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.

Adding subtitles to videos

Overstream is a free tool that allows you to add subtitles to online videos. It only takes a few seconds to upload the video of your choice. Adding the subtitles is quite straightforward as well. You only need to get the hang of the timing. Anyway, the step by step tutorials on the page are very clear and easy to follow. When you are done, you can get the url or the embed code.

Since students in general like working with videos, I think this tool offers a lot of potential for the language classroom. For example:

• giving background information about a particular artist. My experiment:

• describing feelings
• telling the story behind the lyrics and the images of a music video
• preparing vocabulary quizzes based on the lyrics/images, etc.