The Periodic Table of Videos

You all know I´m an EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher but I was once crazy about chemistry. After a tweet exchange I happened to rediscover Danny Nicholson´s blog "The Whiteboard blog" where I found these wonderful videos about chemical elements made by the University of Nottingham. To see each video, just click on the element and a window will pop up.
http://www.periodicvideos.com/#

Jogtheweb.com

Jog The Web via kwout

Like it says, you can create tours to websites with your own comments. It´s quite simple to make and as I´m a hands-on person I HAD to try it out so I decided to give you a taste of the widgets I like from the sidebar of my blog.

This is my tour

How can we use this with students?

• Let´s imagine you want students to explore listening sites. Use jogtheweb to give them a taste of the sites you want them to have a look at.
• Make a tour of your students´ blogs.
• Any other idea?
  

Screencast tutorial about POWNCE

This is my second post about POWNCE.COM and this time as I´m planning to have partners from other countries join my groups in Pownce I decided to make a screencast tutorial in order to help my partners and their students use this wonderful microblogging tool.
Click on PLAY on the player below or to see it fullscreen with the mouse movement click on the link below that.

MOBLYNG.COM slideshow creator

This is another cool slideshow creator I found in Camila Sousa´s new blog where she´ll be registering her experience teaching ESL in the US.

Text generators in Presentations

As I watched Graham´s presentation about Web 2.o and Language learning I noticed a great way to enrich your powerpoint presentations with pictures and customized text. Instead of using those boring templates people are used to seeing, grab an image from one of the sites I´m going to suggest and add the text you wish to have on your slide.


GLASSGIANT.COM is a site where you can create texts on the cover of a book, on a box of cereal, a wanted poster and so on.This is a hollywood sign in which I used the word "imagination".




ROCKYOU.com is another tool you can use for the personalizing texts like the one above.YOu can create texts in the form of signs, tatoos, t-shirts, fortune cookies ...






SIGNGENERATOR.ORG is a site with endless possibilities for creating texts in various images: palm of a hand, hollywood sing, famous star sidewalk, message in a bottle, astronaut message...










SIGNGENERATOR.NET is another site with various images: signs, a bus sign, door sign, hotel sign ...




Another possibility is to add captions to your own pictures and use them in your presentation. The comic strip below was made using http://comeeko.com

DOTSUB.com (video captions)

I´ve found this site from an e-mail sent by Nik Peachey in the Learning with Computers community in response to someone who was looking for a tool to add captions to a video they had made. Well, with http://dotsub.com not only can you add captions to a video you´ve created but also add captions to any video from the net and host it there. It provides you with a link and an embed code of the captioned video as well. This is a video I got from dotsub about wikis. At the bottom of the player you can select what language you want to read the captions in.Watch and learn.

Bubblejoy: sending video messages

This is a fun way to send video messages. With Bubblejoy and a webcam you can make a great video card you can send by e-mail. I found the site in Nik Peachey´s blog along with other great stuff I´m going to publish shortly. Always great of resources found there, great blog Nik!

The image above is a screenshot of a message I´ve just sent to a colleague and dear friend, Camila Sousa, who is moving to teach in the US. Camila, hope you have a wonderful experience there.

Web 2.0 and Language Learning

I´ve just come across this video made by Graham Stanley and decided to post it in my blog in order to share it with other teachers interested in edutech. His video is very clear and it gives us an overall idea of what is going on in the internet + education.

Tokbox.com

This is a talk box where you can connect to me in real time. You can also use tokbox.com in order to send video messages to e-mails and receive them as well. I´m still trying it out. There´s the possibility of inviting people to a conference room with images where more people can discuss together. Interesting tool!

Utterz.com

Decided to write about a tool lots of edutech enthusiasts have been trying out and tweetering about. It´s http://utterz.com.

With Utterz you can create a discussion which people can reply to using text, video, pictures or/and audio. It´s very simple to use and it´s really interesting to hear and see what people have to say. You can get a widget for the sidebar of your website so that you and your readers can follow what people have been saying there.

As you can also record it from your cell phone, it´s very practical and offers great opportunity for authentic language practice.

How to use it with students?

• create threads where students can write about topics you start like: describe your best friend (add picture), talk about your favourite food/dish (+ picture), describe your family (+picture), share your favourite song and so on.

• discuss topics using text, audio or video.
  

BRAZ-TESOL 2008 Fortaleza

Braz-tesol conference took place between 14-17 July in Fortaleza. Several speakers from Brazil and abroad shared experience, presented research and made contacts.



A highlight for me was the Edutech Sig meeting on 14 July where I was able to meet e-friends I had never met f2f: Ana Falcão, Bee Dieu, Jose Antonio and Graham Stanley. We had a great time hugging each other, taking pictures, listening to what they had to say and experiencing the wonders of live broadcasting with UStream. Graham had his laptop recording the full session and both speakers and participants were able to interact with online participants. Can you imagine how happy I was when I heard Carla Arena, Illya, Nina and other LWCers were actually following us (watching us and hearing us)?

You can have a look at the recording of the session at http://www.ustream.tv/bcgstanley/videos

Webcast powered by Ustream.TV

Another great moment for me was my own session “BLOG TALKS” where I shared blog projects I have developed in the last 2 years since I joined the Learning With Computers Community. In spite of the deafening sound of someone pounding on the wall which interrupted me for some time, the objective of sharing was accomplished. I had also created A BLOG to share with participants instead of providing a hand-out (saving trees); idea copied from Carla Arena and Erika´s session 2 years ago “Connect to Interact”.



I´ve also included pictures taken during the session and the slides I used during the session with audio narration. Hope you like it!




I´d also like to thank all twitterers who followed and gave me support before, during and after my session. It´s great to see how warm and supportive people can be.

Chat Robots

After reading about it in Larry´s blog I decided to try the chat robots and see how my students would feel if they tried it. It´s quite interesting and fun. You just start typing a question and the girl interacts with you. You can see the words and hear the girl speaking as well. Try it out here http://cartoonenglish.tv/Chat.html

You can find a list of other chat bots at this list taken from EFL classroom 2.0

TLC + TravelBlog

This is a post to talk about two sites I came across today.

• TLC (Tech + Literature + Classroom) is a blog created by Tara, living in China, who entitles herself as a library lady having fun with technology. She writes about books and sites in very interesting posts. Tara, I will definitely read your blog again.

• TravelBlog is a site I found in Tara´s blog sidebar. It asks you to click on the countries you´ve been to and then offers you the HTML code (large or small) like the one below.
  

COUNTRIES I´VE BEEN TO


Visited Countries Map from TravelBlog

Creating online books with MIXBOOK.COM

I´ve just heard about Mixbook in the Langwitches blog. I imagine you can create wonderful books with students using images from the web or even downloading images from your computer. You can write stories collaboratively, publish them, get the embed code or URL and even have the option of buying a printed copy of the book you have created.

You could:

• write stories with your students.
• write funny stories which students have to continue using their creativity.
• have students create dialogues with drawings they have done...

Have a look at this mixbook created by Third Grade students starting poems with " Roses are red, Violets are blue ..."

Stuff I like

This is my new web page using WIX. I used wix to create a page to links to stuff I like: songs, videos, images and so on. There are various things you can create using wix: cards to send to people, a web page for your business, page with links for your students and so on. The interface is really something! And it´s not so difficult to use as there are pre-set templates.
CLICK HERE for the full-size image

http://www.wix.com/anamariacult/anamariacult