Thursday, 6 August 2015

Activities

The first item on the list of activities was quizlet.com. It is a tool with a wide variety of possibilities for producing flashcards, vocabulary cards and other helps for many requirements of learning processes.
In the afternoon, I gave a talk on some "preliminary" attempts I had made at Blended Learning.
Finally, it was blogging again and how to make and upload YouTube videos.
This is the video I produced:

Technologies

Quizlet is a website but also an app for the iPad (hooray!).  

It can be used for individual work in class or at home. Uses could be learning or revision of vocabulary. Quizlet can be a help in differentiation in that students (or the teacher) can produce individual sets of vocabulary. 

On the site, a huge number of sets are already available which other teachers have made. I even found some sets for coursebooks I am using. They may need some adapting, they are a good starting point nevertheless.

YouTube is well-known but has been completely untrodden territory for me so far. Still, here's a video of a few seconds embedded into the blog (Watch it. It got an Oscar nomination for most inspired foreign film.)

Friday, 7 August 2015

Activities

We learned about Screen Capture Software, which captures images with sound online and even videos with sound online. Russell introduced us to different brands of software, some easier to learn and use, others more difficult to use but also more sophisticated in their features.
In the afternoon, Petruschka gave a presentation on blended vocabulary practice with the help of a website and on the use of the same website for essay-writing.

Petruschka's presentation

warm-up with "ABC DRS3", Questionnaires were produced (by students) from English Vocabulary Profile. The website lists learner's vocabulary in the categories of the CEFR. This is a very useful tool for vocabulary revision.

Technologies

The tools we used were

• Jing (easy to use, no saving locally, video can be uploaded to screencast.com; not available and not viewable on iPad)
• SnagIt (costs about $50, videos can be sent to YouTube and saved locally, not available for iPad either, unfortunately; once sent to YouTube, videos can be viewed, of course)
• camtasia (advanced tools with more features, but also more difficult to use; as there are no screencast tools for iPad, not usable on iPad)
• screencast-o-matic

Application

Screencasting can be used for

• recordings of videos which you want to add your own comment to. This link goes to the video in which Erick is interviewing me and in this one you can hear Erick's wonderful American accent.
• feedback to student's texts by the teacher
• peer reviews among students
• basically you can also use screencast to copy video snippets which otherwise may be difficult. According to Russell you are allowed to copy short sequences for educational uses.