Peer editing in digital and mobile environments

For years now I have been happily using EtherPad based services like http://primarypad.com/ and http://sync.in/ to get participants on the training courses I deliver to work collaboratively to create and peer edit texts. Increasingly though I've been having problems with the reliability of the free services these companies provide and the lack of reliable compatibility with mobile devices.

At last it seems that now I have a very elegant solution in the form of https://quip.com/.
Quip looks a lot like Evernote and has a similar interface with documents contained in notebooks, but one of the big differences is that Quip was designed specifically to enable peer editing and collaboration on documents and has a very clear way of showing and tracking the changes.

Here's a short tutorial showing you how it works:


Why should we get our students peer editing?

• It improves their awareness of accuracy
• It can improve the quality of their writing
• Pushes students to accept that writing is a process that needs revisions and redrafting
• The ability to collaborate in digital environments is likely to be an important real world digital literacy

What kinds of peer editing activities can we do with students?

• We can give them texts with planted errors (10 - 20) in to work on a find and correct together. These could be the lyrics of songs they like or stories or articles they have read.
• We can get students to correct each others' compositions before we look at them.
• We can give them texts with specific features missed out and get them to work together to add them. These could be linking or referencing devices, punctuation, vocabulary words, grammatical features such as prepositions or articles etc.
• We can get them working together to rearrange parts of a text into a better order or structure.
• We can give them the bare structure of a story and ask them to embellish it and make it more descriptive and interesting.

What I like about Quip

• It's free
• Nicely designed interface
• Works and looks well in both tablet  app form and in the browser
• Clearly tracks and highlights changes to documents by different users
• It looks secure and enables you to limit who sees and works on the document while editing
• Has a kind of chat messaging feature which works along side the notes for changes
• We can use it to get students collaborating and working together outside the classroom

What I'm not so sure about

• It requires registration, which can slow things down in class, but it does also add a degree of security
• I haven't tried it with larger groups yet so I'm not sure how reliably it will function when scaled up to say having a whole class work synchronously on a single document
• Not sure how long it will stay free (There is a Quip Business already available)

I'm now looking forward to my next course so that I can try Quip out and get a bit more experience with it. I hope you also find it useful with your students. Do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

Related links:

• What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need? 
• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation 
• How I use social media for my professional development  
• Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey

Revising Short Texts and Syntax on IWB

WordMagnets is a really useful tool that students can either use alone on a computer, or that you can use in class with a projector or IWB.

Here's a short video showing you how to use it.



You can download a copy of the video here and copy suitable for iPod here.

WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange. Here's a text that I quickly copied in from an article about J. K. Rowling.

I clicked on 'Next', then ignored the opportunity to change the background and clicked 'Next' again and I had these randomised word tiles that I could then drag to recreate the text.


This is a great tool that has some really useful features. You can type in and add words to the text, or you can delete word tiles from the text by clicking on remove then clicking the words you want to get rid of.

You can also change the colour and size of the tiles, which could be useful if you really want them to stand out on a whiteboard or dataprojector.

How can we use this with students?

• Revising text - You can get students to test themselves working alone or in pairs on a computer. They simply copy and paste short snippets of text into the text field and generate their won activities. Just two sentences at a time should be enough (Try it, it's harder than you think). Then they have to drag the words back into the correct order. They can check against the original source to se if they get it right. This is great to help them develop an awareness of syntax and collocation.
• Dialogue build - You can type or copy some short dialogues either from your coursebook or by grabbing text from a movie script (Here's a site that has a huge collection of movie scripts that you can copy and paste from: Drew's Script-O-Rama). First get the students to read or listen to the short dialogues then get them to work together to arrange the words into the correct order (This would be a great time to have the dialogue on an IWB and students could actually come up and drag the words into the correct order themselves).
• Once you have the words in order you can get students to practice saying the dialogue. Once they have done it a few times, gradually start deleting words. Start with less important ones like articles and prepositions, so that the key 'sense' carrying words remain. See if your students can still say the dialogue. Then ask them to rebuild the text again adding the missing words. This is a great way to get students internalising dialogue.
• Error noticing - You could use the tool to revise a text with the whole class and actually add in some words that didn't appear in the text as distractors or delete some words and see if students can guess which ones are missing.
• Extending sentences - You could get the students to arrange a short sentence and then start adding new words to it to lengthen the sentence like the telescopic text from this exercise: Extending a Sentence. You could suggest a word to add to the sentence and then students can decide how and where they make it fit and what other words they need to add with it.
• Focus on form - You could use it to focus on form by creating an exercise using examples of sentences with a specific structure that you want to revise. Get the students to arrange the words of the sentences then highlight similarities in structure.
• Parts of speech - You can get students to colour code the parts of speech in the sentence of colour highlight collocations, etc.
  

What I like about it

• Word magnets is free, easy to use.
  
• You can use it to create materials and exercises almost instantly without any preparation.
  
• Once the Flash swf file is open it works quickly in your browser and so doesn't require a fast connection or any software downloads.
• It can push students to really think about syntax and collocation without having to focus too much on applying sets of rules.
• It makes text much easier to manipulate on an IWB (if you have ever tried to create an exercise like this on an IWB, you'll know that it takes a long time).
• You can get students up to the board and moving the words around and changing the colours themselves.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• It's a shame you cant save activities, but at least this means that you aren't violating copyright by cutting and pasting text as all activities are transitory.
• It would be useful to have a solution button that you could click and see the words in the right order. Again though this could also be a benefit because it encourages students to keep trying rather than give up and get the answer.

WordMagnets is a really useful tool whether your students are working alone or whether you are working with them using a projector. I hope you find it useful.

You can find more text based activities for EFL and ESL students here.

Related links:

• Translate Shakespeare 2 Text Lingo 4 Twitter??
  
• Goolge Maps for Directions
• Prompting reading speeds
• Comparing Texts to Aid Noticing
• Write Your Own Quick Biography
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools

Best

Nik Peachey

Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL

Yesterday on my Quick Shout blog, I wrote about a new tool called Xtranormal for creating text to speech animated movies. Since then I've had a little time to put together a tutorial video and think about how to use it in the classroom. First I thought I'd show you what extra normal produces.

There is quite a range of characters and backgrounds so the possibilities for creating situational dialogues is terrific and you can also build these scenes into a series, so this would be great for longer projects too. Here's a quick look at how a movie is created.

• You can watch or download a higher quality version .mov here: Xtranormal tutorial
• Or download to i-tune / iPod: Xtranormal tutorial

So how can we use this with our students?

• We can use it as a novel way to present language in context by creating small scenes for our students to watch.
• We can get our students to create dialogues for specific contexts. You could even give students specific tasks (Convince your partner that taxis are better than buses - Try to convince your partner to buy shares in Mircosoft and not Apple) get the students to work in pairs, taking it in turns to create each side of the dialogue, then they can show the class their work.
• You can get students to create news reports and then create a movie of their own news bulletin.
• You or your students could create monologues of characters telling jokes or stories or reading poems and develop this into an animated talent show.
• Their is both a rating feature and a comments feature, so once students have finished their work they can look at and rate each others' videos
• There is also a 'Remix' button on each movie which enables you to grab a copy of someone else movie and make it your own and remix / change it. You could create movies with errors in the script and ask the students to remix the movie and take out the errors.
• You could create a movie with only one half of the dialogue. Your students would then have to remix it and add the script for the missing person
• You could create the first scene from a story and get your students to create the next scene.
• You could show your students scenes from real films or a TV series and then see how much of the scene they can recreate.
• You could get students to create their own soap opera, adding a new scene each week.

What I like about it

• Well it's free (at the moment) and it's quick and easy to use?
• It's a way of giving students a 'finished product' to showcase the language they are learning.
• It's entertaining and creative.
• It's a very flexible and adaptable tool and could be used by students (over 13 years old) or by you to create materials for your students. You could use it to create materials for young learners through to business courses.
  
• It's a way of getting students to listen and to write.

What I'm not so sure about

• Well I'm not sure how long it will be free. There are signs that the owners intend to start charging, though no signs of how much or whether there would still b a free option.
• Some of the voices that create the speech from the text don't always sound 100% real, though in cartoon type animation I think this is reasonably acceptable.
• Not everyone using the site is doing so for educational purposes, s some of the animations that are already there could be inappropriate for younger learners or offensive to older ones.

Well I hope you find the time to try Xtranormal with your students and by all means share any ideas, tips or materials you create (just add a link in the comments).

Related links:

• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials
• Extending a Sentence
• 60 Second Writing Activity
• Create an English Cartoon

Best
Nik Peachey

Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts

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

• The site also offers talking squirrels

• Talking cats

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

So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I like about this site

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

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

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

Related links:

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

Activities for students:

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

Best

Nik Peachey

Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students

For a long time now I've really admired and been fascinated by the work of AmanitaDesign. They have a really unique approach and I love the way they blend photographic textures with cartoon images.

I also find their games quite addictive and that's I quality I always look for when trying to find stimulating materials for students, so I've been looking at how these games could used for language development.

The two games I've chosen for this posting are Samorost 1 and Samorost 2

Samorost 1 is based on the scenario of an asteroid heading towards a planet. The player has to click various elements of the screen and find out how to help Samorost change the direction of the asteroid and save his planet.
In Samorost 2, Somorost's dog is stolen by aliens and the player has to help Samorost rescue the dog.


So why use these games with EFL ESL students

• These games are fascinating and very engaging.
• They are quite mentally challenging and help students to develop analytical and critical thinking skills.
• They are beautifully designed and should stimulate your students imagination
• They are based around strong narratives
• They really are a lot of fun to play and discover
• Online games are a significant part of our younger students' culture
  

So how can we use these games with our EFL ESL students?
Here are a few suggestions to get your students developing their speaking, reading and writing skills.

• Tell the story - Split your class into A and B students. Get all the As to play one game and all the Bs to play another. as they work through the games they should keep notes of what happens and what they try to do to find their way through the game. Once they have finished the game pair one A student up with one B student and ask them to retell the story as if they were Samorost. Once the students have told their stories they can change over games and see if they can work their way through the game by remembering the narrative that their partner told them.

• Write the instructions - Split your students in to As and Bs as above and get your student to work their way through the games and write instructions for how to complete each level. They should then give their instructions to their partner and see if their partner can use the instructions to find their way through the game.

• Write a review of the game - You could ask your students to write a review of one of the games. You could collect these together with reviews of other games and publish them as a small booklet.

• Following instructions - As a reading exercise you could print up the 'walk through' instructions on how to complete the games and see if students can read them and work through all the levels.

• You can find a walkthrough for Samorost 1 here
• You can find a walkthrough for Samorost 2 here
  
  You could use the walkthrough instructions from the first game as a model and get the students to write a walkthrough for the second game.
  
  You can find lots more links to games and their walkthrough instructions here at Games Online
  

• Write the story - You could get your students to play one of the games and then write the story. They could write it as a news report and even use a video camera or web cam to create a news broadcast.

What I'm not so sure about

• Students can get a bit excited and carried away and then they forget to use English
• The games are actually quite challenging and students may well get stuck and frustrated. If this happens you can either let them stop and get them to end the story at that place in the game, or you can give them the walkthrough sheets to help.

Well I hope you enjoy these games as much as I do. If nothing else, they are a visual treat.

Related links:

• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Create your own game
• Looking at There.com

Activities for students:

• The Samorost Game Challenge
• Take a Quiz Adventure Journey

Best

Nik Peachey

Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL

Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots.

Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students.

To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212
The chat bot has beeen programmed with lots of information about Abrham Lincoln and each time you enter a question the bot searches it's log and tries to match key words from your question with its log information.

This all sounds very compicated, but the site actually makes it quite simple to create your own bot which can either be yourself, a fictional character or a historical or real person.

The students can add information to their chat bot in a number of ways:

• Write diary log entries
• Email in the information
• Add answers to random questions
• Type in questions and answers
• Ask the bot questions and then correct the answers.

Here are a couple of video tutorials showing how it is done:

• Teaching your chat bot
• Testing your chat bot

So how do we use this with our EFL ESL students?
All of these ways can be very useful for generating meaningful language practice.

The virtual you - Get students to recreate themselves as a chat bot. They can upload a photograph of themselves and generate random questions to answer. You could also get them to write diary entries for a week or two. Then at the end of term you could get the students to share their chat bots and see which one is the most convincing. this is a noce way of combining a range of personal information questions with a learningg diary. You could also create one for yourself which students could interegate or get the URLs of your students' bots so that you could find out more about them.

Your virtual celebrity - You could ask students to do research on a favourite celebrity or person from history and then use the information they find to create a chat bot of that person. A number of these are already under development, though Lincoln is the only one open for you to chat with at present.
Grammar bot - You could get your students to create their own grammar bot with infformation they have learnt about various grammar points.

Vocabulary bot - Likewise you could try to get students to create a vocabulary bot that has definitions for the new vocabulary they are learning.

Topic expert - You could ask groups of students to create topic experts based around various general knowledge areas then they couldd work in teams to challenge each others' bots in a test of knowledge.

Interview Lincoln - Get your students to interview Lincoln and see what they can find out about him. See if they can decide if it is a real person answering them.

What I like about this site

• It's free and obviously aimed at educationalists
• I'm fascinated by AI and how it can be applied to language learning and language production so..
• It's great that they have ma de it easy to create your own bot, with out having to know about the technology
• I like the selection of random questions it can get students to answers (a task in itself)
• Looks like it could develop into a novel way of sharing knowledge

What I'm not so sure about

• The site is obviously still under development andd a few things don't always work (I had a few problems trying to upload questions and answers in the 'Teach' section
• The site carries some advertising
• Not sure about the ethics of creating bots of real people (not sure if i would want someone else putting words in my bots' mouth)
• Bots aren't real people and sometimes they make stupid mistakes, but as long as our students are aware of this then we could maake it part of the challenge. It might well be worth telling your students about 'The Turing Test': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test a challenge designed in 1950 to try to trick people into thinking a machine was human.

Well for all the problems I still think this is a site that students can enjoy and which can encourage them to produce a lot of accurate language in text form (bots don't understand bad grammar or spelling).

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• AI and Chat Bots for EFL ESL
• Video conferencing for EFL
• A Virtual World for Facebook Users
• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• 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

The videos used in this posting 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

Microblogging for EFL with Plurk

Well I never thought I'd say this, but I've become a fan of microblogging! I have to say that it's mainly because of Plurk. When I first saw Twitter some time back I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I had a look at a few 'twitterers' sharing such information as what they had for lunch or that they were washing their hair and decided there are levels of detail at which information stops being informative - if you know what I mean.

Anyway, as the Twitter phenomenon continued to grow and other players joined the market I decided to give it another try. At the beginning of June I started a Twitter vs Plurk comparison. Now almost 6 weeks later, I have to say that for me Plurk has come out as a clear winner. Watch this demo to see why.

Here's a quick demo of Plurk and some of the features.

• To view the demo in a new window click here (2.7Mb)
• Download the demo as Quicktime movie (4Mb)
• Download the movie for i-pod (5Mb)

What I like about microblogging

• One problem that I constantly have is the amount of information and new things I find that I'd like to share but just don't have time to research and write about. What I have found over the last few weeks is that mircoblogging allows me to share this information, admittedly with less depth, but I've been able to share links to resources that people might find useful, but which I don't have the time to explore in depth.
  
• See my Plurk line here if you'd like to check out the sites I don't have time to write about: http://www.plurk.com/user/NikPeachey
  

What I like about Plurk

• For me the best Plurk feature is the ability to embed video from YouTube and images into the Plurk. This enable users to watch the clip or image without leaving the Plurk interface.
• I also really like the horizontal time line and the way you can scroll back through time lines and thread in comments. Threaded discussion can often become very disjointed and hard to follow on Twitter, but Plurk makes it much clearer which comments are related.
• I like the distinction between friends and fans (friends Plurks can also appear on your line, whereas fans just subscribe to your feed)
• I like the sense of accumulating 'karma' as you develop your plurk presence.
• I love the Plurk widget (you can see it embedded towards the bottom of the right hand column on this page).
• I really like that Plurk gives a choice of verbs for the message
  

So how about using microblogging with EFL studnts
As a teacher you could use microblogging to:

• Share resources and links to useful websites or videos (they open in the interface so students don't have to search around YouTube for them.
• Send out prompts and reminders to students about assignments and due dates.
• You could just use the social aspect to share a bit of what you do each day with them
• Send students images to comment on / describe
  
• Send out words and ask students to respond with a definition.
• Create single sentence assignments that students respond to wit single sentences.
• Create sentences for the students to correct.
• Create a collaborative story. You start the story with one line and each student has to add another using the response feature.
  

Your students could use microblogging to:

• Create a learner diary, recording briefly their language learning activities and insights through the day.
• Ask questions to the groups and get support with new words they find or things they don't understand.
• Post a short sentence each day using a different one of the verbs in the Plurk line
• Share good websites etc.
• Share a little of their world and what they do when they aren't in class.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• It's really hard for a competitor like Plurk to break into a market that Twitter almost invented, so despite the fact that I use Plurk more often and it seems to me a much better product, I've got far more followers on Twitter than I have on Plurk, so the audience potential is much greater with Twitter.
• As ever privacy is something you need to be careful of, and I've found that a few people who have requested friendship only do so to 'spam' my time line. Though that's easy to sort out and stop.

Well which ever you use, whether it's Twitter, Plurk or something else I hope you enjoy your microblogging experience.

Drop me a line if you know of other alternatives, or if you have used these microblogging applications in other ways. As always you comments are welcome (though moderated!).

Best

Nik Peachey

Related links:
See Wikipedia's definition of microblogging
See My Plurk microblog
See My Twitter microblog
See My Plurk demo video on YouTube and grab an embed code.

Using wikis for teacher development

In my two previous features, I've looked at how to create a wiki and how to use them with EFL students. In this posting I'd like to look at a couple of technical aspects, how to embed video in the wiki and how to add hyperlinks, and how we can use them for teacher development.

Let's start with the technical bit. Here are two video tutorials. The first shows how we can embed videos into a WetPaint wiki.


To view this movie in a separate window click here
Right click and the use 'Save as' to download a Quick Time version of this movie

This second one shows how to use hyperlinks to link together text and pages across the wiki.


To view this movie in a separate window click here
Right click and the use 'Save as' to download a Quick Time version of this movie

Wikis, through sites like Wikipedia.org have shown us what incredible power we have to create and share knowledge through the internet. We can also use the power of wikis for teacher development.

How can we use wikis for teacher development?

• You could use a wiki as a kind of scrapbook to collect together ideas you have on teaching, such as links to or quotes from articles you have read, as well as teaching tips and lesson plans. You could keep your own lesson plans online this way and edit and update them each time you use them. Much of this you could also do on a blog, but using a wiki gives you the opportunity to structure different pages for different topics, like having a classroom management section and a section on teaching pronunciation etc. In this way you could start to collect your own personal teaching manual and, who knows, at some point you might decide to put it live for other people to contribute to or share it with a mentor or peer to help you edit it.
• You could work with a group of trainee teachers and ask them to create a wiki training manual by adding information to each section as they study on their course. You could then see how well they were assimilating the information they were learning on the course and this would give you the opportunity to revise anything they were getting wrong or misunderstanding
• You could create a teaching jargon wiki. At the moment I'm working with a group of teachers and I've created an IT jargon wiki so that anyone who comes across a term they don't understand can add it to the wiki and either I or one of their peers can add a definition. They can also continue to refine these definition and add examples as their knowledge grows.
• You could video yourself teaching, embed the videos, and ask for feedback on your teaching from other peers through your wiki.
• You could use it to collect and share tips on aspects of teaching practice.
• You could work with a group of trainers to create a teacher development course book using the wiki.

I think the possibilities for collaborative projects for teacher development are almost limitless.
I've actually started up a Technology in ELT wiki here which you are welcome to get involved in. http://technogogyelt.wetpaint.com

At the moment this focuses on developing a glossary of IT related terms and definitions, giving access to teachers to ask an answer FAQs, and attempting to define key skills in IT for ELT teacher development. So if you have time feel free to get involved with this. Just register and start to contribute.

I'll be very interested to see how and if this develops over the coming months. If you have any further suggestions or experience of teacher development projects using wikis, please do post a link in the comments.

Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

• How to create a wiki
• Using wikis with EFL students

To have a closer look at WetPaint and create your own wiki go to: http://www.wetpaint.com/

Using wikis with EFL students

In this feature I want to share another tutorial that you can use with your students showing how to edit your wiki and have a look at a live demo wiki that you and your students can play around with.

In my previous post I looked at how to create a wiki using WetPaint and a few of the reasons for using one.

This tutorial shows you how simple it is to edit the wiki. As a demonstration I've set up a wiki using the Cinderella story so once you have had a look, by all means register and have a play around with this.

• View this tutorial in a separate window
• Download a QuickTime version of this tutorial (Right click and then 'Save as' )

So how can we use wikis with our students?

• You can upload student work for collaborative editing, though you should make sure they are comfortable with this first. If they aren't you could try uploading some other documents which need correcting or redrafting and get them to work on those instead.
• Get students to create a story collaboratively. Give them the start or even the start of the first few chapters and get students to add parts to it. The nice part of creating a story in this way is that through hypertext links to other pages you can create 'back stories' filling in information about other characters and telling their stories too. You could start this off by creating or copying a short story of fairy tale and creating hyper links to pages about each of the other characters possibly telling the story from their perspective. For example with the story of Cinderella that I have created, you can tell it from the perspective of an ugly sister or from the rat that got turned into a horse! This is a good way to develop some creative thinking skills and help students to see things from different perspectives.
  
• I've set up an example of this here: http://cinderella-their-story.wetpaint.com/
  Feel free to register and participate or get your students participating in this.
• Some possible tasks you could set students using this wiki are:
• Add some adjectives and adverbs to the text
• Add an extra sentence to one of the back ground stories
• Try to insert a new character into the text
• Find words that you don't understand and add them to the glossary
• Try to add some definitions to some of the glossary words
• Write some questions that you would like to ask some of the characters and put them into the to do list
• Look for questions that someone else has asked about the text and try to include that information in the text.
  

• You could use a wiki as a sort of learning record which all the students could contribute to. This could be based around themes, having separate pages within each theme for vocabulary, useful expressions, grammatical structures, or it could be based around grammar and students could research and share what they know about various tenses and verb forms.
• You could use it to create your own online course book, either working with other teachers or your class. You could get students to select texts and subjects that they are interested in and type / paste them in to pages on the wiki, you or they could then create learning materials to go with the text, as well as adding extra information and background on the them or topic or the grammar or lexis that goes with the text. You would then be able to build on this with other classes.
• You set up collaborative assignments such as Webquests and get students to use the wiki and work together to produce their outcomes
• You could upload or link to videos or images and set group or pair work tasks for students to do. You could use the 'To do' feature of the wiki to set up tasks for different groups or students.
• The wiki also has a lot of communication features so you could set up online discussion / forum tasks with students so that they could discuss the story and make decisions about how they want to change or develop it.
• If you have the means to set up a project with a school in another town or better still another country, you could use the wiki as a cultural research tool. Your students could research the country and the culture of their partner students and create a wiki about it. The partner students could then correct or comment on any errors or misunderstandings of their culture.
  

Wikis are a wonderful tool for students to work together and produce high quality texts. They are also great if you want to be able to share students' work with parents or the rest of the world, or just limit access to your class.

I hope you enjoy using this tool and if you have examples of work that your students have produced using wikis, by all means post a link in the comments section below.

To have a closer look at WetPaint and create your own wiki go to: http://www.wetpaint.com/

Best

Nik Peachey

Related posts

• How to create a wiki
• Using wikis for teacher development

Creating a Wiki

In this feature I'd like to show you how to create your own free wiki using 'Wetpaint' and look at some of the reasons for using wikis to achieve educational goals.

First, for those of you who don't know what a wiki is, here's a quick definition which comes from one of the most famous wikis, wikipedia.org.

"A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content [ ...]. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites."

So, what really differentiates a wiki from a normal website is the fact that anyone who has access to the site can modify its contents (this is often, though not always, restricted to people who create a login or register to use this feature), unlike a normal website, on which the content is usually edited only by the company or person who owns the website.

To show you how easy it is to create your own free wiki, I've recorded these tutorial movies. They are each around 2 mins long and show you how to set up your wiki by using a free service called wetpaint (this takes about 2 -3 mins to do), how to change the style and look of your wiki (this takes about 2 mins) and how to start adding extra pages to your wiki (this takes about 2mins). Hope fully this will convince you that creating your own wiki is not only easy, but it's also very quick.

For anyone having problems with these embedded videos, or who wants higher quality. I've added links to Quick time versions that you can download at the end of this article.

So here is how you set up the wiki using http://www.wetpaint.com/


This movie shows you how to change the style and look of you wiki



This movie shows you how to add new pages.



Hopefully you can see just how easy it is to setup your own wiki.

What I like about wikis

• Wikis are really quick and easy to setup, which means that you can forget about the technical aspects and get busy with the serious business of creating and sharing content.
• The collaborative aspect is great, enabling other users, whether it is a select group or whether you open up the wiki to anyone who wants to contribute, takes the emphasis off you as the creator / author and helps you to share out the work and draw on a much greater pool of knowledge and creativity.
• Many wikis like wetpaint also incorporate other planing and communications features like discussion forums, to do lists, photo galleries etc. which can help you share out the work on the wiki and co-ordinate dispersed teams or group of distance learning students.

What I'm not so sure about

• There isn't much not to like on a wiki, perhaps with the exception of advertising if you decide to opt for a free service. Most service providers also offer a premium ( paid for) service which you can choose if you want to get rid of the ads. This option often gives you access to extra features too. It's definitely worth thinking about a premium service if you work with younger learners, as this will ensure that you don't get any 'unsuitable' advertising springing up along the side of your wiki.
• Wikis can be a bit limiting in terms of design and what you can add to your design, such as amazing Flash games, videos etc, but there are often work arounds to give you access to these.

Well this posting seems to be long enough for now. I hope I convinced you of how easy it is to set up your wiki and in my next postings I'll be looking at how to use wikis with your EFL students and How to use them for teacher development.

Here you can download higher quality versions of the tutorials in Quick Time format

• Setting up a Wiki
• Changing the look and style
• Adding pages

Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

• Using wikis with EFL students
• Using wikis for teacher development