ELT through ICT

Email, sometimes written as e-mail, is simply the shortened form of electronic mail, a protocol for receiving, sending and storing electronic messages. Emails has gained popularity with the spread of the internet. However, as technology develops, from a boring written email, main sending have develop to video mail. If you are pondering what is a Video Mail, it is a tool to send a recorded video of yourself, as if you are writing an email to a receiver. Instead of writing long messages, you are able to talk live in the video, save it and send it as an email. There are a few websites that offer such services, and one of the websites is Mail Vu. Below is a link linking directly to the website and a picture of how the website looks like:

http://mailvu.com/

How Can I Use It for Educational Purposes? 

Unlike AudioBoo and Brainshark, Mail Vu not only allows recording of the users voice, it also allows the actually video to be taken. Users will be able to show emotions and body language as well when recording the video. However, users wont be able to do it Brainshark, where the PowerPoint presentation will be played during the recording. 

Teachers can use this feature to good use. One of it is by having the students to sent video mail to the teacher as homework. Students can record their response to a argumentative based question and answer it using Mail Vu, and sent it to the teacher's email address. The teacher then can reply the video by sending a Mail Vu back to the student. Besides that, group work can be done by using Mail Vu as well. Students can gather in front of a webcam and record the activity that should be done by the students, such as group presentation or role play. Teachers must be creative in creating lessons and activity which involves Mail Vu, so that they can put Mail Vu to full use and in the same time, practice the speaking skills of the students. Below is a picture of how to send your Mail Vu to a receiver.

Advantages

Disadvantages

• If users wish to use other services, they need to pay for it.
• Recorder video could not be embedded into any social websites such as blogger

Ever think of getting the chance to see all the listening materials that is available free for educators in one single website? Well, the search can come to an end as ELLLO, the All-in-One online English listening lesson library is available for anyone who wish to use the materials for their lesson plans or simply by motivating the students to learn English on their free time, in school or at home. There are a few sections available for the viewers to view, hear and use for any lessons: Views (general/culture), Games, Mixer, Videos, News etc. This sections are well organized by the top right side of the website, and viewers will be able to explore the website with ease. Below is the link to this awesome website, and a picture of the front page of the website:

http://www.elllo.org/english/home.htm




Convienient as it is, the categories are lined up in a horizontal way, making it easy for the viewers to choose from:

1. Views

In this category, there are recorded conversation based on various topics. Along with the topics and recorded audio, there will be transcription available for the viewers to view in order to have a better understanding of  the  conversation, as both listening and reading skills are involved in the learning process. There will be quizzes as well for the viewers to complete as a practice based on the focus of the recorded audio. The greatest criteria for this category, which may exist in other categories as well, is there are video responses with subtitles included, as a response to the recorded audio. Not only the video response tool is a great way to comment, but other viewers can listen to other people opinion based on the first person point of view. By doing so, students may increase their motivation to speak, as viewers may notices that there are various accents of English included in this website, and not every sentence uttered is grammatical correct. This may cause awareness, especially to second language learners, that speaking English is not always about uttering the correct sentences straight out from a book, but having the courage to speak up and learn the language.

2. Mixer

This category is special as all the recorded audio is based on various accents. Hence, the listening activity may be a little bit tough for students as they need to adapt the different accents of English language all around the world. But it will be a great and interesting activity because it will be so much fun to hear different accents speaking on the same topic. There are transcription at the bottom of the recorded audio, with Audio Elaborator for vocabulary found in the transcription. There are quizzes and comprehension questions available for practice.

3. Games

For the Games category, it almost have the same function as Views has, however, the difference lies on the task provided. If any viewers explore this category, they will notice that this category will primarily focus on 3 language aspects, which is vocabulary, reading and speaking quizzes. These activities may prove to be useful for beginners of English language learners as it will scaffold learners in learning English.

4. News.

In the News section, viewers will notice that there are only two different accents of English found, which is UK and US English. Learners will have the choice of choosing over 20 broadcasts to play, together with listening questions based on the recorded video. There are too vocabulary questions available for learners to answer and learn.


These are the four main sections which i found may draw teachers and learners attention in learning English using ELLLO. Students as low as primary schools will be able to listen and complete questions based on the recorded audio or video, but teachers need to monitor all the students, as they may have problems with vocabulary. Teachers themsleves can make full use of the website to design a listening activity for the students in the classroom or simply by giving them the topic based on the category chosen and labelled it as homework to do. But these may cause problems as not every child has computers or internet connection in their residence, so the best is by making it as a listening lesson plan.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages for this website. The advantages are as follow:

• It's free
• There a number of categories to choose from
• Quizzes and listening questions are included
• Hearing different accents of English
• Personalization - teachers and learners get to choose with topic interest them the most
• As a support website for designing lesson plans
• Autonomous learning
• Provide a purpose for the students to listening, read, answers the questions and learn the language
• One of CLIL websites

If you are satisfied with you recording, press 'Happy/ Add a title' button, and it will lead to the next page, which is the picture above. In this page, you can add a title to your recording. Besides that, you can insert some labels, regarding to what categories you recording. Below is a podcast of my blog:

Teachers can record lots of podcast for students to listen to. Students can listen to these podcast in the school, at home, for any specific reason, such as revising to what the teacher had taught, or listen back to what the teacher have to explain about a lesson of literature in class. By providing such teaching aid to students, teaching language maybe easier as language can be learned not only in the classroom or ICT classroom, but students can excess to the teaching talking lessons online, as these recording will be available in any social websites, such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook or even iTunes. Besides that, teachers can prepare their lesson plans by singing by their own, composing their own song, and making it as a listening lesson for the class. The authenticity of the music will make the classroom more lively and students often response to authentic materials.

Brainshark, an online presentation technology, is basically designed for business individuals such as marketers, sales people and executives for them to upload and present their presentation for business purposes. Users are able to upload their personal presentations onto their secure online myBrainshark account. When users uploaded their presentations on Brainshark, the system will automatically convert the presentations to a format supported by the system itself. Files such as .ppt, .pptx and .odp are accepted by the system to be converted to be used for the online presentation. Besides that, the maximum file is as large as 200mb and users are able to apply background music for the online presentation. Below is an example of Brainshark and its link to the webpage:

As stated above, brainshark is able to accept Microsoft PowerPoint as one of the sources to be converted to fit its compatibility of its system. After uploading the PowerPoint, users can use the telephone or computer microphone to record voice narration. Users will narrate the points and elaborate what they wish to convey as the voice recorder records the voice of the user on the particular slide. After saving the best voice narration for the slides, the user can move on the next step on narrate the next slide. Furthermore, users too can add additional features such as background musics. Below are some pictures of steps to be taken notice during narration of the slides:

The large screen on the left of the column will show exactly what is in selected. This screen will ease the users to narrate what they wish to convey in the current slide.

The voice recorder will act as the controller for the awesome device. Users can retake the narration if there is an error during narration, discard useless or error voice recording and also save the voice recorded.

In this column, there will be timers recorded for the duration of the narration for selected slides. Every slides has its own time duration besides it.

In the final stage, after saving and editing the voice-based presentation, the final Brainshark can be delivered via a Web link or can be embedded in a Web page, for example, in Blogger. Below is a product of narrated PowerPoint Presentation of my bibliography:

You can even go to my Brainshark page to view it through this link:

This website is very useful when it comes for language teaching and also sharing ideas with all the educators around the world. By preparing a PowerPoint presentation, the user is able to voice out his or her opinion on a certain subject or field and viewers can ask or give advises or opinion on the presentation itself. Besides that, language teachers can use this website to provide the classroom with a narrated PowerPoint Presentation, which may excite the class more and making language teaching in the classroom more enjoyable. Students may even learn more because students will not only listen to what the teacher narrated, but they will view as well what is the teacher talking about, enabling them to understand more about the subject being taught.

What I like about Brainshark:

What I dislike about Brainshark:

Dictation is mainly about the act of manner of transcribing words uttered by another person. Through the definition itself, teachers may expect this particular blog is about a listening activity to reproduce words from a dictation. However, we can say that dictation, in the current teaching process, can be considered as a old and boring way of teaching English. And this may demotivated student to continue to learn language, making teaching and learning unproductive. Nonetheless, there is a website that may change the perception about dictation.

Listen and Write - a free online website which uses recorded voices on various sources, such as current and past news reports, a short clip from a movie, or YouTube videos to produce dictation activities. Below is a printed screen of the website and a link is provided at the bottom of the photo:

Listen and Write, as stated in the above, expose students to most recent news and videos around the world. However, one important to be taken notice is that most of the voice recordings are taken from Voice of America. There a few types of activity provided in the website: full mode, quick mode and blank mode. Each mode has its own unique and way of completing the task, making this website even more interesting to be explored and used as an activity in the classroom for English language teaching.

Full Mode

Lets take full mode as an example. Firstly, teachers have to make sure about the text is:

Students nowadays have taken music as one of the important part in their way of life. There is a increase of music listening as radio gained popularity and music videos are inserted to make music. Hence, by using music's fame, we teachers and this magnificent can use music as one of the medium to teach students English in a more motivating and fun approach. In Lyrics Training, music users just have to choose a YouTube-hosted music video and select one of the three mastery levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Expert. As the video begins to play, the lyrics of the song appear.