Is this a picture or a pile of words?

This is the first question that I asked myself when I first see a book that has cover picture made of word cloud. I know that pictures on covers of books are often done with the at most care to communicate the message of the book. As a result it is common to see names of people who did that in the inside or outside cover of books (cover picture by _____). So what is the value of this word cloud as cover picture here? After I got a chance to see how word cloud is done using the ICT tools and especially after we had a discussion in the classroom about its contribution in language teaching and learning, I realised now two important things. The first thing is that I was not critical about what the words in the cloud represent. The second is that I have never imagined that such practice can be used for further educational purpose, especially English Language Education.

Wordle is one of the ICT tools that can help as do such word cloud. As usual, let me introduce what it is, how can it be used in English language teaching and what are the features that can be considered while preparing to use it in classroom.

What is Wordle?

As I mentioned earlier, wordle is an ICT tool to make word cloud for different purposes.  The word cloud often has words with different font size and colour the most frequent word/s have larger size and the size of the font of the words goes smaller as the words become less frequent.  The procedure to create Wordle document is very simple and short. The following video shows you how you can easily create your wordle document.

http://screencast.com/t/aqcw1ti2

What is the use of Wordle in English language teaching?

The most important question for this short article is what purpose wordle serves in teaching English language. In my perception wordle can be used for different purposes while teaching English language. At a higher education level especially at the stage where collocation of words is discussed. The result from analysing a written text can show us preliminary information about word frequency of the text. This however is very elementary level information. In the document prepared above we can see that the words presentation, presentations and Saturday, are used frequently.

In addition to, this we can produce different kinds of lessons for teaching English language. I will try to discuss how can we use such documents to teach vocabulary, writing and speaking.

We can ask our students to work on matching words with synonyms

We can also facilitate a reconstruction of a paragraph based on the jumbled sentences that we have produced from it using worlde. The following picture shows how to do that.

We can ask students to guess and speak or write about what is the main issue of the wordle document. They can use the words given as hint. It can facilitate collaboration and group dynamic while students try to make meaning out of the words and try to visualise the words written in small font size. We can consider the fun that can lessons create as a tip for our class as well.

Things to be considered

 Wordle is just a single ICT tool. It is obvious that it cannot help us to prepare our lessons all the time and so does any other ICT tool. However, we can think of which tool can help us produce what kind of lesson. This is often to the decision of the teacher. In addition to this, there is one limitation of wordle as we can see in the jumbled sentences exercise above. In the exercise, the students are expected to figure out each word in the sentences so as to understand the complete meaning. This could be time consuming.

It is better give it a try and see what can we improve about it.

Good Luck

Story using Bubblr

How about 'Bubblr'?

The advantage of using multimedia resources to present our lesson is well discussed. However, my practice as a teacher of English as a foreign language informs me that I often ignore such relevant aspect of pedagogy. Of course one reason for such ignorance is the lack of access and expertly in suing resources available.

Situations are changing now. There are user friendly ICT and multimedia tools out there that can really make difference in English language teaching and learning. Using multimedia  resources in our presentations need to be a matter of necessity than option. We are lucky that there are thousands of them out there.

In this post I would like to share about ‘Bubblr’, a simple but a very exciting ICT tool that can help us design interesting lesson for our classes.  As usual, I will discuss on what is it? How can we use it in our language teaching and what are the issues that we need to consider to make the best use of it.

What is Bubblr?

Bubblr is a program that is produced by a company called Pimpampum.com. The company of course has other similar products. Bubblr helps to create a document that has series of images selected form the repository such as fliker. It has very simple and user friendly steps to create. Russell Stannared’s http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBubblr/index.html   video can show as how can we use to build our bubbler document.

This is the page that we see when we open the program.

What is its benefit for teaching English language?

As I mentioned earlier multimodal classroom inputs facilitate teaching learning in different ways. The first thing is that we create variety in classroom presentations. This facilitates the learning of students of different learning preferences. Bubblr enables us to display pictures in sequence and insert some written texts using the models of bubble given at the bottom of the program. Hence, leaners get advantage to facilitate their understanding.

We can think of different lessons based on the language item that we are interested to teach and the level of our students. At the lower level vocabulary practice and construction of simple sentences are ideal practices using bubblr. We can adapt similar decisions to the intermediate and advanced level. For example, we can integrate practice of the four language skills at intermediate level. Having presented a sequence of pictures we can ask students to make a story out of it. Then after, we can go on asking students to produce written version of that story. Bear in mind that while doing the above activities, students are also practicing listening and reading.

How can use the best out of Bubblr?

Planning any lesson require the teacher to consider the level of the students and the relevance of the lesson at that level. This are also the most important skills that teachers are trained to practice. As I mentioned earlier it is possible to use bubblr teach present our lesson for learners at different levels. The other important point to make best use of bubblr is to work on the integration of the pictures and the texts that we insert using the bubble diagram.

You can view from my blog what I did using bubblr to create a simple promotional note.

Good luck in using bubblr and
Good Day

Something more than search engine for classroom

My calssmet who has the new Iphone 4 S showed me an aminzing feature of it. Later, I also saw the feature on TV ad. The phone has a feature called siri. I can say that it literally can talk to you. It provides information about what you ask. We tried to inquire about a lot of things such as the capital city of my country, the current prime minister and other questions. See the following dialogue between myself and the phone. 

Me: I love you

I Phine 4 S: But I respect you

Me: Why don’t you love me back?

I Phone 4 S: I am not allowed to

Is that not exciting??!!!!!!!!! It of course reminded me the film called I Robot, Will Smith.

I am thinking about how can we use such resources in supplementing our practice of teaching and learning.

 I am convinsed that things that we read on science fiction novels and watch on movies will come to be reality. How fantastic is technology. It is really making life easy.

In my ICT in ELT class I came across a website aclled Wolframe Alpha. I have see that it is a much more practical help for my question above, helping teaching and learning.

Let me discuss briefly what Wolframe Alpha is and comment on how can we use it in supplementing teaching and learning in general and Engliah language teaching and learning in particular.

Wolframe Alpha is like a search webiste that provide you quick information. You can inquire the result of simple arthemetics or factual information or more complecated economic and chemical information. The website provides you reasonably reliable answer. Just type your inquiry and press enter button. It even goes to th extent of giving you possible answers if your questions are mis typed.

What does it has for teachers of Englaih Language?

The two things that come to my mind are Task Based Language Learning and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). I know that both are engaging for the learners. In the case of the later, we can teach students about a subject matter and use the opportunity to help them development their language skills in that aspect. Hence, Wolfram Alpha can be a source of relevant information for the activities for our students. In the case of the former, We can provide students tasks such as finding facts and figures and reporting. As mentioned earlier, Wolframe Aplha can also be a reliable source of information for students. The other aspect of important input from Wolfram Alpha is that it can provide cooked information that facilitate communication and effective use of the target language.

What can we do to make the best use of it?

Wolframe Alpha  has some special characteristis compaired to other search engines. It provides readily available and well cooked information that the user can work on. Therefore, if the student knows exactly what to inquire, she can get the infromation. The level of the learner often determines the type of information that she inquires. This enables saving time of the learner. Teachers can facilitate the use of the wesite to get infromation. However,  they need to be very confident about how far students can use them to help their own learning.

Planning Your Travel, WebQuest Lesson

This Webquest lesson is the result of my practice to use the Quest Garden. It was demanding but also exciting practice to produce. such practices help to have resource for our calsses or share it with other teachers.

WebQuest Lesson

Example presentation using my brainshark

How to use My brainshark

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?

http://my.brainshark.com/Home.aspx

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!!!