Naming My Sources: Part 2

In the first part of this series aimed at sharing the sources of the information I blog about, I focused on sites which spread the word about new technology or websites. In this second part I'd like to spread the word about some of the more ELT and Educationally orientated blogs which have provided me with a wealth of information and professional development.

First of course has to be Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day……For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL
This site is a huge and constant source of information and new sites and resources. Larry also produces categorised lists of resources so it's well worth searching through his archives.
The blog is up dated a number of times each day, so to really get the best of it and to stay informed you should sign up to his RSS feed.
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/

Free Technology for Teachers
This is another great blog. It's aimed more at general education than at EL teachers, but a lot of the sites and activities it mentions could easily be used with EFL ESL students, especially if you are using a CLIL type of approach.
Again, the site is up dated at least everyday, so again this is a good one to subscribe to.
http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com


Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day
Again this isn't an ELT specific website, but is the source of quite a few interesting links to educational software and websites. A new item is added each day along with a short descriptive text (often taken from the site being recommended) so it's well worth subscribing to. Not all of the resources recommened are non commercial though, so be sure to check.
One of the best things about the blog though is that the resources are all added to a directory that now has thousands of useful tools to help with learning, so if you are ever thinking of buying some software, be sure to check the directory first as you may well be able to find something free there.
http://janeknight.typepad.com

Technology and Education Box of Tricks
This is a blog that I've only started tracking more recently. Again it is aimed at general education rather than being ELT specific, but there are lots of useful tools there and it's really well designed and well written with some good tips about how to use the resources in the classroom etc.
http://www.boxoftricks.net/

Instructify
This is again a more recent find for me, but one that has a real wealth of information. It's updated regularly and has a mix of content between links to educational sites and information on new web tools and software.
The content is well written, informative and goes into some depth, so well worth reading.
http://blogs.learnnc.org/instructify

The English Blog
Last but not least, is this blog which is written by Jeffrey Hill. This one is aimed at EFL ESL teachers and has links and comments about useful resources, videos and news and opinion from around the web.
This is one of the blogs which I've been subscribed to for the longest and it has a real wealth of information in the archives, so well worth a browse.
http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/

I hope you enjoy these blogs and find them as useful as I have. If you write a blog and it hasn't been mentioned here, well then look out for part 3 which you should see in a month or two.

If you want to get the best out of these blogs or any others then I recommend that you have some form of RSS feed reader or personalised homepage. If you don't have one you can download a step by step guide to creating a personlised homepage from my article: Creating a personal homepage

If you know of other blogs which are regularly updated with useful content for educators, then by all means post a comment at the end of this article.

Related links:

• Creating a personal homepage
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Quick Shout
  

Thanks and best wishes

Nik Peachey

Creating multimedia stories

I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!

Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.

• Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.
• Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two versions
• Silent with better image quality (2.1 Mb wmv)
• Lower quality one with music (500k wmv)

I know there are a lot of online Web 2.0 ap that do all of this too, but for those of us with slower, unreliable or more expensive connections, it's nice to have a bit of software that can do the job for us without using any bandwidth at all (apart from downloading it of course).

You should be able to download Photo Story 3 from here.
It's a 5 Mb download, so that shouldn't take too long even over a dial up connection.

How to use this with students
You can use it to create multimedia materials for your students, whether is for use in class or to take home for homework. Here's some things you can do:

• Create some narratives for them to view
• Create narratives which illustrate grammar points
• Create a series of pictures and words which illustrate different sounds from the Phonemic alphabet

Having software like this that can produce a professional looking end product can be really motivating for students and really help them to push themselves to produce accurate polished work. Here's some things you can get your students to do:
It's ideal for presenting the results of project work.

• Get the students to take photographs and upload them to tell their own stories to the class
• What they do each day
• What they did at the weekend / on holiday
• Stories about their family
• Get some pictures from Flickr and get the students to order them and create a story around them.

What I liked about it

• It's free
• Easy to use and quick to learn
• Really liked some of the filter effects
• Liked the way you can easily create a wide range of background musics
• File sizes were quite reasonable and exports pretty easily for a number of different devices

What I wasn't so keen on

• It's a shame that it's so limited in the the formats that it exports to (mainly different sizes of wmv) , but I guess there are plenty of converters you could use if you wanted to change it for an i-pod or something like that.
• I also thought that a bit more control over how the text was placed over the images would have been really handy.
• There's no version for MAC of course, but if you have a MAC you won't need this as you get lots of nice stuff that does all this for you ready installed when you buy it.

Photo Story 3 isn't a revolutionary piece of software by any means, but I'm sure it can be used to really engage your students in some enjoyable learning.

Hope it works for you

Best

Nik

Drama project tools

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc.
Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project.

What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique.

How to use this with students
When ever I've tried to do drama, video or machinima projects with students, it's often been a bit of a disappointment, they end up producing something that isn't very good or well thought out and they don't really produce much language along the way. With a tool like this you could structure the whole of your project and have them involved the whole time, so that they work together towards the actual project performance over a number of lessons.

There are some useful example projects which are downloaded with the software too and examining one of these could also form the basis of a lesson

A good way to get students into using this might be to take an existing short story and analyse it and input the information from the story into the software to turn it into a play or movie.
There are some nice tips here on common grammar and other mistakes when writing a screen play.

What I liked about it

• It's free and a reasonably small download
• It can be used by groups working collaboratively online
• It can help to give real shape and a professional feel to creative / drama projects
• You can download versions for MAC as well as PC and in quite a few different languages
  
• It's nice to be able to share projects and look at other people's projects on the user community
• It's pretty simple to use
• There are some online tutorials to help you understand the software, though they tend to be a bit long and wordy.

What I wasn't so sure about

• Project work can be quite an undertaking for a teacher and a class and involve loads of planning and commitment. You would need a good bit of practice with the software to make sure you are comfortable with it before launching into a project.

If you are already running drama type projects and want to get students more involved in the creative process and working on their own original projects, then I think this is a really useful professional level tool.

It would also work really well in conjunction with Moviestorm if you were thinking of launching into a Machinima project and would help you and your students to keep track of the work you do within the movie creation software.

I've actually downloaded this myself and started using it with some of my own creative media projects, so I'll let you know how I get on.

Hope you find it useful

Best
Nik