of the tags on your phrase to find other related words or phrases which have been saved by other users and add those to your own collection.

If you use social media with your students you can post the phrases you save through various social media channels so this is a great way to feed information and activities into something like a Facebook group or page or a Twitter feed that you use with students.

All of the entries you make to Phraseum can be edited and changed, so students can always add additional tags, change them and add the same entry to multiple phrasebooks.

Phraseum also enables you to follow people in a similar way to Twitter or Pinterest. If you follow people you can see their public phrasebooks and keep up-to-date with what they are saving.



This is really useful if you are using it with students, as by following them you can easily monitor their work and use the comments feature if you need to help, support or encourage your students.

Here are a few examples of phrasebooks I've created:

How to use Phraseum with students
  • You could get started just by creating a few of your own useful phrasebooks and sharing them with your students.
  • If you like to pre-teach vocabulary, a good way to do this would be to create a vocabulary phrasebook from a particular online article you would like your students to read. They can look at the phrasebook before they read and check they understand the vocabulary, or use it as a reference while or after they read.
  • You could also collect a phrasebook with a collections of more random words and phrases and see if the students can predict the genre or kind of text the phrases came from.
  • You can collect phrases into a phrasebook and ask students to suggest appropriate tags to add.
  • If you train your students to use Phraseum then they can start using it to create phrasebooks while they read. They can sort new words into specific groups. They could be grouped according to the source or topic or they could group words according to word classification such as parts of speech or types of collocation.
  • You can get students to share phrasebooks and crosscheck so that they share vocabulary and check that they have similar definitions or translations of the words.
  • You can send students on treasure hunts for specific things, for example searching for business related collocations. If they use this as the tag they will then be able to share their results together (any tag you click on shows you all other words and phrases which share that same tag).
  • Get students to use the phrasebooks to revise and review their vocabulary.

What I like about Phraseum
  • I love that it works in the browser tool bar. This makes it really easy and quick to access at any time you are online.
  • I really like the social aspect too. Being able to share and compare phrasebooks with other people is really useful.
  • It’s great that it makes it easy for students to go back to the source of the word or phrase.
  • Saving phrases really encourages students to think about words within lexical chunks rather than as independent entities.
  • Phraseum can be used in multiple languages.
  • It’s free.
I think this is a great tool to support more of a lexical approach to online learning. It can also support students digital literacy and study skills. I hope you and your students find Phraseum useful. Be sure to share in the comments any ideas you have for using it with your students.

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Nik Peachey
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الاثنين، 15 ديسمبر 2008

Online Video: For Language Development

There are now a number of online video sharing communities that are specifically designed to support the development of language and communication skills. These websites don't just provide us with video content, but also the tools to help us make authentic video accessible to learners.

Dotsub
Authentic video can be very challenging for language learners so at times it is useful to have translation in subtitles or a transcription of the text. Dotsub is a website that enables users to upload and add subtitles to their videos. The site is community based, so you can upload your video and request that someone else translates it for you, or you can also help other people by translating or transcribing their video. You can also import videos from YouTube to add subtitles to them.
To find out more read: Subtitling your video clips

LangoLab
LangoLab is a video sharing website designed for anyone who want to learn or teach any language. Users upload videos and add transcripts. Learners can then listen to the video and follow the transcript. They can click on words in the transcript to get definitions, and create their won flashcards to help them remember the words.

To learn more about this site go to: Language Learning through Communal Video

Yappr
Yappr is another community site that allows users to upload and transcribe videos. It is also community based so that registered users to the site can interact, get to know each other and help each other learn each other’s language.

Find out more about Yappr here: Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL

Yolango
Yolango takes things a step further. It not only enables users to create transcripts and translations, but they can also create and do a number activities based around the video. These include gapfil exercises, comprehension questions and vocabulary building tests.

The site is free, but users must register to do the activities. The site will also track their score. The site uses authentic video many of them either music videos or popular movies. It’s more directed at older learners.
Read more about this site: Ready Made Authentic Video materials For ESL EFL

Wordia
Wordia is a user created video dictionary. Anyone can choose a word that they like and create a video talking about what the word means. In this way users of the English language are starting to redefine the language according to popular use.

The definitions that people give are more like short narratives, but this is still a useful resource and you can get your students to create their own online dictionary using 12seconds.tv, like this definition of headache
Read more about Wordia here: Video Dictionary 2.0

Well I hope this gives you some insight into some of the sites that are helping to do the work for us. If you know of any more, by all means do leave a comment.

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Nik Peachey
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الاثنين، 1 ديسمبر 2008

A River of Images

I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver, an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site.

This is great because it provides you with and endless stream (or I should say river) of images as you scroll down the page. You can keep scrolling and pull in thousands of images to the page.

This is what it looks like. I started by just scrolling through the random images that appeared when I opened the page, then I went back and typed in 'sport' to see what images would appear.


How to use this with our EFL ESL students
This is a great tool to use with a projector or an interactive whiteboard as we can put it up in front of the whole class. Most of these suggestions would also work if we had students working in small groups or pairs around a computer too.

  • Word association - Get your students to associate words with the images as you scroll through them. 1 student to each image. Once you have got through 20 or 30 words, get the students to work alone or in pairs and try to write down all the words they heard. You can scroll back through the images to help them remember.
  • Brainstorming vocabulary - Type a tag word based on a theme you will be studying into the search field and scroll through images getting students to suggest words that the images evoke on the topic.
  • Rapid sentences - You could do a similar activity to the word association one, by working round the class getting each student to produce a sentence about each image as they appear (one student for each image). This will enable you to push the students fluency, by getting them to think quickly as you scroll to the next image. Again you could consolidate this by getting them to write down or try to remember the sentence that was produced for each image. This will ensure that students do actually listen to each other.
  • Stream of consciousness story - You could make the above exercise more challenging by telling the students that each sentences for each image had to become part of an ongoing story and then see if they can remember the story at the end.
  • Picture grammar drills - You could use the pictures to create drills, by telling the students they have to make a sentence about each picture using a particular verb form. This could be present continuous (describing what is happening in the picture) 'going to' + infinitive (predicting what is about to happen in the picture) present perfect (describing what has just happened before the image was created). This makes drilling a much more engaging and creative activity. Each student could create a drill sentence per image and the other students could copy them or you could go round the class getting a different student to create a sentence individually for each picture.
  • Memory game - Get your students to watch as you scroll through 10 - 20 images. Then stop and put them in pairs to try to remember what all of the images were and describe them. Then scroll back and see how many they got right.
  • What's the association? - If you try more abstract words such as 'skinny' or 'vocabulary', the images produced can have only a very tangential connection to the search term. This is perhaps a good way to get students thinking more carefully about the way the words are used and what connotations they have as they try to explain the connection between the tag word and the image.
  • New words dictionary - As new words come up during the class you can search these and find images which help students to understand the new word. This strong visual should aid their memory. They could even decide on which image best illustrates the word and copy it into a digital vocabulary record of some kind.

What I like about this site
  • It's free and very easy to use
  • The site gives you access to far more images / flashcards than you could possibly ever carry into class
  • There is a constant stream of really high quality striking images
  • One of the things I like is the unpredictability. The images change each time you return to the site and there seems to be a constant stream of new ones.
  • Really nicely designed site

What I'm not so sure about
  • You might find the odd inappropriate image depending on what your search term is and depending on the age and cultural background of your students.
  • The site does sometimes produce some very curious results for some words!
  • Sometimes you can get a sequence of very similar images, if someone has just uploaded a batch of images with the same tag to to flickr.
Well there it is. Flickriver, another really great image tool. I hope you enjoy it and are able to use some of these ideas with your students and of course do leave a comment if you want to suggest other ideas.
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Nik Peachey
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الأربعاء، 5 نوفمبر 2008

A Tool for Comparing Words

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in.
There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle, (an alternative is Google Fight) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar.
Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in'

The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context.
If you compare this with the first result for 'operate in' you can see the context is quite different and in this context it has a different meaning.
By extracting these 'real' examples of the way the language is used and helping students to analyse and make deductions about the language we can help students to develop valuable autonomous learning skills.

So how can we use this with our students?
  • This is a great way for students to search and compare the use of prepositions when they aren't sure which is the correct one to use.

  • Likewise it can be really useful for checking collocations and the way they the different words and phrase are used, as in the 'operate' example I gave above.
  • You could also use it to check word forms when checking the different parts of speech of a word. With word like 'economic' and 'economical' which are both adjectives, students can check to see how the different forms are used and when to use the correct one.
  • Students could also use this to check different spellings of words to find out which is correct.
  • When learning or teaching new vocabulary we could use this tool to extract examples of similar words being used in context. We could use these to create gap-fil sentences, cloze texts and other learning materials for students.
  • We could get students to find real examples sentences which use the new words they are learning especially words with synonyms (slim, skinny) or words that have gradients, to see how the different words are used and when to use each one.
  • We can get students to compare British and American words to see which is most popular.
  • Students can compare the popularity of idomatic expressions like 'Raining cats and dogs' vs 'Storm in a tea cup'.
  • Students can search the results for two different words to find out which one has the most uses / different meanings.
  • We can also use this tool for discussion warmers comparing popularity of things. Which of these do you think is most popular?
    Dogs or cats?
    Madonna or Britney Spears?
    Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?
    cook or chef?
    Students can vote on which they think will win and why they think it will be most popular.
What I like about it?
  • Simplicity.
  • This is a free and easy tool to use which gives you much of the power of a concordancer.
  • Because it links in to Google it gives you access to vast amounts of information about the words.
What I'm not so sure about?
  • Because it links into Google to search examples from the internet, you can't control what your students see in the results, so some of the results may link to inappropriate materials.
  • It searches words within text, so it gives youy limited information about how the words are used in spoken language.
Well I hope you enjoy Google Battle and find it useful and if you have any other ideas for using it please do post a comment.

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Nik Peachey
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الخميس، 16 أكتوبر 2008

Exploiting Image Sequences

I have to admit that when I first saw Bubblr, I thought it was just a simple tool for adding speech and thought bubbles to images, but when I started to try it out I discovered that it can do far more than that.

You can use Bubblr to search through Flickr images, then drag them onto an image line and create a long sequences of images with text /speech bubbles / thought bubbles etc. These can then be printed, saved online or embedded into a blog.

This quick tutorial shows you how it's done.



Right click to download an .mov version Bubblr tutorial

So how can we use this with our EFL ESL Students?
  • Possibly one of the easiest ways to use this tool is like a picture dictionary. If you have a data projector in your classroom you can use it live to cross-check vocabulary and ask your students which they think is the best image to depict a word. By the end of the class you could have a sequence of images that represent all the new words students have learned in that lesson and then simply upload them to a class blog.
  • This could even prompt some discussion of more complex words. For example, which of these would be the best image to represent the word 'Medication'?

  • Your students could create and save their own vocabulary records and even upload them to their own or a class blog to share.
  • You could use a collection of images based around a theme as a prompt for essay writing or discussion. These are images all based around the key word Poverty.

  • You could create images of poems or haiku by finding images based around key words in the poem. You could use these without the words as prompts to help students memorise poems. Here's an example Haiku

  • You could use it for its intended purpose and create comic strips for your students, get them to create their own comic strips, or create your own strips and ask them to add the text. What do you think these people are saying? Conversations

  • If you are feeling really experimental you could try using a collection of images in place of your power point presentation. You can use images to make a strong visual connection to what you are saying and people are much more likely to listen to you if they aren't trying to read text or bullet points.
  • You could use images to revise different verb forms. Here's an example Haircut


What I like about it
  • The site is free and easy to use and gives you access to a huge volume of images that can easily be searched.
  • You can produce materials and activities really quickly.
  • I really like that you can embed the image sequences into blogs or link to them.
  • You don't have to register or part with any personal information or even an email address.
  • You an create online materials or print up on paper.
What I'm not so sure about
  • You should be careful about letting younger learners use the site as some of the images can be more adult orientated.
  • The search depends on the tags that users have labeled their images with and these can sometimes seem a bit odd. This can be used to your advantage though as you can get students to talk think about the association between the image and the search word.
Well I hope you find this a useful tool and if you think of other uses for it by all means leave a comment.

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Nik Peachey
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الأربعاء، 3 سبتمبر 2008

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 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.

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Activities for students:
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Nik Peachey
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الجمعة، 16 مايو 2008

Games With a Purpose and a Social Network

Well who would believe it? A social network built around playing word games with online partners! This may not sound like a great idea, but I have to say that I'm impressed! Gwap (Games With a Purpose) is a collection of 5 basic word games which you can play in collaboration with an online partner (The website automatically finds you one).



The site has a selection of five rather addictive games:
  • The ESP game. You and your partner both see an image and you have to type in as many words as you can that you associate with the image, until you and your partner come up with the same word ( that's the ESP bit). This is great vocabulary practice and pretty addictive too. You play to a time limit ( about 3 mins) and get a score at the end.
  • Tag a Tune. This is a fantastic idea. You and your online partner both hear a tune and you both have to type a description of the tune. You then have to decide if you were both listening to the same tune or a different tune. Great writing practice and again done against a time limit with points awarded.
  • Verbosity ( a variation on the classroom 'Hot Seat' game). You and your partner take it in turns to see and describe a word. The partner who can't see the word has to guess it. When you are describing the word you have specific sentences that you complete as clues. This not only helps to develop vocabulary skills, but also helps develop students abilities to explain new words which they don't understand.
  • Squigl. This is an image based game. You see an image and a word and you have to hold down your mouse and outline the place on the image where you see the object of the word. Great for vocabulary building.
  • Matchin. This is the least useful game in terms of developing vocabulary, but is still quite interesting. You and your partner see two images and you both click on the one you like the most. If you click on the same one, you get points.
All of these games are played against a time limit and you are awarded points, though you work collaboratively with your online partner.

Where's the social part?Well you have the option to start chatting with them at the end of each game and you can also set up a profile with picture and demographic information, which the site uses to help select a similar playing partner for you (though this is optional).

I was actually more interested in the games than the chatting, though with the last game, particularly if you are choosing similar pictures a lot, it might be interesting to chat and find out how similar the person you are working with is. It's also a good bit of language practice for your students if they do, though as ever they should be careful to protect their privacy and identity.

How to use this with students
  • Just get them online and get them playing the games.
  • They could do it from home as homework and you could set them a score to reach, or see who can get the highest score.
  • You could use them as warmers at the beginning of class, especially if you have an IWB or data projector, or as fillers for early finishers in a multimedia room.

What I liked about it
  • It's free, though you do have to register, easy to use and fun.
  • Students work collaboratively rather than competitively
  • The games are really nicely designed, visually very attractive and have good use of multimedia
  • They are 'authentic' rather than being made for language learners, though they are really well suited to the ELT / EFL classroom.
  • The site was set up by Carnegie Mellon University so you can be reasonably sure there isn't some large dark corporation doing unspeakable things with your personal data
  • The site is actually being used as a way of tagging images and audio, so your time is being put to good use and helping the world become a better place ( find out more)

What I wasn't so sure about
  • There's not much I don't like about the site. It's shame that you 'have to' register to play the games, especially as you are supposed to be 13 or over to register, but this is due to the chat functionality.
  • Also, as with any site that contains images, there is the potential for some of these images to be offensive to your students, but there is a small button for them to click to flag offensive content, and that in itself is a good form of training.

Well hope your students enjoy the site and that you don't get too addicted to plan a lesson.

Best

Nik
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الجمعة، 18 أبريل 2008

Your big carbon feet

I’ve just seen this new website called the Carbon Account. It’s sort of an ecology 2.0 social network. Once you register you fill in details about your household and your travels, the meter readings for your bills and the amount of miles you travel in your car etc and it will then calculate your carbon emissions for you.

You can see what the carbon emissions of other users are too and work at reducing your carbon emissions. You also have the option to network with other site users to offer support and encouragement, so the site is a bit like a weight watchers for the environmentally sound!

If you want to see how it works then take a look at the video on the site at:

The site also has some well written information on what carbon emissions are and how they are calculated. The site owners can also help set up special accounts for groups and give tips on reducing emissions.

This is a really good site to base a class project on.
  • Collecting and inputting the relevant data provides a lot of rich vocabulary work for language learners as well as having a meaningful outcome, and building awareness of the environment and our impact on it.
  • Students could monitor their carbon emissions over the course of a few months and see who can reduce them the most.
The only thing that does bother me about the site, is that it involves parting with quite a lot of detailed personal information, but they do seem to have a sound a very reassuring privacy policy. So why not give it a try with your students.

Hope it goes well

Best

Nik
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