Home All posts

Create your own social network 7 steps

Comment
Social networking is one of the key concepts that is driving Web 2.0 these days. With the opportunities social networks offer for collaboration and communication, this is certainly something we as educators should be thinking about being involved in.


In this tutorial I'd like to show you how to create your own social network on Ning, just by following 7 steps. I've published these as a downloadable PDF with screen shots, so that you can print them up and follow them / share them.
Perhaps though, more importantly it's worth thinking about some of the issues, and pros and cons surrounding the use of social networks.

Some advantages of creating your own network.
  • Control over the content
    You can make sure nobody posts anything inappropriate or irrelevant.
  • Control of who joins and the ability to block or ban people
    You can protect your members, ban anyone who doesn't behave or just limit membership to people you want to invite.
  • Increased reach
    You can increase the reach of your F2F activities and get more people involved in the collaborative / collective development of your project.
  • Good for your personal / career development
    You can learn a lot through being an administrator and develop some useful skills and knowledge.
Things to consider before you launch your network
  • Closed (just people you invite) or Open (anyone who wants to join)
    I would advise starting off with just people you invite first to see how things take off. Deciding to make the network open could take a lot of consideration and demand much more 'policing' moderation from you.
  • Do you have the time to manage the network?
    This is always a key question for teachers. Keeping the network active and up to date is going to take time. If you don't have the time / resources to put into it, best not to start.
  • Do you have or can you find content to input to the network?
    Content is still the main motivation for teachers / students to get involved, even if it's just as stimulation for communication / collaborative work, you need to have something to offer and your members are going to need to 'get something' from visiting your network, or they won't be coming back.
  • How / Will you be able to nurture collaboration between the members?
    Bit like the point above. Just providing a network isn't going to create collaboration. Ning is just a platform, you have to provide reasons, tasks, activities for members to collaborate on, or it just won't happen.
  • What functionality (groups, forums, video and photo sharing) do you want to make available?
    Providing all of these on Ning is easy, but don't provide anything you can't use. If you provide the ability to share photos / videos, make sure you have something to share and reasons for sharing those things. You'll also need to think about who can share add and create. Are you going to keep complete control or share it with your members?
  • Will you want to include advertising or ask it to be removed?
    If you are using Ning for educational purposes you can contact them and ask for advertising to be removed. You can also pay for a Ning platform and generate some money from the advertising yourself. I wouldn't recommend this as the amount may well not justify what you have to put up with from the advertisers. It's also better to get the advertising removed before you invite people to join, as some of the links can be inappropriate.
  • What information will you want members to add when joining?
    You can decide what information members need to submit when they join and decide who sees the information. You find out a lot about them this way, but people can be put off by having to give away their information, so it could be best just to let them decide.
  • How long will you want to keep the network live? (limited period or indefinitely)
    If you only intend to use the network for a specific time limited project it might be good to make this clear to your members, so they keep records of anything they develop within the network. Then when the project ends you can delete it with a clear conscience and keep the web tidy.
Looking at other networks
Before you start your own social network it's a good idea to have a look round at what others are doing. You might get some good ideas, see some potential pitfalls you want to avoid, or even decide someone already has your area covered and just decide to join them instead of recreating the wheel. Here a four networks for teachers that are well worth checking out.
Evaluation criteria
Deciding whether you want to join or recommend a network can be a tricky process, but as I've been looking around for ones I want to be part of I've built up a list of criteria that I find quite useful to have in the back of my mind.

  • What features / functionality does the network offer? (Groups forums etc.)
    If there's no interaction, is it worth being a part of this network?
  • Are the groups / forums active with a number of members exchanging information?
    Just because it has them doesn't mean they are being used. Have a look and make sure there is something there to learn and somebody there to learn with.
  • Are these features being used? (If the network offers the use of photo or video sharing is this being used?)
    This is a good place to look to see what members are really sharing. Is there original content or is it all grabbed from YouTube / Flickr?
  • Can you find out when the network was last active?
    Some networks are still online, but have died. Either the members or creator has lost interest. No point joining an inactive network.
  • How many members does it have?
    Open networks that only have a small number of members, may be less worthwhile. Most networks need a critical mass to keep them moving, unless the members are very committed.
  • Are any of the members’ photographs inappropriate?
    Many people join networks to pull traffic to their / unsuitable sites. A quick look at their avatar image could well give you a clue to which these are.
  • Check out some of the member profiles. Does the profile disclose the member’s email address or other personal info that you wouldn't want to share?
    Make sure that the network isn't forcing you to disclose more information than you would feel happy with.
  • Are there any ‘Google Ads’ on the site? Are these suitable or potentially offensive?
    Especially when recommending networks to others, it's good to check this first.
  • Is there any interesting content on the site?
    Again, I still believe that content is king. Content + collaboration = learning! No content, don't join.
  • Who is behind the network?
    Always wise to know who you are dealing with and sharing your information / knowledge with. Is it a group of like minded individuals, or a faceless company with dubious motivations?
Why create your own network for teachers?
Some suggestions:
  • To support particular dispersed groups doing specific projects / training courses
  • To record and share examples of practice and expertise specific to their context
  • To help train and develop teachers in the use of ICT / Learning Technology
Why create your own network for students?
Some suggestions:
  • Class research projects – create a network for your students based around a particular theme that they need to research.
  • Inter-class project – create a network for sharing information with students in another school / country.
  • Create a fan site with your students dedicated to a particular celebrity they like.
  • Create a site to inform visitors about Morocco / your town or city, your culture etc.
  • Create an online classroom and add links to materials, activities and tasks the students should do.
  • Create a network to showcase students work and keep in contact with and involve parents.
Important
  • You should not use Ning with students below the age of 13.
  • Always protect your members’ privacy and make sure their email isn’t displayed and they don’t share addresses or telephone numbers with people.
Well if after all this you are still interested in creating your own network, here are the 7 steps again:
I've created one myself for a training course for teachers that I'm involved with. Personally I've found it really valuable so far.
For more opinions and to find out about alternative platforms, visit Larry Ferlazzo's blog post on Social Networks for the Classroom

Good luck with your networking and please do use the comments below to share your experience of using social networks.

Best

Nik Peachey

Skype Part 2 Online Workspace

Comment
Anyone who uses their whiteboard for ELT / EFL classes will know what a really useful teaching aid it can be, so how about using one with your distance learners?

In Part 1 of this series on Skype plugins, I looked at how and where to find and install plugins for Skype and I also looked at how to use Pamela to record audio materials and interviews with Skype.

In this posting I'd like to have a look at an online collaboration tool called Yugma which allows you to share files, share your desktop, make live presentations and have a shared online whiteboard all running along side your Skype application.

This quick tutorial takes you through some of the basic features.



You can download a version for your computer in Quick Time here.
Or
Open the tutorial in a new window here.

How to use this with ELT / EFL students
Well I think this is definitely a distance learning support tool rather than some thing to use in the classroom / multi media lab with students. It could be ideal for teacher who wants to teach online 1 to 1 especially if you are doing this independently and don't have the support of a company to provide you with specialist software. I think it's also a pretty useful tool for teacher training and development if you have groups of teachers spread around the country or the world even.
  • You can show students how to use specific software for their course and talk them through the various processes.
  • You can show students around websites and use them as the basis for online discussion
  • You can share documents with your students and get them to work on them collaboratively
  • Students can share projects they have been working on with other group members
  • You can play games online such as Pictionary (a game where one player draws a picture and the others have to guess the word it represents)
  • You can share notes as you deliver presentations
  • You can record presentations and reuse them
  • You can set up a whole programme of different online business simulations such as
    • Presenting information about a company
    • Presenting a sales report of the results of survey findings
    • Students try to sell a fictional product to investors (your other students would be the investors)
    • Carrying out online interviews, with students presenting and talking about their CVs
  • The ability to record these presentations would make it much easier for your students to review them and for you to offer feedback on their work.
What I like about Yugma
  • As tools like this become a more widely used and accepted part of international business, developing the ability to use such tools is going to become a valuable 'real life' skill.
  • It's free (at least some parts are) and quite easy and quick to install and use.
  • I really like that you can record your meetings to watch later etc.
  • Great that this integrates with Skype
  • It seems to offer a pretty comprehensive package of functions

What I wasn't so sure about
  • Some of the functionality is limited after the first 15 days, unless you choose to pay for an account.
  • You have to be sure that your firewall / anti-virus doesn't block it, so if you have any problems getting it started, then that's the first thing to check.
  • You'll also need to get your students to download and install it.
Well I hope you find this tool useful. As I said, this is really one for the distance / online tutor and I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried it out with their students.

Best

Nik Peachey

Dictation goes Web 2.0

Comment
Yes and why not? Seems hard to see how this would be accomplished but it certainly does seem to be the case at the Listen and Write - Dictation website. What's more it seems to have been done in a pretty impressive way too.

This site features quite a number of audio files all of which can be accessed through quite a cleverly designed dictation activity. The users get to listen to parts of a sentence and they then have to type in the words of the sentence to a text field which only allows the words if they are correct. They are able to listen over and also get some help by setting the activity to auto complete the words as they type them in (cuts down on the frustration for EFL students of not being able to spell what you can hear).

The other nice aspect of it is that you get a score as you go and so you can work against yourself to try to improve the score.

But where's the Web 2.0 bit?
Well anyone who registers can link to an audio file for use in the activities. As a registered user you can also take on the task of adding the transcript etc. This can be a great way of sharing what must be quite a lot of work. Anyway, watch this video to see it in action.



How to use this with students
  • Just your EFL students registered and sit them with some headphones to work through a few dictations
  • Get your students to add some audio files that they would like turned into dictation activities
  • Add some of your own audio and transcripts that you want students to work on

What I like about it
  • This is really good free listening practice for students
  • Great for use in a media centre or to set listening homework for students to do on their own (they can tell you their scores in class)
  • Nicely designed activity with well thought out prompts
  • Great that it plans to include other languages
  • Great that the work load is being shared out and that users can add links to audios they want someone to transcribe
  • The texts have been leveled according to difficulty
What I'm not so sure about
  • I didn't manage to find a privacy policy on the site, so I wonder what they do with my info once they have it!
  • Most of the texts are quite high level and grabbed from Voice of America news, so are also on some quite heavy news topics.
  • Some more exercise types would be great, though they may be coming
  • I wonder who is going to be willing to put the time into transcribing the audio files (bit cynical I know but teachers are seldom sitting around with a lot of time on their hands)

On the whole I think this is a really simple, but really great idea. This site has huge potential for language development and I hope the the people at Listen and Write can keep this going and that your students find it really useful.

Best

Nik Peachey

Using wikis for teacher development

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

Using wikis with EFL students

Comment
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.




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

Creating a Wiki

Comment
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
Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

Using Product Reviews

Comment
Product review sites are becoming ever more popular on the internet, and why not after all? If you are going to spend money buying something, it's always a good idea to see what other people who bought that same product think of it.

ExpoTV is just that kind of site. It has a collection of, mostly home made, video clips made by ordinary people, mostly from North America, talking about the products they have bought. There is a huge collection of material here on a whole range of products from computer accessories to clothing, make up, cars, video games, children's toys and even trucks!

Here's an example product review. This one is of one of my favourite products, Apple's i-pod touch




What I liked about the site
  • The clips are reasonably short and download quite quickly.
  • It's free and you don't have to register unless you want to add comments or upload your own video.
  • The site is rich with the kinds of language and vocabulary that students find quite useful in their 'real lives' especially if they do have to buy things from websites or while traveling in an English speaking country.
  • The videos are made by real people so the material is very authentic with a wide variety of voices and accents.
  • The site is well designed with a good search facility, so it's easy to find the kinds of products you are looking for.
  • There is a brief guideline on how to make a good product review here which students can use as a guide. Also some how to video clips that are handy.
  • There is a great potential here for real tasks as registered users can submit their own video reviews and even make money from them!! (I would be very careful about advising students to do this)
  • There's an embed code for each video so if you don't want students wandering around the site, or if you want to use only specific clips you can grab the embed code ( as I have above) and just add the clip to a blog, web page or word processing document.

How should we use this with students?
  • Get students to watch videos of a type of product and decide which one they would buy and why / which ones they wouldn't want to buy.
  • Get students to create their own product video and include all the relevant information (this could be done very easily using anything they have with them in class from shoes to stationary, phones bags etc.) If your students don't have access to a video camera, you could still get them to do this for each other in class as a kind of short presentation. You could even make it competitive and see who can best convince the class to buy their shoes or phone etc.
  • Get the students to watch 3 or 4 clips and make notes of key information about each product. They could then share this information in small groups and decide on the best product.
  • Give pairs or small groups of students a budget and a shopping list and ask them to select the best collection of products within their budget. They should then use the product information to justify their choices.
  • Ask the students to make notes of key word or phrases / sentence structures used when describing products
  • Get some pictures of products and get students to watch / listen to one clip and decide which product was being described.
  • Prepare a list of product features from a selection of videos, then get the students to watch the videos and match the features to the product.
  • Give students a selection of clips to watch and ask them to decide which was the best made clip. Ask them to decide why. (This is a good activity to start with if you intend to get students to make their own clips or presentations)
  • Have a class discussion about product review websites. Here's some possible discussion questions.
    • Have you ever used a site like this before?
    • Do you think the sites are useful?
    • Do you know of any good sites like this (in English or other languages)?
    • Are the reviews unbiased?
    • How much confidence do they have in such sites?
    • Why do people add videos to sites like these?
    • How do the sites make their money?
    • Why do they pay people to make video clips?
    • Would you make a review of a bad product? Why / Why not?
What I wasn't so sure about
  • Students can submit their own videos and get paid for them, but I would be very wary of encouraging this especially for younger students. Be sure to protect your students privacy and personal information and check on any terms of use before letting them register on this or any other website.
  • The site carries a lot of advertising so be wary of letting students click round all over the place. It may well be better to create your own page that only uses the clips you have selected embedded into the page (especially for younger students).
  • Students should be aware of the fact that not all the information given in the video is necessarily correct. These are just amateur video makers giving their opinion.

On the whole I think that sites like this are a really useful source of authentic materials, real language use and authentic real life tasks that can be useful to students beyond the classroom.

there are some things to be wary of when using them, but on the whole I think making students aware of the possible dangers, traps and pitfalls, is a valuable part of their education in itself, so I don't see this a reason not to use these sites.

Well I hope you find these tips useful, and please do add a comment if you have any other ideas for using product review websites, or if you have used them with your students.

Here's the URL of the site in case you missed it: http://www.expotv.com

Best

Nik Peachey
الاشتراك في: الرسائل (Atom)

Total Pageviews

Popular Posts

الأحد، 15 يونيو 2008

Create your own social network 7 steps

Social networking is one of the key concepts that is driving Web 2.0 these days. With the opportunities social networks offer for collaboration and communication, this is certainly something we as educators should be thinking about being involved in.


In this tutorial I'd like to show you how to create your own social network on Ning, just by following 7 steps. I've published these as a downloadable PDF with screen shots, so that you can print them up and follow them / share them.
Perhaps though, more importantly it's worth thinking about some of the issues, and pros and cons surrounding the use of social networks.

Some advantages of creating your own network.
  • Control over the content
    You can make sure nobody posts anything inappropriate or irrelevant.
  • Control of who joins and the ability to block or ban people
    You can protect your members, ban anyone who doesn't behave or just limit membership to people you want to invite.
  • Increased reach
    You can increase the reach of your F2F activities and get more people involved in the collaborative / collective development of your project.
  • Good for your personal / career development
    You can learn a lot through being an administrator and develop some useful skills and knowledge.
Things to consider before you launch your network
  • Closed (just people you invite) or Open (anyone who wants to join)
    I would advise starting off with just people you invite first to see how things take off. Deciding to make the network open could take a lot of consideration and demand much more 'policing' moderation from you.
  • Do you have the time to manage the network?
    This is always a key question for teachers. Keeping the network active and up to date is going to take time. If you don't have the time / resources to put into it, best not to start.
  • Do you have or can you find content to input to the network?
    Content is still the main motivation for teachers / students to get involved, even if it's just as stimulation for communication / collaborative work, you need to have something to offer and your members are going to need to 'get something' from visiting your network, or they won't be coming back.
  • How / Will you be able to nurture collaboration between the members?
    Bit like the point above. Just providing a network isn't going to create collaboration. Ning is just a platform, you have to provide reasons, tasks, activities for members to collaborate on, or it just won't happen.
  • What functionality (groups, forums, video and photo sharing) do you want to make available?
    Providing all of these on Ning is easy, but don't provide anything you can't use. If you provide the ability to share photos / videos, make sure you have something to share and reasons for sharing those things. You'll also need to think about who can share add and create. Are you going to keep complete control or share it with your members?
  • Will you want to include advertising or ask it to be removed?
    If you are using Ning for educational purposes you can contact them and ask for advertising to be removed. You can also pay for a Ning platform and generate some money from the advertising yourself. I wouldn't recommend this as the amount may well not justify what you have to put up with from the advertisers. It's also better to get the advertising removed before you invite people to join, as some of the links can be inappropriate.
  • What information will you want members to add when joining?
    You can decide what information members need to submit when they join and decide who sees the information. You find out a lot about them this way, but people can be put off by having to give away their information, so it could be best just to let them decide.
  • How long will you want to keep the network live? (limited period or indefinitely)
    If you only intend to use the network for a specific time limited project it might be good to make this clear to your members, so they keep records of anything they develop within the network. Then when the project ends you can delete it with a clear conscience and keep the web tidy.
Looking at other networks
Before you start your own social network it's a good idea to have a look round at what others are doing. You might get some good ideas, see some potential pitfalls you want to avoid, or even decide someone already has your area covered and just decide to join them instead of recreating the wheel. Here a four networks for teachers that are well worth checking out.
Evaluation criteria
Deciding whether you want to join or recommend a network can be a tricky process, but as I've been looking around for ones I want to be part of I've built up a list of criteria that I find quite useful to have in the back of my mind.

  • What features / functionality does the network offer? (Groups forums etc.)
    If there's no interaction, is it worth being a part of this network?
  • Are the groups / forums active with a number of members exchanging information?
    Just because it has them doesn't mean they are being used. Have a look and make sure there is something there to learn and somebody there to learn with.
  • Are these features being used? (If the network offers the use of photo or video sharing is this being used?)
    This is a good place to look to see what members are really sharing. Is there original content or is it all grabbed from YouTube / Flickr?
  • Can you find out when the network was last active?
    Some networks are still online, but have died. Either the members or creator has lost interest. No point joining an inactive network.
  • How many members does it have?
    Open networks that only have a small number of members, may be less worthwhile. Most networks need a critical mass to keep them moving, unless the members are very committed.
  • Are any of the members’ photographs inappropriate?
    Many people join networks to pull traffic to their / unsuitable sites. A quick look at their avatar image could well give you a clue to which these are.
  • Check out some of the member profiles. Does the profile disclose the member’s email address or other personal info that you wouldn't want to share?
    Make sure that the network isn't forcing you to disclose more information than you would feel happy with.
  • Are there any ‘Google Ads’ on the site? Are these suitable or potentially offensive?
    Especially when recommending networks to others, it's good to check this first.
  • Is there any interesting content on the site?
    Again, I still believe that content is king. Content + collaboration = learning! No content, don't join.
  • Who is behind the network?
    Always wise to know who you are dealing with and sharing your information / knowledge with. Is it a group of like minded individuals, or a faceless company with dubious motivations?
Why create your own network for teachers?
Some suggestions:
  • To support particular dispersed groups doing specific projects / training courses
  • To record and share examples of practice and expertise specific to their context
  • To help train and develop teachers in the use of ICT / Learning Technology
Why create your own network for students?
Some suggestions:
  • Class research projects – create a network for your students based around a particular theme that they need to research.
  • Inter-class project – create a network for sharing information with students in another school / country.
  • Create a fan site with your students dedicated to a particular celebrity they like.
  • Create a site to inform visitors about Morocco / your town or city, your culture etc.
  • Create an online classroom and add links to materials, activities and tasks the students should do.
  • Create a network to showcase students work and keep in contact with and involve parents.
Important
  • You should not use Ning with students below the age of 13.
  • Always protect your members’ privacy and make sure their email isn’t displayed and they don’t share addresses or telephone numbers with people.
Well if after all this you are still interested in creating your own network, here are the 7 steps again:
I've created one myself for a training course for teachers that I'm involved with. Personally I've found it really valuable so far.
For more opinions and to find out about alternative platforms, visit Larry Ferlazzo's blog post on Social Networks for the Classroom

Good luck with your networking and please do use the comments below to share your experience of using social networks.

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , , ,

الأربعاء، 11 يونيو 2008

Skype Part 2 Online Workspace

Anyone who uses their whiteboard for ELT / EFL classes will know what a really useful teaching aid it can be, so how about using one with your distance learners?

In Part 1 of this series on Skype plugins, I looked at how and where to find and install plugins for Skype and I also looked at how to use Pamela to record audio materials and interviews with Skype.

In this posting I'd like to have a look at an online collaboration tool called Yugma which allows you to share files, share your desktop, make live presentations and have a shared online whiteboard all running along side your Skype application.

This quick tutorial takes you through some of the basic features.



You can download a version for your computer in Quick Time here.
Or
Open the tutorial in a new window here.

How to use this with ELT / EFL students
Well I think this is definitely a distance learning support tool rather than some thing to use in the classroom / multi media lab with students. It could be ideal for teacher who wants to teach online 1 to 1 especially if you are doing this independently and don't have the support of a company to provide you with specialist software. I think it's also a pretty useful tool for teacher training and development if you have groups of teachers spread around the country or the world even.
  • You can show students how to use specific software for their course and talk them through the various processes.
  • You can show students around websites and use them as the basis for online discussion
  • You can share documents with your students and get them to work on them collaboratively
  • Students can share projects they have been working on with other group members
  • You can play games online such as Pictionary (a game where one player draws a picture and the others have to guess the word it represents)
  • You can share notes as you deliver presentations
  • You can record presentations and reuse them
  • You can set up a whole programme of different online business simulations such as
    • Presenting information about a company
    • Presenting a sales report of the results of survey findings
    • Students try to sell a fictional product to investors (your other students would be the investors)
    • Carrying out online interviews, with students presenting and talking about their CVs
  • The ability to record these presentations would make it much easier for your students to review them and for you to offer feedback on their work.
What I like about Yugma
  • As tools like this become a more widely used and accepted part of international business, developing the ability to use such tools is going to become a valuable 'real life' skill.
  • It's free (at least some parts are) and quite easy and quick to install and use.
  • I really like that you can record your meetings to watch later etc.
  • Great that this integrates with Skype
  • It seems to offer a pretty comprehensive package of functions

What I wasn't so sure about
  • Some of the functionality is limited after the first 15 days, unless you choose to pay for an account.
  • You have to be sure that your firewall / anti-virus doesn't block it, so if you have any problems getting it started, then that's the first thing to check.
  • You'll also need to get your students to download and install it.
Well I hope you find this tool useful. As I said, this is really one for the distance / online tutor and I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried it out with their students.

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , , , ,

الخميس، 5 يونيو 2008

Dictation goes Web 2.0

Yes and why not? Seems hard to see how this would be accomplished but it certainly does seem to be the case at the Listen and Write - Dictation website. What's more it seems to have been done in a pretty impressive way too.

This site features quite a number of audio files all of which can be accessed through quite a cleverly designed dictation activity. The users get to listen to parts of a sentence and they then have to type in the words of the sentence to a text field which only allows the words if they are correct. They are able to listen over and also get some help by setting the activity to auto complete the words as they type them in (cuts down on the frustration for EFL students of not being able to spell what you can hear).

The other nice aspect of it is that you get a score as you go and so you can work against yourself to try to improve the score.

But where's the Web 2.0 bit?
Well anyone who registers can link to an audio file for use in the activities. As a registered user you can also take on the task of adding the transcript etc. This can be a great way of sharing what must be quite a lot of work. Anyway, watch this video to see it in action.



How to use this with students
  • Just your EFL students registered and sit them with some headphones to work through a few dictations
  • Get your students to add some audio files that they would like turned into dictation activities
  • Add some of your own audio and transcripts that you want students to work on

What I like about it
  • This is really good free listening practice for students
  • Great for use in a media centre or to set listening homework for students to do on their own (they can tell you their scores in class)
  • Nicely designed activity with well thought out prompts
  • Great that it plans to include other languages
  • Great that the work load is being shared out and that users can add links to audios they want someone to transcribe
  • The texts have been leveled according to difficulty
What I'm not so sure about
  • I didn't manage to find a privacy policy on the site, so I wonder what they do with my info once they have it!
  • Most of the texts are quite high level and grabbed from Voice of America news, so are also on some quite heavy news topics.
  • Some more exercise types would be great, though they may be coming
  • I wonder who is going to be willing to put the time into transcribing the audio files (bit cynical I know but teachers are seldom sitting around with a lot of time on their hands)

On the whole I think this is a really simple, but really great idea. This site has huge potential for language development and I hope the the people at Listen and Write can keep this going and that your students find it really useful.

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: ,

الخميس، 29 مايو 2008

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
To have a closer look at WetPaint and create your own wiki go to: http://www.wetpaint.com/
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,

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.




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
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,

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
Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,

الثلاثاء، 27 مايو 2008

Using Product Reviews

Product review sites are becoming ever more popular on the internet, and why not after all? If you are going to spend money buying something, it's always a good idea to see what other people who bought that same product think of it.

ExpoTV is just that kind of site. It has a collection of, mostly home made, video clips made by ordinary people, mostly from North America, talking about the products they have bought. There is a huge collection of material here on a whole range of products from computer accessories to clothing, make up, cars, video games, children's toys and even trucks!

Here's an example product review. This one is of one of my favourite products, Apple's i-pod touch




What I liked about the site
  • The clips are reasonably short and download quite quickly.
  • It's free and you don't have to register unless you want to add comments or upload your own video.
  • The site is rich with the kinds of language and vocabulary that students find quite useful in their 'real lives' especially if they do have to buy things from websites or while traveling in an English speaking country.
  • The videos are made by real people so the material is very authentic with a wide variety of voices and accents.
  • The site is well designed with a good search facility, so it's easy to find the kinds of products you are looking for.
  • There is a brief guideline on how to make a good product review here which students can use as a guide. Also some how to video clips that are handy.
  • There is a great potential here for real tasks as registered users can submit their own video reviews and even make money from them!! (I would be very careful about advising students to do this)
  • There's an embed code for each video so if you don't want students wandering around the site, or if you want to use only specific clips you can grab the embed code ( as I have above) and just add the clip to a blog, web page or word processing document.

How should we use this with students?
  • Get students to watch videos of a type of product and decide which one they would buy and why / which ones they wouldn't want to buy.
  • Get students to create their own product video and include all the relevant information (this could be done very easily using anything they have with them in class from shoes to stationary, phones bags etc.) If your students don't have access to a video camera, you could still get them to do this for each other in class as a kind of short presentation. You could even make it competitive and see who can best convince the class to buy their shoes or phone etc.
  • Get the students to watch 3 or 4 clips and make notes of key information about each product. They could then share this information in small groups and decide on the best product.
  • Give pairs or small groups of students a budget and a shopping list and ask them to select the best collection of products within their budget. They should then use the product information to justify their choices.
  • Ask the students to make notes of key word or phrases / sentence structures used when describing products
  • Get some pictures of products and get students to watch / listen to one clip and decide which product was being described.
  • Prepare a list of product features from a selection of videos, then get the students to watch the videos and match the features to the product.
  • Give students a selection of clips to watch and ask them to decide which was the best made clip. Ask them to decide why. (This is a good activity to start with if you intend to get students to make their own clips or presentations)
  • Have a class discussion about product review websites. Here's some possible discussion questions.
    • Have you ever used a site like this before?
    • Do you think the sites are useful?
    • Do you know of any good sites like this (in English or other languages)?
    • Are the reviews unbiased?
    • How much confidence do they have in such sites?
    • Why do people add videos to sites like these?
    • How do the sites make their money?
    • Why do they pay people to make video clips?
    • Would you make a review of a bad product? Why / Why not?
What I wasn't so sure about
  • Students can submit their own videos and get paid for them, but I would be very wary of encouraging this especially for younger students. Be sure to protect your students privacy and personal information and check on any terms of use before letting them register on this or any other website.
  • The site carries a lot of advertising so be wary of letting students click round all over the place. It may well be better to create your own page that only uses the clips you have selected embedded into the page (especially for younger students).
  • Students should be aware of the fact that not all the information given in the video is necessarily correct. These are just amateur video makers giving their opinion.

On the whole I think that sites like this are a really useful source of authentic materials, real language use and authentic real life tasks that can be useful to students beyond the classroom.

there are some things to be wary of when using them, but on the whole I think making students aware of the possible dangers, traps and pitfalls, is a valuable part of their education in itself, so I don't see this a reason not to use these sites.

Well I hope you find these tips useful, and please do add a comment if you have any other ideas for using product review websites, or if you have used them with your students.

Here's the URL of the site in case you missed it: http://www.expotv.com

Best

Nik Peachey
مرسلة بواسطة في ليست هناك تعليقات:
التسميات: , , ,
الاشتراك في: الرسائل (Atom)