A River of Images

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

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

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


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

• Word association - Get your students to associate words with the images as you scroll through them. 1 student to each image. Once you have got through 20 or 30 words, get the students to work alone or in pairs and try to write down all the words they heard. You can scroll back through the images to help them remember.

• Brainstorming vocabulary - Type a tag word based on a theme you will be studying into the search field and scroll through images getting students to suggest words that the images evoke on the topic.
  

• Rapid sentences - You could do a similar activity to the word association one, by working round the class getting each student to produce a sentence about each image as they appear (one student for each image). This will enable you to push the students fluency, by getting them to think quickly as you scroll to the next image. Again you could consolidate this by getting them to write down or try to remember the sentence that was produced for each image. This will ensure that students do actually listen to each other.

• Stream of consciousness story - You could make the above exercise more challenging by telling the students that each sentences for each image had to become part of an ongoing story and then see if they can remember the story at the end.

• Picture grammar drills - You could use the pictures to create drills, by telling the students they have to make a sentence about each picture using a particular verb form. This could be present continuous (describing what is happening in the picture) 'going to' + infinitive (predicting what is about to happen in the picture) present perfect (describing what has just happened before the image was created). This makes drilling a much more engaging and creative activity. Each student could create a drill sentence per image and the other students could copy them or you could go round the class getting a different student to create a sentence individually for each picture.

• Memory game - Get your students to watch as you scroll through 10 - 20 images. Then stop and put them in pairs to try to remember what all of the images were and describe them. Then scroll back and see how many they got right.

• What's the association? - If you try more abstract words such as 'skinny' or 'vocabulary', the images produced can have only a very tangential connection to the search term. This is perhaps a good way to get students thinking more carefully about the way the words are used and what connotations they have as they try to explain the connection between the tag word and the image.

• New words dictionary - As new words come up during the class you can search these and find images which help students to understand the new word. This strong visual should aid their memory. They could even decide on which image best illustrates the word and copy it into a digital vocabulary record of some kind.

What I like about this site

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

What I'm not so sure about

• You might find the odd inappropriate image depending on what your search term is and depending on the age and cultural background of your students.
• The site does sometimes produce some very curious results for some words!
• Sometimes you can get a sequence of very similar images, if someone has just uploaded a batch of images with the same tag to to flickr.

Well there it is. Flickriver, another really great image tool. I hope you enjoy it and are able to use some of these ideas with your students and of course do leave a comment if you want to suggest other ideas.
Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey

Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1

I'm beginning to think that besides the actual computer itself, a WebCam is one of the most fundamentally useful tools we can possibly have to help us teach and learn a language and of course what's great about WebCams is that they are getting very cheap and many laptop computer come with one ready installed for free!

Beware of bad hair days!!!!

So I've decide to start a mini series of postings on 'Things you can do with a WebCam' - Even if you don't have an Internet connection.

Create fictional characters for narrative and photo stories
Most WebCams can be used to create and record both still and moving images and come with their own software which can be used to add backgrounds or to change and distort the images. You can get your students to dress up, disguise themselves and then create images that they can build into a picture story.

• Here are some images of characters that I created with my daughter as the basis for a story.

• I then embedded these into a document and added some speech and captions. This is a great tool for getting your students to create their own picture stories and practice dialogue and narrative.
• I used Photo Booth to create these images and then imported them into Comic Life on my MAC, but you can do the same thing on a PC by using free software such as ManyCam to create the images and then just inserting them into a Word document and adding 'Call outs' for the captions and speech bubbles. (See a review of the ManyCam software here: Great WebCam Software)
  

Record your own stories
Story telling is a great way to develop students listening and speaking, but why loose all those wonderful story telling moments. You can use a WebCam to record stories for your students to watch and get your students to record their own stories to share.

• Telling a story to a WebCam on a computer can be much less intimidating than facing a live audience, so this can reduce your students' anxiety levels. It also gives them the opportunity to watch and listen to themselves telling the story so that they can evaluate their own performance and record and re-record and improve their performance if they feel it's necessary.
• Your students can also store these recordings as part of an E-Portfolio which they can look back on later and, if you have younger learners, you can share these with their parents.
• You can also create the stories collaboratively, by recording your own beginning and getting your students to add a sentence each so that they develop the story in their own way.
  

Here's an example beginning that I created using an online tool called 12 Seconds TV, but you can do the same thing with your WebCam and just store it on your hard drive.

• The stories that you record don't have to be created by the students or even improvised. You could get your students to record readings from books and work on making them entertaining. I remember as a child watching a TV show called Jackanory which featured popular celebrities reading stories and have often enjoyed reading stories to my daughter.
• The ability to make your reading entertaining and dramatic with different voice to do the parts of the dialogue is quite a skill and requires a good understanding of the text. Asking students to use a text to develop these skills can be a really good way of focusing them, not only on their understanding of the text, but can also help the students to 'explore' the tonal ranges of their voice in English and to work on their pronunciation. If you try this though be sure to leave plenty of time for rehearsal.

Here's an example from Jackanory of Rik Mayall reading Georgie's Marvellous Medicine


Editing your videos
Once you have a number of stories recorded you might want pull these together into a short 'show' and start editing them together, adding effects and inserting images into the narrative - You could even use the still images of the characters that you created.

• Again, if you have a MAC you can use i-Movie to do this, but don't worry if you have PC, there are also some great free tools that you can use with your students to do this. These include VideoSpin by Pinnacle (See my review: Free Video Editing Software ) or Virtual Dub which is a simple free program (You can see a review and tutorial here Merge Multiple Video Files With Virtual Dub )
• Once again, remember that it doesn't have to be you who does thee editing. You can get students to edit their own videos and add effects too. having a polished finished product from their learning can help to motivate the students and give them pride in their accomplishment, which will ultimately encourage them to enjoy and improve the level of their English.
  

Well that's the theory. Hope it works out for you and if it does then look out for part 2 of things you can do with your WebCam.

Related links:

• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages

Best

Nik Peachey

Create Image Books

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool called Bookr.

Bookr enable us to create nice interactive image books with text captions.
Here's an example that I created based on the poem 'In White' by Robert Frost.

I found the words to the poem on Poem Hunter here: 'In White'
You can see the full size version here: In White by Robert Frost

The books are really simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add your text.
Here's Bookr video tutorial to show you how easy it is.

• You can download a higher quality (4.9Mb . mov) version here: Bookr Tutorial
• You can download a version for iPod (5.6 Mb) here: Bookr Tutorial

So how can we use this with our students?

• Poems - Like my example above, you can get students to illustrate poems, by typing in the words and picking an image for each of the key words in the text. If you have pairs of students illustrating the same poem they could justify their choice of image and how they felt it linked to the poem. If students illustrate different poems you could collect them together on a blog or webpage as a kind of poetry carnival and even choose the best ones.

• Jokes and Songs - The ideas above would probably work just as well with jokes or song lyrics too.
  
  - A good place to look for child friendly jokes is Yahoo Kids Jokes and for more adult jokes try 101 Fun Jokes (choose with care)
  - Two places you can find song lyrics are SongLyrics.com and Lyrics Search Engine.
  

• Grammar Examples - You can get students to create books of personalised sentences based on various grammar structures.
  
  - For present perfect you could ask students to create 'experience books' with images of places they have been and things they have done.
  - They could create their future plans book with illustrations of things they are 'going to' do, things they 'will have done by ... ' etc.
  - They could create conditionals books with an image to illustrate each clause of the conditional
  

• Narrative and story telling - Students could pick some images and then tell a story about them in their book. You could do this a few different ways:
  
  - You could try give the students ten keywords, they find images to match the words then create a story linking them all together.
  - You could search out the images yourself then ask the students to write the text for them. (You can do this by publishing an image book, then get the students to open the book and click on the 'Recycle' button. They will then be able to edit the book and save their own version.
  - You could also create a blank book with your own text in and ask the students to read and select images for the text (Again you do this by creating a book and then the students click 'Recycle' to edit their own version).
  

• Matching text to image - You can create your own image and text matching exercises by creating a book with images and the descriptive sentences on the wrong pages. Students would have to cut and paste the sentences in to the correct pages.

• Error correction - Select some images and write some text to describe each image, but include some mistakes (Errors in the description rather than the grammar - e.g. blue flower when the image is of a blue moth etc.). Ask your students to correct the mistakes.

• Personal information book - Students could create a book to illustrate things about themselves such as hobbies, interests, favourite singers etc. (Make sure they don't include location or contact information)

• Favourite things - They could create a book describing some of their favourite things, a bit like the song (Rain drops on roses etc.)

• Hobby book - They could create books to illustrate information about favourite hobbies or sports which they enjoy, like a guide to basketball (Including images of all the equipment etc.) or skateboarding.

• Scrap book - They could create a scrap book using images to illustrate a trip or holiday they went on. This could be even more effective if they have their own Flickr account as they could actually use their own images from their holiday.

What's good about Bookr?

• It's free and very easy to use.
• Gives students access to loads of images
• You can pull in images from your own Flickr account if you have one.
• Great that you can embed the books into blogs or webpages.
• Really nice way to personalise and add creativity to classes.
• Students have a really nice product at the end of their work.
• Students don't need to register or part with any personal information
• I like the way the pages turn!

What I'm not so sure about

• Be careful with younger learners, some images may be inappropriate
• It's a shame that the text is quite small and doesn't show up so well on the embedded version of the book.
• Would be nice to be able to print the books up.
• All published books are public

I've really enjoyed playing with Bookr and exploring some of the creative possibilities and it's a tool that I'm sure I will use in the future. Hope you enjoy it and by all means add a comment if you want to share other ideas or materials you have created with it.

Related links:

• Immersive Image Environments
• Great Time Line Tool
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences
• Develop Your Vocabulary
• Vocabulary Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey

A Tool for Comparing Words

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

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

So how can we use this with our students?

• This is a great way for students to search and compare the use of prepositions when they aren't sure which is the correct one to use.

• Likewise it can be really useful for checking collocations and the way they the different words and phrase are used, as in the 'operate' example I gave above.
• You could also use it to check word forms when checking the different parts of speech of a word. With word like 'economic' and 'economical' which are both adjectives, students can check to see how the different forms are used and when to use the correct one.
• Students could also use this to check different spellings of words to find out which is correct.
• When learning or teaching new vocabulary we could use this tool to extract examples of similar words being used in context. We could use these to create gap-fil sentences, cloze texts and other learning materials for students.
• We could get students to find real examples sentences which use the new words they are learning especially words with synonyms (slim, skinny) or words that have gradients, to see how the different words are used and when to use each one.
• We can get students to compare British and American words to see which is most popular.
• Students can compare the popularity of idomatic expressions like 'Raining cats and dogs' vs 'Storm in a tea cup'.
  
• Students can search the results for two different words to find out which one has the most uses / different meanings.
  
• We can also use this tool for discussion warmers comparing popularity of things. Which of these do you think is most popular?
  Dogs or cats?
  Madonna or Britney Spears?
  Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?
  cook or chef?
  Students can vote on which they think will win and why they think it will be most popular.
  

What I like about it?

• Simplicity.
• This is a free and easy tool to use which gives you much of the power of a concordancer.
• Because it links in to Google it gives you access to vast amounts of information about the words.

What I'm not so sure about?

• Because it links into Google to search examples from the internet, you can't control what your students see in the results, so some of the results may link to inappropriate materials.
• It searches words within text, so it gives youy limited information about how the words are used in spoken language.

Well I hope you enjoy Google Battle and find it useful and if you have any other ideas for using it please do post a comment.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL

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

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

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

So how can we use this with our students?

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

What I like about it

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

What I'm not so sure about

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

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

Related links:

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

Best
Nik Peachey

Filming in Second Life 1

Last Sunday, I was lucky enough to make my debut as an educational chat show host on The Consultants-E's Edunation Island where I interviewed Gavin Dudeney. In an attempt to capture this moment in my personal history I decided to video record the event with the intention of editing it into a kind of 'highlights of' show.

Since I posted the first clip from this on my Quick Shout blog, I've had a number of people asking me how I recorded it and what I used, so I've decided to share what I've learned so far from creating movies in Second Life and have a think about how this could be put to use with our students. Anyway, in this article I'll start with the technology bit and how the clip above was created.

Hardware and Software

• My initial worry was that grabbing an hour of video and running my avatar and being the host of the show all from one computer was asking for trouble, so I decided to use two computers (both MACs) and run my avatar on one and record the video on the other.
• I used a MAC to record the video and some screen recording software called I-Show-U (it's not free, but it's not expensive either). The software uses a plugin called Sound Flower which enables me to record the audio coming into the computer. I've also had some success doing this on a PC with Camtasia Studio 5.
  

• Another advantage of using a separate computer to do the recording on is that when I've tried to do it before with just one, my microphone comes out much louder than the speakers coming through the computer. Most good screen recording software should have an option to record the in-coming audio from the computer, so make sure you have this option selected.

Setting up the Second Life Interface
It's important to set up the interface on the computer that you are recording on so that you get the best quality sound and minimise distraction, so ...

• On the sound controls I muted any of the unwanted sounds that i didn't want in the recording

• I also edited my preferences to make sure that there were as few on screen distractions as possible. I turned off the avatar name tags and disabled popup messages etc.

• As I was planning to go into mouse look to zoom in on the action from the back of the hall, I made sure that audio for voice chat was set to 'Hear Voice chat from camera position'.
• I reduced the frame size of the Second Life viewer, to make it a bit closer to the final output size I wanted, as I thought this would reduce the final file size and save on quality loss when the video was edited.
  

Editing Software
Once the recording was over I was left with a 1 hour / 253Mb .MOV file. To edit the file I used the free I-Movie software that came with my MAC. This was the first time I'd used it and I found it pretty easy to learn.

• One of the really great things about it is that when I save the movie I can load it directly up to my my YouTube channel in a single click.
• For those of you not blessed with a MAC Camtasia Studio 5 (which I've used for most of the SL tutorials I've created) enables you to do all the editing from within the software, so PC users don't need a separate software, though Camtasia Studio 5 isn't free (I think Camtasia Studio 3 free is though)
  

Well you've seen the results above, though the .MOV file quality is much better (but slower and larger than the YouTube version).

So What Went Wrong
As with all best made plans, plenty of things went wrong:

• The biggest problem was with avatars appearing in the centre of the coffee table during the interview! Kind of hard to know how to prevent this kind of thing.

• Also of course if you leave a computer idle for long enough, even though it's recording it can start to hibernate, or a screen saver can appear! So worth changing those energy saving settings.
• And of course how ever many of those popup messages you disable there's always one you miss!
  

Anyway, I hope after trying this I'm a bit wiser and next time it will go a lot smoother.
If you have any experience of creating film from Second Life, by all means leave a comment. Or if you think I've made any big mistakes omissions here, by all means try to put me right,

Look forward to your comments and in part two of this article I'll be looking at ways to exploit filming with students.

Related links:

• Killer Apps in Second Life
• Coffee With Gavin Dudeney in Second Life
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Building in Second Life
• More Second Life Tutorials
• Lip Sync for Second Life
• Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life

Best

Nik Peachey

Exploiting a Video Viral

For a long time now I've been fascinated with viral marketing campaigns and the way advertisers use these to promote their products. What's really interesting about them is the advertisers ability to come up with really novel and original ideas to capture our attention and make us want to share with others. My Fame Star is a great example of this and one that we can use to create lesson materials.
What it does, is enable you to upload a photograph and then create a story around it.


It then converts this story into a small video report. Here's an example I created called 'How my past caught up with me.' (You'll have to watch a short advertisement first)

Example: Click here if the video doesn't play

How to use it with students

• Create a video about yourself or a fictional character and ask your students to watch it and make notes about your life story.

• Get your students to create their own stories then put them in pairs to listen to each others' story and make notes of the variations / differences.

• Use it as a prompt for students to write a newspaper story. You could get the students to watch the video clip and then convert the story into a newspaper clipping. You could add some realism to this by asking your students to use the Newspaper clip generator from one of my previous postings (Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts)

• Ask students if they can think of any real celebrities whose story is similar to this. Get them to tell the class or write the story of a similar celebrity.

• Discuss the use of 'viral marketing' sites like these as advertising.

• Do they think it's useful?
• Do they know of other viral marketing examples?
• Does it have an influence on their impressions of the company / product?

Have a look at an article I wrote here to find a out a bit more about viral marketing

What I like about it

• It can really personalise the lesson and materials
• It's fun and free (despite the advertising)
• It's easy to use
• Great stimulation for the imagination
• It has an embed code so you can embed the video into a blog or wiki
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Shame about the advertising, but I guess everyone has to make a living
• If you email it to someone the default is to accept promotions of the company's products (I deselected it)
• Sometimes the embed code doesn't work so well but can be improved with a bit of code editing.
  

Well I hope you and your students enjoy this and by all means post links or comment about any other ideas or materials you create with this tool.

Related links:

• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Create an English Cartoon
• Animating vocabulary
• Make you own animated movies
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey