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Friday, November 25, 2011

I just discovered VYOU. You can receive messages or record video responses. I could see it being used for students to answer or respond to the teacher or to other students. They could practise their pronunciation and send messages to others in the class... Teachers could also use it as a response box for students to send their questions to. Make them think you are on call 24/7! With a bit of imagination, I think it could be used in a lot of innovative ways in the EFL class. Would love to hear any of your ideas on how you would use this tool.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

LISTEN AND WRITE

Just as the title says, 'Listen and Write'. Good for language students to improve their listening skills and hear about the news at the same time. Available in many different languages which is great. http://www.listen-and-write.com/

Friday, November 18, 2011

Online Comic Creators

Came across this slideshare presentation on comic creators. I've used a few of them in the past with my high school students. Comics are great way for EFL students to practise their written English. They love sharing them with other students too which means they'll also be brushing up on their reading skills at the same time. Depending on your students' ages you may find one comic creator more appropriate or appealing than another.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

QWIKI

For those of you who learn better by 'listening' why not try QWIKI. If you're feeling lazy about reading new information on a topic, you can type it into QWIKI and within seconds you'll be sitting back and listening to the information come to you. QWIKI will tell you all the important information about the subject and also comes accompanied by photos. In an ESL/EFL context, QWIKI could allow users to learn about a variety of topics through multimedia and storytelling, rather than through reading. I could see how it could also be particularly useful for students with dyslexia or simply for students with reading difficulties. I know that many of my students are often lazy about looking up any information on Wikipedia so this seems to be an exciting new alternative.

Monday, November 7, 2011

PREZI

I love when I see a student motivated enough to do that little bit 'extra'. It doesn't happen very often! My 15 year-old students had to use Prezi to make recipes. Most of them, if not all of them, used images from google to show which ingredients they were using. This particular student actually took his own photos of each ingredient as he was making his 'panellets'. He took photos of each step as he was making his recipe and then of the final outcome. The result was a fantastic prezi presentation and one very happy teacher. It's nice to see there are still some students out there who are willing to put in that extra time.
Another student example:
This student brought in the final product for us to try!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

WEEBLY

Create a free class website with WEEBLY I've personally opened a site and it's very easy and fast to use. There are a lot of different templates to choose from and adding content is as easy as dropping and dragging new items onto your page. If you are a teacher, they also have Weebly for Education which offers extra features such as accepting homework from your students. There's no need to download any software either; it's all online so you can keep your site up to date from any computer. I'd definitely classify Weebly as another 'COOL TECHY TOOL'.