Created and maintained by the Ministry of Education on TKI, this website lets you browse for software by type, by product or learning focus area. Its Managing Software section offers definitions, ideas of use as well as privacy and safety guidelines. Student work samples with various software is available and inspiring!
From there you can access the associated Software for Learning Wiki, Effective Pedagogy, and take the opportunity to join in the conversations after viewing the e-stories, which "include strategies that may assist schools to explore e-learning and provide opportunity for quality dialogue". Of particular interest for Languages teachers are Suzanne Atkins (Whangarei Girls High) e-stories where she reflects on the benefits for her students who have worked on digital story telling and on a wiki.
Here is Excitement with a capital E! And possibly a concrete answer to gather spoken samples in students portfolios: Lingt is a great new tool designed for language teaching. Its young "on to it" developers have created a fantastic user friendly, completely online, no downloading needed, free tool "to improve and assess spoken proficiency by making online spoken assignments as integral to your homework schedule as your usual reading and writing assignments". Just what we need to gather concise data on students' progress in an area which so far as been oh so cumbersome to keep track off! And it's not just easy for teachers to set up and use, it really is a breeze for students to access!
If you're going to add only one new tool to your web toolbox this term, that's the one.
The low down: - Register for a free account, do this straight away, it allows you to get a really good look. - Go through the short concise tutorial, iron out question marks with the FAQ from the Help section. - Make sure you've got either internal mic on or plugged in one at the ready (that's the technical aspect sorted!) - Build an assignment incorporating voice, video, images, and text using the online editor: the speech bubble interface is simplicity itself! By the time you've played round with it a couple of times, you'll have the hang of it. - Direct your students (individuals, or class) to lingtlanguage.com, followed by your username, to complete your assignment by the date you set. No need for them to register or be members etc, just share the link with them! They'll submit their assignment back to you via email for evaluation - Go over the answers, provide comments via text or voice, and send the feedback to them, which they too get via email.
Looking for inspiration before getting started? Click on Share once registered to see what users have created and shared for you to sample.
Read more from the excellent Box of Tricks blog which introduced me to it and from The World Language Classroom Resources blog which offer a link to a sample use of Lingt to assess student performance. And meet Justin, one of the developers, on Classroom 2.0 ning: the philosophy behind Lingt is solid!
Florence Lyons (Matamata College) refered to it in a blog post and Emma Souch (Waimea College) described it as "a fantastic and simple way to get students to create animated dialogues in French".
Either use the online Text-to-Movie or download the desktop software State to create movies.
For the online version initially click on Create Movie, then click on a Showpak, and you can start creating. Have a look at the Quick Tips, design your scene, and start writing the script! Preview your film as many times as you want by clicking on Action, before saving for further editing or uploading. Jose Picardo describes how is languages students use Xtranormal in his excellent blog Box of Tricks.
I went on to create a short movie myself (see below!). To slow down speech delivery it is worth entering spaces in the script, or even breaking it down into smaller chunks. To achieve better French pronunciation it may pay to revert to phonetic transcription of certain words.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Del.icio.us greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. Things you can do with Del.icio.us :
♦Bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from any computer anywhere, by just logging in
♦Share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return. Eg: if one of your bookmarks is for www.french.ac.nz, you'll see how many other delicious users have also bookmarked it. By clicking on the "people" button you'll then access all the other users' bookmarks sharing your topic of interest (eg: Teaching of French, or Resources etc)! No more "blind" Googling!
♦See what's hot with Del.icio.us users by checking out our popular tags. By looking at popular bookmarks for a tag, you'll be able to discover the most interesting bookmarks on the topics you're most interested in.
In her article published article in Polyglot 2008 (NZALT), Gayleen Mackereth describes del.icio.us as "a snowball: when others use the same bookmarks as yours, you can then access all the sites they have bookmarked. There is a growing corpus of associated knowledge".
A great online tool brought to our attention by Florence Lyons (Matamata College)! Type or paste the text you wish to scramble et voilà, your Word Magnets are ready! A brilliant tool for teaching basic syntax (you can colour code the words), or more complex structures. Students at all levels can work in pairs and have fun while working out word orders. Génial!
Nota is a free website which is essentially an online piece of interactive white paper that can be used to create presentations, wikis, or collaborate on projects. Nota lets you write text, paste photos, add links, videos etc directly onto a Webpage, and it resizes everything! It is great for group or class work and beyond as more than one person can log on and update the Web page at the same time. The site lists a number of ways it has been usef for education related projects, so you can provide a link for others to view and participate. To see how easy it is visit notaland.com for a demo.
The idea of VoiceThread is to encourage group conversation around images, documents and videos. Find out about VoiceThread here.
VoiceThreads might best be described as interactive media albums. They are essentially online slide shows of images, documents, or videos that enable viewers to comment on any slide (or at any point in the video) by typing, recording an audio or video comment, or drawing on the image itself. Teachers have been early adopters of the easy-to-learn technology. Read this blog page to find out how and why students participate more actively in digital discussions than in the classroom.
A very easy introduction to VoiceThread and its use is available on this wiki where you will find a clear step by step custom made "VoiceThread Educator Guide". You may want to talk with the IT person at your school to find out which version you are best to use on your school network before you register an account. VoiceThreads can easily be embedded on Websites and Moodle, where your students can access them to leave their comments.
Click on this VoiceThread link to find practical manageable ideas for using VoiceThread in the Languages Classroom.
Is your current Microsoft Office package getting out of date? Can’t open documents produced by either Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007? Your school has not upgraded and you don’t want the big expense of a license to download a newer version of an MS Office package?
Well here is the solution: OpenOffice ! It’s easy to download, uses the same type navigation as MS software and easy to get to grip to and more still: absolutely free! Most large Internet cafes and a range of big companies have resorted to using OpenOffice.
OpenOffice.org 2 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share them on your blog or wiki pages. Find out how to use word clouds in the Languages classroom by visiting www.boxoftricks.net or go to Samantha Lunn's The Languages Resources Blog for "23 ways to use Wordle in the MFL Classroom"
When you use a wiki your students get a gentle introduction into online collaboration, and they'll remain engaged beyond the classroom! Click on the link above (title) to access pbwiki and create a free wiki for your class. This link also answers some frequently asked questions.Some teachers of French in NZ are currently trialling wikis to establish virtual exchanges with classes in France.NB: This wiki may not be the best but it is easy to use and it’s free!Don’t forget to talk to the Principal at your school for conditions of use and continue to foster a warm working relationship with the IT coordinator to ensure a smooth set up!
(Dictionnaire multifunction) Better than any other since it can be downloaded and adds itself on your Web browser menu. No need to log on or opening an other tab when you are working online to check a translation or a definition! Click on the link above (title) to download it now! French Dictionaries on line This link takes you to an extensive selection of dictionaries to check spelling , definitions, grammar points, find synonyms, rhymes , literary terms etc. Include link to Reverso if you want a translation.
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. A new more stable Beta version came out in January 09 especially for Mac OS X. FANTASTIC for those internal assessments recordings: timed for accuracy and ready to be converted as MP3 for moderation, but surely very reliable and flexible indeed for PODCASTS. NB: Mac users may wish to investigate GarageBand (Ilife09 suite) for their voice recordings and podcasts publishing.
Talking about Podcasting, click here to access the Learning and Teaching Scotland site where the podcasts' "what, why and how to" are outlined, with videos and examples! To get started with downloading and gathering podcasts, you may wish to download Itunes if you have not done so already, to play your digital sound files and videos. It is perfect to synch contents to your students Ipods for instance. You can also access a lot of free French learning podcasts through the Itunes store. And visit BoxofTricks.net to see "Podcasting in 5 easy steps" , a video which shows "how anyone can start their own podcasts" and use podcasts alongside their teaching. Happy podcasting! If you wish to access some pre-recorded Podcasts for Learning French, open the document below: several listserves members contributed links to the podcasts they use regularly. Feel free to use the Contribute form to send your favorites on!
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