My brainshark is an amazing website that has interesting feature as a tool of information communication technology. It can be used in classrooms and other educational and training purposes. In this post, I would like to share about it. I will be focusing on how it can be used for the purpose of teaching language especially in ESL context. Therefore, I would like to focus on relevant questions such as, what is it? What are its especial features? How can it be best used to teaching language?
What is it?
My brainshark is a website created by a company called mybrainshark.com. It is free and open means for ‘creating, sharing and tracking multimedia contents’. Like other service providers, it can be sued for education, communication and entertainment purpose. Here we will focus on it use for education purpose only.
What are its special features?
On My brainshark, we can easily upload different contents from power point, word document, podcast, photos and videos of any format. We can also add sound, or other media features to the document that we uploaded from MP3 recorder, or using our own voice. One more important thing, we can send our uploaded documents to different people such as students or other fellow teachers or even publish it on wider media such as Youtube. Beaty (2003: 75) mentioned that multimedia resources with such features facilitate communication and serve our purposes most. We can Link, Embed and Share via email whatever we created using My brainshark.
How can it be best used for language teaching?
The use of technology in language teaching and learning requires one to evaluate the purpose and means of using it. Therefore, before we use My brainshark in our language teaching business we need to clearly identify our purpose of using it. The greater advantage of My brainshark is that it can have audio, video and written documents synchronised.
We can use My brainshark to meet the following purposes in our language classrooms.
Beginner level
Practice vocabulary
Practice pronunciations
Practice grammar
Intermediate level
Practice listening and note taking
Advanced level
Practice listening and note taking
Tough it depends on the creativity of the user, knowing the features of a technology product helps us to decide on the productive use of it. In my perception, analysis of the feature of Mybrainshark tells us that it can be mainly used at advanced level of teaching. Teachers can prepare their presentations and avail it in website for reference.
One can register for free use of My brainshark. The procedure to follow is very simple and user friendly.
Finally, I up loaded power point presentation about myself. I added audio presentation after I uploaded my power point and the result was amazing.
I invite you to watch it.
Good luck in using My brainshark!!!
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