ESL Video

This is a great tool that I read about in Nik Peachey's blog, Nik's Quick Shout

It allows you to embed a video and create a quiz based on it. Once you are done, you can grab the code to embed in a blog, wiki, etc. As my students love working with video clips, I find this tool of enormous pedagogical value since students are developing vocabulary and listening skills through a highly motivating activity. This has also proved a valuable resourse to entice students to visit their wiki, where, alongside their working spaces, they now have a video page.

The only weak points I have encountered so far are that ESL caters solely for multiple choice questions. Besides, if you want to embed the code on Ning, you'll find that you can only do so on the pages that have a text box (Main, Members, Groups) Apparently, "iframes" can only be added to text boxes in Ning.

WordSift: Tool for visualizing text

Wordle taken a step beyond?

Apart from showing the most frequent words in a text in the form of tag clouds, this tool integrates visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. You can see images of the words, word webs, definitions, sentences where those words appear, etc.
Some of the applications suggested in the tutorial below include:

• pre- reading activities, e.g. making predictions about a text, introducing unfamiliar vocabulary

• post- reading activities, e.g. creating word webs to explore connections between words, writing a paragraph including some of the most frequent words

ISSUU: publishing tool

ISSUU is an extremely versatile publishing tool. It allows you to publish different types of documents in a very attractive way, with the look and feel of a real book.
You can share your work with other users, create networks and work collaboratively with the people in them, insert relevant documents from other users into your own creations to have all the information relevant to you in a single place, and, I guess, many other things that I haven't explored yet.

This is a very simple example of what you can do with this tool:

My colleagues'reaction

A few days ago, we had our first teachers' meeting of the year. Inspired by all I had experienced and shared during the Enhancing Lessons session, I went on and on about the benefits of integrating technology into our practice.

This is my colleagues' answer:

From Verónica Maser:




From Claudia Bondino:

Tool for creating animations

I have just learnt about this tool in AllSharing, a ning platform created by Mbarek Akkadar.

GoAnimate seems to have a lot of potential for story telling. One of the features I like the most is that it allows you to record your voice, thus lending itself to developing speaking and listening skills.