Archive for the 'video' Category

Open-Source Online Classroom

Published
by
Seth
on June 23, 2008
in efl, language teaching, tools and video
. 4 Comments

video conferencing for language education

When you think of online language education, you first think of a teacher and a class of language students, all talking together via a video link, right? Well, the reality unfortunately is a little different.

Unless the school or university you work for has a lot of money to invest in hardware or software (which your students are going to have to end up paying for in higher course fees) you’ll probably be teaching languages online with tools that look very much like a traditional webpage. This is great when we don’t need to talk to our students “live” , but when we do, surely we can manage better than this?

I found Dimdim recently, which allows you to create your own video conference and online meeting classroom, for up to 20 participants, for free! There are no complicated downloads for the meeting participants and no expensive hosting packages for the teacher or school. Dimdim also includes all sorts of useful features for online language teachers like a whiteboard, one to one chat and group chat as well as other handy features like a shared desktop, PowerPoint and PDF file sharing.

For those of us that want unlimited numbers of conference participants, you can even download all the files needed for free and setup your own online meetings server. You will need your own webhosting , something that many schools will already have, you may also need to upgrade the webhosting service you have to a more powerful package, but when you compare this to the prices of commercially available online meeting and conferencing packages, you are still likely to be saving a large amount. You can also then start to fiddle about with the look of your Dimdim server so that it matches your school’s identity and look.

I must admit, I have only tried out Dimdim with one other person so far, but it seemed easy enough to set up. I had hoped that I would be able to see the video of all participants, but the video broadcasting is only for the teacher. Dimdim do say they are working on a version with “Multiple Presenters,” we’ll have to see.

I did like the fact that you could choose whether to allow your students to only have audio or text chat, students can “put up their hand” to allow them to attract the teacher’s attention, the teacher can also decide how many participants can speak at one time (online lessons can get chaotic if everyone talks at once.) There are a host of other useful features, certainly too many to list here.

If you’d like to try out Dimdim with us, please feel free to come along to an online meting I have setup at 09.00 C.E.T. on Saturday 28th June. We will be discussing how you could use Dimdim with a class, and will try out several of the features of the software.

To access the meeting, simply follow this URL: http://tinyurl.com/6zlrt7

Looking forward to meeting you online soon!

Interactive White Board for Under 50 Euros

Published
by
Seth
on June 2, 2008
in 50 Euro IWB, gadgets, ict, language teaching, tools and video
. 3 Comments

Affordable interactive white board technology for every school sounds a bit Utopian, don’t you think? I recently found out that maybe it’s more realistic than you might have guessed! I know that pretty soon I’m going to have to tone down my enthusiastic introductions, but I literally applauded the computer screen (like a weirdo) when I saw this.

After recently having spent more than €4000 at our language school on a brand new Smart Board, youIWB for Under €50 -video can imagine that I was just a bit surprised when reading Joe Dale’s blog about a school in Ireland who had managed to make one for under €50. “Rubbish,” I thought to myself. I thought wrong. The Inver National school in Ireland even have a blog to show you the how-to-dos of the whole process.

From searching through the Inver National’s video of the whole process, I found out that it’s the brain-child of Johnny Lee, a veritable genius of affordable and accessible interactive technology. It was at this point that I started clapping :-)

Essentially it’s a very simple idea, which has been turned to good use. Simple ideas are always the best, don’t you think? The €50 IWB uses a Wiimote- the remote control from a Nintendo Wii, which costs €40 from my local supermarket, and an infra-red pen.

The Wiimote contains an infra-red sensor which can track the movement of an infra red light source. Johnny connected his Wiimote to a computer using Bluetooth and with a little bit of programming magic, he came up with some free IWB software to make it all work together. Incredible!

Here is his video on how to setup the IWB:

So I don’t think you need me to tell you how much this could benefit schools in countries where the economy is still developing, but from looking at this, I’d say that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of schools worldwide have now got IWBs within their price range. That has got to be a good thing, don’t you reckon?

I’ll definitely be trying this out with our school and I’ll be sure to write about it here too. If you want to try it out, watch this space and I’ll let you know how I get on. Send me a comment if you fancy trying to work together on making a Wii IWB, Two minds are definitely better than one!

Justin Timberlake is a Language Teacher!!!

Published
by
Seth
on May 3, 2008
in ict and video
. 2 Comments

Actually he’s not, but Mike Mara, a Spanish teacher from Dublin Jerome High school is, and he’s AWESOME!

I thought I’d seen cool ways to teach a language but this guy is just way out there. If you can make your students laugh (like surely Mike’s did) when they are learning a language, well you’re doing something right.

Mike has made a couple of videos, based on Justin Timberlake pop songs, to remind his high school Spanish students how to conjugate present tense verbs. The thing is they are so funny! Every time I watch them I can’t help giggling like an idiot! My favourite one is the “Conjugation’s Back,” which you can watch below.

Thanks to Joe Dale’s Blog for putting me onto this one :-D

6 Billion Others

Published
by
Seth
on November 18, 2007
in efl, ict and video
. 4 Comments

Yesterday I came across one of the most moving and beautiful sites I’ve ever, ever found on the internet: 6 Billion Others.

6 Billion Others is a site which puts the same simple but meaningful questions to people from all over the world and films their responses. The result is an awe-inspiring portrait of the human condition. The first thing I thought when I saw this site was “I’ve got to use this in my teaching somehow.” I tell a lie, the first thing I thought was “This is an incredibly profound, unique moment” the second thing I thought was “How can I share this” so I thought of how to use it in class.

Attentive Listening - Good For Students!

The interviews are mostly shot in the person’s mother tongue, though there are three language versions of the site and all the videos are subtitled in either English, French or Italian. This gives them a wonderful scope for a humanistic slant on teaching languages. The videos present these wonderfully diverse people to the language learner in a full frame shot, which grabs the listener’s attention. As the 6 Billion Others website so succinctly put it, “The closeness of the interviewee’s face generates an intimacy conducive to attentive listening. The viewer concentrates on the words and facial expressions and can thus identify with people of very different origins.”

Uses In The Classroom

So how can we use this amazing resource with our learners? Here are a few ideas I came up with:

Start a discussion with your learners on “5 questions that they would like to ask people from all around the world.” This will create a nice lead-in to, and interest in, the subject. You could also see if your students would like to predict the type of answers they expect people from different countries and continents to give to their questions.

Next, I would suggest you go to the website yourself and choose a link to follow, or if you are teaching online specify a video for your students to watch. This way you can teach a few bits of necessary vocabulary, write a few gist and comprehension questions or any of the other exercises you would like to do with the videos.

Selecting One Video For Your Students

Because the videos are all made in flash, it’s difficult to send online students to a specific video, which you might like to do for your language based questions. To get round this, take a screenshot (press shift + the Print screen button) and write on the screenshot which video you want your students to watch first. Here’s an example (click to see a higher definition version)

Considering the wonderful, absorbing nature of the videos, I would then really wish to give my students a bit of freedom to explore the videos further. To do this, you could ask them to watch another 2 or 3 videos which are each about 5 or 6 minutes long. The videos are also repeated cyclically, which is useful for language learners because if they miss something a speaker says the first time round they, will hopefully catch it the second time round.

Follow Up Activities

While they are watching, I will ask my students to take notes about anything the speakers say that really interests them and the country the person was from. I’d then ask the students to discuss their notes together and compare what they found most interesting about the videos. I would also talk with my students to see if the videos had asked any of the questions the students had thought of at the beginning of the lesson.

From reading the website, It seems like the plan of the project is to eventually allow their internet viewers to upload their own answers to the questions on the site, which would be a wonderful in-class project. I don’t think this is going to be available until 2008 though.

Your Class’ Own Interviews

A wonderful way you could exploit the ideas and concepts from the site before they allow users to upload videos would be to ask your students to each write one question they would love to ask everyone in the class. Try to encourage them to ask “deeper” questions like: “What makes you happy” rather than “who is your favourite pop singer?” Then compile these questions together into a list, give a copy to each student and ask each them to record an answer using a webcam.

YouTube would be a perfect place to record the answers to the list of questions your students write. There is a clever little tool they have now, which would also work very well for this type project, called “Quick Capture.” This allows anyone with a webcam attached to their computer to record a video message and upload it directly to YouTube. You could start an account at YouTube for your students, give them all the username and password for the account and ask them to upload their video answers to the site. Below is a photo of the “Quick Capture” facility (click for high resolution version) , or otherwise here’s a demo video that a YouTube user made.

Finally, when they have all uploaded an answer to their questions, ask the students to watch each other’s videos on YouTube and leave a video response to them.

If you have any other ideas of how to use this wonderful site with your students, please feel free to post them as a comment below as I’m definitely interested in using this site and would love to know any other ways of using it.

Seth.