Screencasting & interactive videos for teacher development

Using screencasting software or services to record what you do on your computer has become, in my humble opinion, one of the most useful tools for teacher development and potentially useful for teaching and learning in the EFL-ESL classroom.

There are free services like Screenr, CamStudio, Jing, Screen-O-matic, Tildee and paid software like Camtasia to make these recordings. Screencasting can be used to:

1. show how to use a web tool (How-to videos)
2. give feedback to participants (eg. writing or online projects)
3. video lectures (eg. showing how certain skill works; giving short explanations on language aspects)
4. make presentations

Screencasting is not only a great web tool for teachers, but students can also use it to showcase a project; to describe their online portfolios; for making presentations; to describe a picture among other things.

I have been using screencasting for some teacher development courses I have participated as moderator or comoderator this year. One of them is the English Village Online. I used it as co-moderator in a podcasting course to show participants how to record and publish podcasts  and to provide feedback to them on their final projects (inspired on Russell Stunnard’s work about screencasting & feedback). Also I have used screencasting to record tutorials for The Learning Technologies for the Classroom course offered by the BritishCouncil (Venezuela) to show participants how to:

1, have access to the course in Moodle and give them a walkthrough on the course content.

2. use Wiziq as our virtual classroom

3. create a blog for participants’ reflections

4. use certain web tools introduced in the course modules.

For this course, I recorded 11 tutorials in total using Camtasia. If you are going to use a free screencasting service you have to make sure you can download or save the video to your computer and that it is in one of the format accepted by Youtube (.AVI, .3GP, .WMV, .MOV, .MP4, .MPEG, .FLV, .MKV). Making this interactive video compilation would make it easier for participants to have access to tutorials from one single place. This would keep participants from having to bookmark and watch the tutorials from separated links. 

Now how did I come up with this idea? I remembered having bookmarked this article in Diigo called How to make an interactive lesson in Youtube. And it suddenly hit me I could sort of do more or less the same thing making a video compilation instead of a lesson.

How did I create this interactive video?

I carefully read the article and watch the videos from Knewton about preparing for the GMAT. Next I had to "migrate" (so to speak) the tutorials I had uploaded from BlipTV to Youtube. Once I had done that I started planning out the video compilation. From this plan, I realized I had to record some screencasts to take participants to the tutorials in an orderly fashion. To record this videos I used my webcam, Powerpoint and Camtasia. I recorded 5 screencasts:

1. The first one called "Home" was recorded to greet and invite participants to start watching the videos by clicking on "Tutorials".

3. The second one called the "Main Menu" grouped tutorials into "Access", "Blogger" and "Modules".

  4. The last three are "submenus" for Access, Blogger and Modules. These menus provide access to the tutorials. 

Next I started adding spotlights to the menu button images. These buttons were created in Photoshop and saved as JPEG. I created some other buttons to make navigation smooth from one video to another or to go back to "Home" or "Main Menu". I created these buttons from Youtube using "Notes" in "Annotation".

To learn about adding spotlights go to How to make an interactive lesson in Youtube.

Here’s my interactive video tutorial compilation for the Learning Technologies for the Classroom course. 

Just to close this post, I recently learned from the fantastic Richard Byrne that there's a service called Viewbix for making interactive videos. Check it out and let me know what you think about it.

Mantweet, Womantweet

Yesterday I came accross this study on daily patterns of life in Twitter messages when reading Michael Rundell's post (You say "lovely", I say "great" - How "Beatlish" can that be). It shows according to gender how frequent a word is used. This study was carried out by the Language, Interaction an Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento, Italy.

The website Tweetolife has got a "lovely", "cute" webpage to experiment a bit with word or phrase queries and learn, for example, how frequently men say "fabulous" and when they use it or how frequently women say "dude" and when they use it as well.

To try this out, go to: Tweetolife and click on "Gender Differences" and submit a word.

You will get a graphic showing how frequent men and women use this word:

If you hover the cursor over the blue bar for men, you will read 24%. Now if you do the same over the pink bar for women, you will get 76% (mmm...blue and pink; how stereotypical that is). If you click on "Detailed Query" you will find when men and women use this word.  Apparently men use it when talking about sports  while women when talking about food!!!.

Queries are based on thousands of tweets from Twitter collected by the university of Edinburgh. This gives an interesting use to Twitter to research about vocabulary or grammar use for example. Would this king of web tools would be useful for teachers? learners? Would this be useful when writing dialogues? or any other type of writing task? Do you think it has got any application in the language classroom or it is just an interesting tool to explore about, say, gender stereotypes in class?

A writing helper: MacMillan Dictionary

Lately  I have been writing more entries for my blog and posts in the forums for courses I delivered for the British Council. As a non-native English speaker, sometimes I'm in doubt about the right word or phrase to use. Also, when I am rehearsing for my presentations or recording tutorials and doubt strikes me again, I turn to one of the best online dictionaries I have come accross: The MacMillan Online Dictionary.

What Do I like about it? First, its slick and sort of "minimalist" presentation caught my fancy. Secondly, the easy way to search words/phrases and all the info I can get including pronunciation.

Lay-out and design

Have a peek at this image, isn't that a page you feel like you are going to get what you want? The lay-out, in my humble opinion, is clean and simple. Information is not cluttered. It goes from top to bottom. From Search engine to dictionary features/content. You can clearly identify three sections;

1. Search engine (dictionary/Thesaurus)

2. Main web page dictionary information (learn english, live english, love english)

3. MacMillan dictionaries and mobile apps.

4. In detailed-dictionary features and content for entry words

The design is as clean and simple as the lay-out. Red, black and white as the main colour for fonts, headers and drawings. Fonts are easy-to-read. Few pictures or drawings. All this makes navigation easy and pleasurable. 

What do I use this dictionary for?

1. look up word's meaning, its pronunciation, collocations and maybe prasal verbs.

2. make sure I am using the word appropriatley. You can get info about cultural notes, word stories, offensive words an metaphors.

3. check how frequent a word is. It is useful for my ESP courses at the university.

4. find synonyms in the Thesaurus.

This is really helpful when I write a blog entry or a post in forums. Also, it's really handy when I rehearse for presentations and hesitate a bit on how a certain word is pronounced.

Searching for words

Searching is easy. You can either search in the MacMillan webpage or add it to your list in the Firefox serach bar and get definitions in a flash from its tool bar.

There are some other gadgets you can sue to search for words in a breeze in this online dictionary.

Other features I love:

Another nice feature is that words like "snap" has got sound effect. I think it is easier to click on a sound effect icon and make our students listen to it than us trying to ackwardly impersonate the sound.

Also you can check both British or American definitions and also get some info about word forms.

It has got an interesting video like What's Your English.

How can you use it in the classroom?

1. For writing compositions, look up words and check their meaning, collocations, use, word form, phrasal verbs.

2. For reading, to look up for words and check their meanings.

3. For speaking to check pronunciation (althought chekcing pronounciation for reaidng can be useful as well).