Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook

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

Nik Peachey or Austin Powers?

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I think this is a good site for EFL ESL

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

What could be better

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

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

Related postings:

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

Best

Nik Peachey

Manga images for EFL ESL

Many of our younger and even older students are exposed to and enjoy 'Manga' type cartoon art work. 'Face Your Manga' is a site which enables you and your students to easily create manga type image avatars, so I'd like to explore a few ways we could use this site for EFL ESL development.

The site is quite easy to use and you simply click through a few steps, selecting and adjusting different aspects of your avatar's appearance. Once the avatar is complete, you simply email it to yourself and download it onto you computer as a jpg image.


How can we use this with EFL ESL students?
Here are some activities you could try.

• You could ask students to work at home and try to create an avatar that looks as much as possible like themselves. Ask the students to email their avatars to you. Print these up and then stick them round the class. When students come to class ask them to try to decide which avatars represent which students in the class. Once they have done this, try to get them to describe the features that helped them guess and which features they feel are different in the images from those of the real people.
• Create a few manga images. Then put the students in pairs. Give one student the image and ask them to describe it to their partner (not show it). The partner of each pair then has to create the same image using the website.
• Get students to create their alter ego avatar (someone who is the opposite of themselves). Ask them to bring or email the image to you. You can them print them and ask the students to work in pairs in class and describe the avatar to their partner and explain how the imaginary person is the opposite of themselves in appearance and personality etc.
• Create a set of images and ask students to work in groups or pairs to create an imaginary profile for each character ( information regarding their job, personality, living circumstances, etc). Then ask students to imagine what the relationships between them are. Lastly, ask them to create a short story or soap opera including the characters. Students can then regroup and tell other students about their characters and the story they created.
• Ask students to create an avatar of a specific person (yourself or a celebrity) then email you or bring their images to class. The students can then discuss and decide which looks more like the real person. This should produce a lot of comparing and contrasting type language ("His nose is bigger" 'The mouth is too big" etc.).

Here's an image of myself and my avatar as an example:



What I like about the site

• The ability to create images of imaginary people is really useful for EFL ESL materials creation.
• The art work is good and the number of different characters you can create is huge.
• The site is free to use
• Manga images are part of our learners' culture, so they are likely to find this more motivating
• The interface is pretty easy to use.

What I wasn't so sure about

• The site does try to charge users for immediate printing of their images. This isn't really necessary though as the quality of the emailed one is sufficient.
• You have to submit and email address in order to get the image sent to you. (You could give your students your email address so that all the images are sent to you.)
• You can create avatars which are making rude gestures! It might anyway be wise to deal with what these gestures mean and in which cultures they can be found offensive.

I hope you enjoy Face Your Manga and find these ideas useful. If you want to use an alterantive site that does a similar thing them you could have a look at my posting on DoppelMe

Related postings:

• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth

Best

Nik Peachey

My Personal Best

I've been blogging on this site now for just over a year, so I thought that just before I head off on my holiday for a couple of weeks, I would leave you with what I feel were some of my best postings over the last year or so.

Creating audio-visual monologues
Back in April 2007 I wrote about a nice bit of free recording and lip syncing software that enables students and teachers to create small animated flash characters like this one.

Interactive presentations
Back in September 2007 I discovered Voice Thread and wrote a tutorial and some teaching tips and some ideas for how to use it.

Creating a mobile phone website
In October 2007 I wrote about how to create your own mobile phone based community using Winksite. This included a demo tutorial as well as an example site for you to try out.

Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
In November 2007 I created some tutorials and teaching materials based around two online Role playing games (RPGs) and looked at how thee could be used for EFL/ ESL.

3B Village 3D browser
In December 2007 3B Village added lots of new functionality to there 3D collaborative web browser and this inspired some teaching tips and ideas based around that.

Soundscapes from Soundtransit
In March 2008 I wrote about a wonderful site for sharing and downloading audio files. I really enjoyed this site as it inspired quite a few teaching ideas and tips.

Iconic teen video
From April 2008 I thought that my best posting was a look at the kinds of videos teens are watching on YouTube and the new micro-genres that are developing through that medium.

Immersive Image Environments
In May I discovered one of my favourite browser plugins and one which I still enjoy everyday- PicLens. I wrote some suggestions showing just how useful i thought it could be in class.

Create your own social network 7 steps
Lastly, in June of this year I wrote about creating a social network using Ning. This was a real learning experience for me and I tried to share some of what I had learned from creating a network for a project i have been working on.

I hope you have enjoyed at least some of these postings. I've certainly enjoyed and learned a lot from producing them.

Anyway, I'm off on holiday for the next couple of weeks and will be back with more mid to late August.

Best wishes

Nik Peachey

Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students

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

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


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

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

So why use this with EFL / ESL students?

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

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

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

See the full range of Bubble Joy designs here:

What I'm not so sure about

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

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

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

Best

Nik Peachey

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.

Video conferencing for EFL

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

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

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

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

So what do I like about it?

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

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

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

• Chinese - video - whispers - Use the video email feature to record a short text. Send it to the first of your students. Ask your student to write down the message and then record it themselves and send it to the next student. Each student should rerecord and send the message on to another, until the last student sends it back to you. You will then see how accurately the message matches to your original text.
• Interactive video learning diary - You could get students to create an interactive learning diary, they could email you their video summary of what they feel they have learnt that day and you could then respond. Your videos would form a good learning record and students would be able to look back at them later and see how they had improved -quite literally - and also hear the improvements in their speaking ability. This is also a great way to give your students one-to-one-time which can often be a problem in class.
• Class survey - You could send a video message to your students with a class survey question that they could respond to. This would be a good way to carry out classroom research, decide on learning goals and make sure that all students had a means to feedback to you in private and on an individual basis.
• Different perspectives - Show some of your students a video clip or picture, that includes a number of people (scenes from films with bank robberies, where a number of people are involved are quite useful for this). Then ask the students to imagine that they are one of the people in the film or picture and they need to describe what happened. Ask them to a video giving their account of what happened. You can then ask the other students to imagine they are detectives and watch the clips your students have created and make notes to piece together what happened. The 'detective' students should then try to recreate the scene using the student videos to guide them. Afterwards they can watch the original film clip or picture together and see how well they did and what they missed.
• Favourite poems or haiku - Students could record themselves reading their favourite poem or haiku, you could then embed the videos into a webpage or blog as a class poetry collection.
• Live tutoring support - This looks like an ideal tool for supporting distance learners and doing 'face to face' tutorials.
• Video interviews - You could get in touch with someone for your class to interview. Just have one computer plus camera set up in class, and a visiting expert, friend or colleague on the other end for your students to interview. They could also interview an expert in groups from home with a conference call.
• Video lesson with conferencing - You could use the conference call to video cast your lessons to a group of distance learners.
• Video twitter - using the feed feature you could create a kind of video Twitter, with your students video micro-blogging about learning English, their day at school, or any topic they find interesting.
• Text and video message - Using the video email feature, you could record a video of yourself reading a text, then add the text within the email message. You could include some errors in the text and get them to watch the video and correct the errors.
• Create a collaborative story - Email students a video with the first line of a story and ask them to record your line of the story and add their own, then pass it back, or pass it on to another student. This way you could build up a story between the group over a period of time.
• Tip of the day, word of the day - Send you students a tip or word of the day by video email. These could be exam tips, study tips, recommended websites, or words and definitions.
• Video dictation - Send a video email of yourself dictating a text and ask your students to watch and write the text in the email and send it back to you for correction.

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

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

Possible problems

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

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

Nik Peachey

Similar postings

• Make your own chat room

Naming My Sources: Part 1

I've decided to start naming some of the sources I use to locate new and interesting websites and information. I've decided to do this for a number of reasons

• I just don't have time to write about everything I find, so this gives people the opportunity to find things for themselves and perhaps write about them.
• I always feel guilty that I don't acknowledge the sources of much of the information I get. This isn't because I'm guarding my sources, it has more to do with not working in a very organised way. I tend to mark interesting sites and come back to them later, by which time I can't remember the original source.
• I don't have a blog roll, but I would like to send some kudos to some of the sites and site owners that I feel have really helped me.
• A number of people have asked me how and where I find great sites to write about.
  

If you have a blog and it doesn't appear on this list, please don't be offended, I will try to make this a regular feature as there are so many that I don't think it's useful for readers to put them all into one post.

Lastly, before I get started I would also like to say that the list is not in order of importance, so I'm not saying that any one source is better than another. Anyway, here goes:



KillerStartups
This site is a great source of new websites that have just been launched or are in Beta or Alpha still. One thing I really like about the site is that users can rate the site in terms of its likelihood of surviving. There is some basic information about the new sites, then some reasons why it might succeed and some reasons why it might fail. Users can also add their comments. This is potentially quite a useful activity for students too as it gets them reading and evaluating - valuable thinking and analytic skills practice.



Go2Web20.net
This is another great source and one that I could browse for hours. It also has a really nicely designed interface which shows you the logos of all the sites. If you mouse over the logo you'll see a brief description and clicking on the logo gives you a more detailed description. There's a search engine too, if you know what you want to find. Every time I visit the site I find at least 4 or 5 really interesting sites within a few minutes.



WebWorkerDaily
This is another favourite of mine and is the source of lots of great information and ideas. It's a great place to get ideas, tips and information about ways to work more efficiently with your computer, but tends to be more 'geek' than educationally orientated. Still a great source of information though, and it's well worth checking through the archives if you have some time.



Demo Girl
This is a great source for finding useful sites and demo girl also provides video tutorials showing how to use the sites. There's quite a huge archive of information on her site too, so it's well worth sorting through the archive search categories on the right of the screen.



MakeUseOf
This is another great source of information and in particular web based apps or free software. They tend to focus mostly on free stuff which is handy and they have a great Web2.0 Directory which is worth browsing through, especially if you are looking for a particular tool.

Well that's probably enough to keep you busy for a while. All of these sites provide an RSS feed, so if you don't have time to look through the archives, just sign up to the feed and keep up to date with what's new on them.

If you don't have a feedreader, you can check out my article on Creating a personal hompage using Netvibes as that can really save you some time.

Hope you enjoy these sources and find something useful. More coming in the next week or two.

Best

Nik Peachey