Skype is a free web tool where you can make and receive free calls and video calls only with an internet connection. I’ve already shown a short presentation on Skype in my previous post about Prezi so what I’m just going to give some tips on how to use it in your classroom as well as outside 🙂

Sorry for writing so much but I did this while on the train and I didn’t have my microphone with me and it would’ve been kind of awkward recoding this post with 8 people sitting around you 😛

Inside the classroom:

• Let’s say you want to invite a guest to talk to the class but this person is in another country and can’t make it to your class (transport, expenses, time, etc.  – for all these reasons and maybe others). What you could do is to organize a live video stream through Skype.

You could ask your students then to interview the person, take notes on his/her answers and write an article about him/her

• You could start a call with a person (important for your lesson) on Skype without video feature. Ask him/her to hold a short speech on a certain topic and ask you students to speculate on the persons characteristics and appearance just by listening to his/her voice – for using adjectives; speculating language; language for prediction. In the end show the person by activating the video feature and ask your students to compare their predictions with the true identity.
• I don’t know how many of you do this but I have some classes where I teach my students how to make phone calls, how to start a phone conversation, how to end it when calling for different reasons (personal or professional). In these lessons I like to use real examples. This means that I actually give them a phone or ask them if we can use theirs. Some might not want to pay extra costs for phone conversations on their phone in the English lesson and maybe you don’t want to do this either (mainly if you have a large class). Do you see where I’m heading with this? 🙂 Yes, Skype is an alternative – in case you have at least 2 laptops at hand. You can use one laptop in the classroom for the incoming call and place the other one outside the classroom for the outgoing call. In this way they can not only practice phone conversations (such as reporting a crime or calling for help and describing what happened) but also video conferencing. Of course, keep in mind that you cannot have more than 2 videos running at the same time on one laptop. You can have a phone conversation with more people at once but not with video on.
• Students record their conversations on Skype, send you the saved recording on email and you can give them feedback on it. I always strive to give a feedback as good as possible to my students and this might be sometimes difficult when in the classroom. I’m not saying it’s impossible….I’m just saying that processed information is easier to assess.

Outside the classroom:

I might want to practice the Speaking part for the IELTS, TOEFL or Cambridge (FCE, CAE, CPE) exams in the class and I see that my students still need practice. If I don’t have enough time in the class for further practice then I can tell them to practise their speaking skills at home. How do they do this?

Well there are more options:

o    You can ask them to record themselves using their phone while talking about a topic. However, not everyone has a phone with a recorder on it.

o    You can tell them to use a microphone and install a specific software on their computer to record what they’re saying. However, they have to buy a microphone in case they don’t have one and they have to install the proper software on their computer…something that not everyone is willing to do.

o    IF they have a laptop with an incorporated microphone, they could use that. However, not every Windows OS supports a recorder although Windows 7 has one and is free for use in the Accessories section. You just have to open it and push the big red button to start recording.

o    Using a proper recorder is of course a good way also but once again they need to buy one if they don’t have one yet. For most this might be a pain in the neck and might demotivate them to practice the speaking part.

And if you think about it, talking to oneself is not really what happens at exam…or in real life… 🙂 Practising speaking on your own might be good if you’re practising for a speech and still you don’t have an audience…something that you do have in reality.

So without further a do….In my opinion, the best way of practising speaking at home on a phone with a partner is using Skype.

Skype not only offers you free calls but also free live video chat feature thus making it able for anyone who has a laptop with a webcam and a microphone (built in or external) to have a real conversation while practising some speaking skills. Yes, you do have to have a microphone…luckily most of the laptops nowadays on the market offer you a built in webcam as well a microphone thus making the purchase of an external microphone unnecessary.

So how do we give feedback on a conversation  that our students have had at home with another person? The answer is simple…we ask them to record the conversation and send it email it to us:)

How do we do this? On Skype of course 😛 Skype has many plug-ins which give us the possibility to record not only the voice but also the video calls.

You might not want to ask your students to record their video calls…I think asking them to record their voice calls is enough for you and for them. They might be shy enough to listen to their own voices and sending it to you could be something they might not be keen on.

Pamela is a plug-in that is easy to install, it’s free and it can record your calls on Skype. The downsides are that you can record only up to 15 min although there are rarely conversations that take that long. Also it doesn’t function always as well as it’s supposed to be….I think it’s just made this way so you buy it in the end. Consequently, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed lately by Pamela because it didn’t want to start although I could open it and set the setting but it didn’t record anything….I couldn’t even push the big red button…it was unavailable.

This led to frustration and curiosity in the same time. I searched for new plug-ins for Skype to record conversations and I found some.

PrettyMay is a free plug-in and much more useful than Pamela because it can also record video besides the voice call record option. It is easy to install and to use and it stores your recordings which you can then save and send to anyone you like.

• You can create a chain story using recordings made on Skype. You can start a conversation with one of your friends/colleagues or with higher level students by telling the beginning of a story, for example you could start talking about one of your best experiences you’ve had in life and stop at a certain point to ask your friend to continue spontaneously the story for another 2 minutes. Save the conversation and send it to another pair of students. Ask them to listen the beginning of the story and come up with the second part of it without ending it. Do this until all your students get to tell a part of the story.

For advanced users: you could then use a free web tool such as Audacity and put the pieces of the story together and save it as an mp3 or any other format.  You can then give feedback on the structure of the story, language, creativity, fluency, coherency and so on 🙂 The new chain story 🙂 It’s fun and captivating. Students will be anxious to see what the others have thought about and will try to top whatever the other have written…this kind of competitive spirit is always a good incentive.

• Whenever you want to tell your students to make up dialogues in order to practise certain speaking skills and vocabulary…don’t! Ask them to have actual conversations. Tell them about Skype and its free features and how easy it is to use. Ask them create live conversations using the newly acquired vocabulary. Practise dialogues for: ordering food and drinks in a restaurant; reporting a crime or an accident; invitations and any other phone or live conversations you can think of.

Here is a short tutorial on how to install Skype and PrettyMay call recorder and on other tips on how to use them for educational purposes (from slideshare.net):

And here is a video to see what Skype is about:

So that you just know…Skype can be used also on your mobile phones. You can make phone to computer conversations also (and it doesn’t work only on Verizon!):

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I’ve found Prezi while searching for an alternative for PPT (Power Point Presentations) and I have to say I am stunned and will probably never want to use another PPT again 🙂

Yes, it’s that good, visually attractive and also addictive…something that we all love…of course if it’s for educational purposes…and this time it is.

Here is an example from TED where Prezi is used as a tool for a presentation:

I could write an entire description for its use, however, I prefer showing you instead how to use it. Therefore, I prepared a presentation on how to use Skype for teaching purposes and did this using Prezi.

I also added some tutorial videos for using Prezi….you should check them out in the prezi presentation.

Prezi for teachers

If your a teacher working for a public or private school and you have an email account for the school you’re working for then you should definitely use that when signing in to Prezi.

If you sign in to Prezi using your yahoo, gmail, hotmail or any other accounts, you will get only 100 MB storage space on your account. However, if you sign in using your school’s email address (for example name [at] babelcenter [dot] ro – this is the name of the private school I teach in) then you will get 500 MB storage space which is a lot more.

In case you don’t have such an email address and you want to sign in using your other email accounts, you can do so and not worry so much about the space you have until 100 MB. If you get to the limit you can always download the presentation you’ve created, delete the one you have on the net and start a new one. This way you can save your presentations and create new ones all the time.

On the other hand it’s always good to have your presentation online, in case you don’t have your laptop with you and you still want to use one of your presentations somewhere with an internet connection.

So, without further a do, here is my first presentation on Prezi (I’m still testing it and finding out new things but until now I had great fun using it and find it a very useful tool – my students were also very happy to see that there is a more interesting way of making presentations than PPTs):

Let me know what you think of this 🙂

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I’ve heard about xtranormal.com a few years ago and tried it out. I have to say that students enjoyed using it and watching some movies from the site. Mostly they enjoy using it because it’s easy to use and straightforward with the tools it gives you (animations, expressions, looks, sounds, etc.).

I enjoyed using it because it really gets the creativity of students working. It can bring them together while working on a project and it can teach them many important skills they definitely will need in their future jobs, such as teamwork or target-oriented interaction when working on a project.

Here are video tutorials on how to start using xtranormal.com and some tips on how to use it:

How to start

How to create

How to save

How to preview

Inside the classroom

• you could prepare a movie on the topic of your lesson and use it as a lead in.
• you could make a movie only by adding expressions or animations to it and let the students add the dialogues to the movie. They watch the movie created by you and discuss what the actors might say.
• if your class is equipped with at least one computer for a student, you can ask them to work together in groups or pairs and create a story, a dialogue focusing on different points, such as: small talk, turn taking, debates, agreeing and disagreeing, giving advice, etc.
• you can ask them to create dialogues for different books. If you give your students some books to read then ask them to retell the story of the book in the form of a movie with dialogues. Students will practise their summarizing skills in this activity.
• tell them to choose a famous historical conversation(you can look for some before the activity and give them some support by giving them some examples) and role play it with two actors in xtranormal. The conversation should give the public the feeling that it’s really similar to the original one (they could watch some on youtube before engaging into the activity)

Outside the classroom

• ask your students create a feedback movie on the lesson. They could give you feedback in the form of a conversation. They could try to predict what your reactions to their feedback would be and then give them feedback whether they got it right or not.
• you could ask them to create a movie on a certain topic you would like to discuss the next lesson. Let’s say you want to talk about ‘Generation gap’. Ask your students to use their creativity and create a movie based on the topic. Award them for the movie closest to the topic.
• ask them to work in groups and create a movie made up of at least 2 or 3 parts. You can extend this to a short TV Series with students giving them a title and subtitles to all of the episodes. They could create a TV Series based on their classmates and their weekly learning experience (they could create an episode every week or maybe twice a week).  This really strengthens their abilities to interact and to work in teams making decisions together for the project. In the end, after finishing the TV Series, they could share their experience with the others on how they managed to work together and how difficult or easy it was working in teams on a long-term project.

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Where would first look for a picture or song if you wanted to insert it into one of your presentations, blogs, websites or anything done by you? I think most of you would go to google images or download a song from the internet. This could have its consequences though. Many don’t know the rules of copyright on the internet and because of this lack of interest in the rules of copyright many could face severe consequences.

One great way of avoiding copyright issues is Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/).  Here is one video which is quite self-explanatory (there are 2 and I will show both of them because they give different information but I’ll begin with this one because I think it more fun and it’s easier to understand what Creative Commons has to offer):

The main idea is that Creative Commons can tell you what you CAN and download legally and how you can use it for personal use.

This is a video with a more general explanation of Creative Commons:

It’s really easy to embed a Creative Commons license to your blog, website or to any of your work. I’ll just refer to how you can do this on your blog and give further links to other blogs and sites where you can find more information on how to get a license.

How to get a Creative Commons license on your blog (on wordpress – I will research how to do it on blogspot also in the upcoming days and post about that too)

How to start?

First you have to have your blog ready for use. So you have to have it up and running.

The next step is to visit the Creative Commons site (http://creativecommons.org/). On the right side of the site you will see the word ‘License’ – now click on it.

After you’ve clicked on the button this site will appear:

As you can see for yourselves the steps towards creating your own license are pretty straightforward.  There are two main questions asked from you. Do you allow commercial use of your work? If yes, it means that people can sell your work and make money out of it….if they can 🙂 The other questions is whether you allow people to modify your work or not. If you allow them to do this, they are given permission to use it, cut it, ‘remix’ it (as said by the folks at Creative Commons), share it and so on. However, for further specific information about the different types of licenses watch the first video in the post or if you want something more serious then you should read the information on the following site carefully: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

After you carefully read the types of licenses go back to the 2 questions, answer them accordingly to your copyright intentions and  press ‘Select a License’ button at the bottom of the page:

You can probably see that there are also some optional fields you might want to think of filling in. I filled in all but the last two (I put nothing to ‘Source work URL’ – because I don’t use anyone’s work for the basis of mine and no ‘More permissions URL’ either)

1. At the 1st section (the Format section) choose the type of your creative work. In this case you should choose ‘Text’ because I’m referring here to a blog. If you’re licensing a song, video or anything else…well then just choose that 🙂

2. You could also give a title to your work if you haven’t got one yet

3. You might want to enter your name so that the person who uses your blog will attribute the work to your name and not his/her’s.  This will appear in your license. This is what appears in my blog under the CC license:

‘Technologies inside and outside the classroom by Straub Roland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.’

4. You can add the URL to your site and your work will then be attributed to that URL and if you have your name typed in also then both will appear in the license description.

5. Here you can just insert the URL of your work’s source. It means if you used someone’s blog to create your work then you should insert the URL of that blog into this section.

6. This section is quite self explanatory. Just by clicking the information button on the right side of each of these section you will get a short explanation for each of them. This is what it says for this section: ‘A URL where a user can obtain information about clearing rights that are not pre-cleared by your CC license.’

The text for the license

When finished, you should get a text (code) which you will have to copy into your blog. The code will look something like this:

You will get a clear description of the license of your choice. In this case (as an example) you can see that it says ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License’. You can have different types of combination between the licenses…it really depends on how restrictive you want to be (read about the types of combination you can have or watch the first video in the post).

Now go to your blog and press the dashboard button on the top of your screen in your wordpress blog:

When in your dashboard go to your widgets. You can find them under the ‘Appearance’ section:

When you press on the widgets button you should be able to see different types of widgets which you may embed into your blog. Find a Text widget such as this (see picture).

Drag the widget to the right side of your screen and drop it unto your sidebar. When ready, open the widget, type in a title such as ‘Creative Commons License’ and copy the text/code that Creative Commons has generated for you when choosing your license into the text widget.

Copying the text

Just select the text in the Creative Commons site by pressing Ctrl+A (to select all) on your keyboard – or select all the text with your mouse, right click and select Copy – and then go to the Text widget, click on the blank space and press Ctrl+V (to paste the text/code into the blank space) – or click on the blank space, press right click on your mouse and press Paste. When finished, press the Save button on the widget and close it.

This is how you should see the Text widget in the dashboard in the sidebar without text:

And with text:

That’s it! 🙂

And this is how you create your own CC license 🙂

As you can see it’s easy to make and you can rest more easily from now on knowing that your works can’t be used for any reason you don’t want it to be used.

In case you’re using your blog for educational reasons it is good to know that your work can’t be transformed into a circus show without your permission:) So feel free to experiment on using Creative Commons as a search engine whenever you’re looking for new photos, songs, videos or anything else you want to use legally. You could also share this with your students and make them aware of all the copyright issues they could have if downloading things from the internet illegally.

Have fun downloading carefree 🙂

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Many teachers ask themselves why they should use twitter. Even some of my students asked me why they should use twitter if they already have a facebook, yahoo messenger account. Frankly, you don’t HAVE TO use it if you don’t want to. No one will oblige you to create an account on it.

However, there are some advantages of using twitter for both teachers and students, despite the whole skepticism about it.

For those who don’t know it yet, twitter is a micro-blogging site where you can post any time what you are doing and if you follow someone such as your friends, family members or colleagues you will also know what they’re doing.

Here is the official explanation by twitter:

Why is it called a micro-blog? Well, first of all, you are not allowed to write more than 140 characters in one tweet (entry). This can be very refreshing for many but also kind of annoying for some of us.

When I want to read about something on a blog then I prefer not having to read the entire post because I’m probably not interested in everything the person has to say about a topic (of course it depends on the topic) so I’m just going to skim for the most important pieces of information. On the other hand, when you are on twitter you don’t have to read thousands of words or skim through the entire text just to find something useful. You can read the entire entry because it’s that short 🙂

Therefore, it’s more motivating to read short pieces of information thus finding out about many things in shorter time than reading for hours about one certain topic.

Nevertheless, many are still skeptical about twitter because of its quick flow of information and its, sometimes, overwhelming tweets. However, this might occur only if you have hundreds or thousands of followers – which is not easy to accomplish. And even if, by any chance, you get bored of getting the tweets of someone you’re following, you can easily get rid of them by clicking ‘Unfollow’ and henceforth you won’t get any tweets from that person again – if you change your mind you can always follow that person again.

Despite this skepticism about this rush of information, I think that this is something positive. Nowadays, you have to try to stay up-to-date with everything new that’s going on in the world. Why? Because your students are doing the same thing and you might find yourself not knowing what they are talking about or what students are into these days thus lowering your chances of making your lessons interesting. And if you can’t motivate students nowadays they will get bored of your lessons or, even worse, of you or your lack of interest. But this is almost a different topic that I might talk about another time. Let’s get back to twitter:) The main idea here is that, the more information you get on twitter the better. Of course this depends on what kind of tweets your receiving and this depends on who you’re following. Now these are all your choices to make. Who to follow, what to read and what not to read. You can have two separate accounts: one for work and another for personal stuff. However, I personally think this is unnecessary…it’s just one too many passwords to remember but as I said it’s a personal choice.

Outside the classroom

Lately, I’ve been hearing teachers talk a lot about twitter and how to use it to their advantage in their professional lives. I’ve been hearing about what a great way twitter is if you want to make new professional acquaintances and find out about new activities, links, conferences and many more and this is true, however if people are looking for conversations on twitter then it’s the last place to go. Yes, IF you follow the right person on twitter then you can see who that person is following and follow maybe some of them and then look at some of the people that person has as his/her followers and follow some of them and so on and so forth. After a while you will start getting lots of tweets about different stuff relating from day-to-day activities to professional ones. Then you can start filtering out the ones which are important for you and use them in your field of expertise.

• you can stay in touch with some of your colleagues in a different country or continent and post new websites, software or activities that you have used or see what they are currently using. This is a fast and easy way of sharing experiences and different ways of approaching teaching.
• I also found on Digg.com some interesting ways of using Twitter. Here are some of them:

Artwiculate

A fine use of Twitter which helps us learn a new word each day and replace the colorful adjectives we normally use at traffic snarls. Follow @artwiculate on Twitter and use the word they broadcast in one of your tweets. The more ‘likes’ or retweets each reply gets, pushes it up the popularity charts on Artwiculate. The prize: An enriched vocabulary which we can use to sound more intelligent than we actually are.

Atlibs

Solve user created puzzles via Twitter or create your own. The fun is in the off the cuff bizarre answers that get generated. The site could do with a boost as the responses seem to be flagging off. If you have a sense of humor, play this Twitter game which is short and funny.

Outwit.me

Outwit.me has a lineup of seven games based on Twitter. You can join and play anytime once one game is over and another begins. For instance, in Tweet Hangman you have to guess a secret word or phrase by replying with letters. Tweet Quiz is about guessing all the multiple answers that may exist for the quiz asked. Each correct guess that matches the majority earns a point.

Tweet Bricks

This Twitter game is the equivalent of the classic game of Bricks, except that the bricks come from Tweets. Stack up your Tweets as they fall down with the arrow keys. You can choose to play with your own Tweets, with other users, friends or followers, with your mentions, or with all Tweets posted with a Hash tag.

Chess Tweets

The idea to play chess with a remote opponent is nothing new. Chess Tweets just takes the idea onto Twitter. You don’t need to register separately. You can play against one or against the entire community by moving the set pieces and sending chess moves via your Twitter account. Depending on the responses, this game can be slow at times.

As you can see there are some ways to use these outside your classes with your students by motivating them to use twitter not only to say that they are washing the dishes or watching their favourtite TV series but also to use it as a useful tool.

Inside the classroom

Now, this is depends very much on whether your students have a mobile device (such as a smart phone or tablet/pad or  a laptop) that supports a twitter application. If not or they don’t like carrying it with themselves into classes then you pretty much can’t use it when teaching in the classroom. If they do have these gadgets and are happy to use them in class you might use twitter to:

• receive feedback from your students on the lesson. They just have to hash tag (which is this sign #) the topic of discussion and send you a tweet on the lesson. They can then start a discussion on why they liked certain aspects of the lesson and why not. Students can vote on which part they thought was the most useful in the lesson by tweeting and retweeting each other.
• you can ask them to give examples of sentences where they use some of the newly learned vocabulary. They could use one new word they’ve learned during the lesson in their tweets.
• you can ask them to drill some grammar points. They could tweet a question using a particular tense and ask the others to answer the question using the same tense. In order to make it a bit more interesting you could tell them to tweet about a personal experience so they have an incentive to start with. You can always reply to their tweets adding some feedback on their tweets.

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