For the next few weeks I will be working and helping moderate the MachinEVO course in Second Life, one of the TESOL EVO courses. We are all hoping to learn how to record Second Life and to create recordings which will be useful to our language learners. There are already more than 110 participants on this course, some of them already accomplished machinima producers, and some taking their first steps now. 

Second life educators are known to be great sharers – nowhere else (but on Twitter)  have I met so many colleagues willing to give away their free time and this is an inspiring environment to work in.

For the benefit of those who have not yet created any machinima productions, I have created this short guide.

This post is inspired by a post with the title How to Make a Movie which summarises the process in 19 Steps.

Second Life

Download the Second Life Viewer and create your membership and avatar

Useful Tools for recording in Second Life

•  Fraps free download from http://www.fraps.com/  You can record for up to 2 minutes – paid version (27$US) for as long as you want

• Tutorial on how to use Fraps 
• Second Life Michinima with Fraps and Vegas 
• Pinnacle Studio Ultimate version 14 trial version
• VirtualDub  suggested by Marius – you can view a You Tube video tutorial here

Screencast tools – recording your screen

•  Jing Free version allows recording your screen for up to five minutes. The screencasts can then be stored on their server and an embedding code is available.

• Russell Stannard’s great teacher training video on how to use Jing
• Screencast-o-matic  Does not require a download and can convert your screencast into a You Tube video.

• Comment: Made a test recording and on my Mac which has a good internal microphone SL sounds recorded very well but in the past when I used it on my PC it didn’t.  Here is the link to my test recording,
• Alternatives   Looks like there are quite a few – found them listed on this page. Do try them out and report your successes or comments

• Russell Stannard’s great teacher training video on how to use Screenjelly  

Audio Recording & Editing

•  Audacity - an open source application which allows you to record and edit audion. Audacity is easy to use and allows you to record different tracks and to change the level or speed or tracks or sections of your track.

• A You Tube Tutorial on how to record using Audacity and showing some of the basic functions. You can search for more on            You tube
•    

©Marisa Constantinides 2012

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A few months ago (April-June 2011*)  I wrote a report on a survey on the use of technology amongst CELTA tutors. The results were rather disheartening and the prevailing attitudes among many of my respondents ranged from the completely negative (“It is not our job/place to introduce technology on CELTA courses; there are more important basic areas; they can learn this later”) to the cries for help (“I don’t feel I know anything about it; I don’t know where to begin“).

Although for reasons of copyright ownership, the original article is only available if you purchase it, you can read  the abstract if you click here – you might also like to hear the podcast of an interview I gave to Nik Peachey on the same topic from IATEFL Brighton online in 2011.

My own position is that we do need to include it as an important part of our curriculum and that we should make it a normal part of everyday teaching, i.e., normalize the use of education technology tools.

How successful have we been so far? 

Today, technology was on the timetable of my currently running CELTA courses.

And even though it appeared on the timetable ‘officially’ for the first time,  I am very happy to be able to embed an animation created by one of my trainees for her Teaching Practice which followed that particular ‘input session’. Here it is:

GoAnimate.com: is there a movie tonight.

(Thank you Danae for letting me use your work:-) ) 

Web 2.o & Integration into Teacher Development Courses 

This was a question (how to integrate Web 2.0 training into our courses) which I had to deal with along with many others like myself who have found themselves in a similar position.

At first, I started by including one or two input sessions – usually during the second half of the course or later. It seemed – by dint of amount of time allocated to it and place on the syllabus –  that this was not one of our core subjects.

The results of these short input sessions were very mixed. There were a few, but very few, trainees who seemed to respond to the call for the use of more technology, but many of them remained either unconvinced or relegated the use of Web 2.0 tools to a time after the course, when they would “have more time to think about it”.

It seemed that this particular treatment was not having the desired effect.

Some of the articles and blog posts I read up  seemed to be rather dismissive of what I had been doing – which got me thinking whether my approach was not somewhat misguided. The question they posed was:

Can you help teachers integrate technology in one or two sessions on a course and hope they will readily adopt it?

This was the question I was dealing with and after a few enthusiastic attempts to preach technology, I decided that the best way was to stop preaching and, instead, practise rather than preach, and practise without making too much fuss about it, but treat Web 2.0 tools very much like other tools, visual aids, materials I was using on my courses.

At the start of today’s session, I asked my trainees to think back and remember how many different Web2.0 tools they have already been using so far.   Here are two word clouds, one from today’s sessions and one from a previous course:

Made with Wordle

From the brainstorming of our  CELTA course, in July 2011 – a slightly different combination of tools but still quite a few for the first half of their 4-week course.

Made with Wordle

As the trainees themselves realized, they had been using most of the tools I was talking about – the tools were recognised and discussed in a sensible way, in terms of their best uses or when and where it would be a good idea to include them.  They did not seem like a novelty, nor did we dismiss other non technical tools and methods in favour of tech tools.

Here is how our trainees were introduced to some of  the tools:

Before they even started their course

• They used a wiki to access their preparation materials and self-access tasks
• They saw a couple of Vokis made by their course tutor on the welcome page and another one in their “Common Room” where they were free to play and upload or edit and insert links
• They used a Lino_it (an alternative to Wallwisher) in order to meet and greet each other  before the course
• They watched You Tube Videos and  screencasts on how to use their wiki
• They downloaded files from the wiki
• They subscribed to my Diigo and Delicious bookmarks

During their Course – for assignment work and lesson prep

• They used Audacity to record  a learner each for their first assignment “Focus on the Learner” (on Day 2)
• They learnt to convert Audacity files to wav files so they could hear them on pc or laptop
• They used our PC’s or their laptops to email audio files to themselves or learnt to upload them onto their wiki – in some cases the same learner was used as the subject of the assignment by two trainees
• Their Teaching Practice points were uploaded to their wiki.
• They scanned and uploaded pages or images from coursebooks and saved audio files
• They looked for images on Google, Flickr and royalty free sites, including Microsoft ClipArt
• They found and downloaded or favourited song video clips and other topical clips to use in different parts of their lessons
• They used powerpoint to show their images, realizing what a waste of paper and ink printing photos involved
• They downloaded and used lesson planning templates in order to write their lesson plans
• They experimented with powerpoint for more dynamic grammar presentations and revelations of bits of language through the various animation tools available in this programme
• They researched language points for their language analysis
• They used online phonemic typewriters to insert phonemic script in plans, aims, language analysis sheets
• They used the chat function in their wiki or Skyped each other to collaborate
• They used Google.docs to create and share class profiles so that they could have information available to them when they changed over classes
• One of them (on our latest course) stage managed a live Skype chat with a friend of hers in the UK  to illustrate some language points/functions she was presenting-I am sure more skyped dialogues will be appearing again soon
• They often took pictures of the Teaching Practice Feedback comments which we encourage them to write on the board for each other using their iPhones or phone cameras; they uploaded the photos to their wiki – sometimes we used Lino it for delayed feedback

A Little & Often – Without too much Fuss 

This is what I have come to realize – that a little and often seems to work best – the examples are what they see from us and just like a trainee will try to imitate a technique as simple as rubbing out the words of a dialogue gradually to help the students memorize it, so will they try to do the same if they see us use a tool in one of their sessions or a demonstration lesson which made the lesson more motivating and effective.

Resistance resisted

To the one voice of resistance  - “What if there is a power failure? How will you teach your lesson then?”,  it was delightful to hear the trainees thmeselves reply “well, we can always use the board or have a plan B just in case….” 

So How?

I don’t think I have reinvented the wheel here but it just goes to show that to train teachers (or anyone) in best practices in their field, you do have to model these best practices quite consistently in your own teaching and training.

By modelling the use of Web 2.0 tools without very much ado about them but including them as a normal part of everyday teaching, it looks as if we may be looking at  a much better way of introducing educational technology to teachers in training by making it a part of the normal everyday tool kit for teaching.

It has worked so well so far, that I think I actually am going to do away with the input session(s) on their timetable – they are probably not needed.

How have you integrated technology in your training courses? 

I would really love to hear about your experiences and successes and failures. Sometimes you learn more by looking at those too

 GoAnimate.com: Signs+of+the+Times by SpyrosBogiakis

Another dialogue produced by Spyros Bogiakis towards the end of the course
to illustrate some functional language  (persuading or advising)

 Related Research Article

*Integrating Technology on Initial Training Courses: A Survey Amongst CELTA Tutors  International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT), April-June 2011, Vol. 1, No.2

A quick and fun mini blog challenge by David Dogson in his blog post here – I fed my blog URL to Wordle and Tagxedo and look which words they have gone for!

Here is my blog in the clouds!

made with Tagxedo.com

I still can’t embed this Tagxedo properly to show the words animated! (See comment in previous post) In that post, you can see a Tagxedo os Shelly Terrell’s blog and one for Nik Peachey’s blog which I made for their birthday Wallwishers. Here is the URL of the Tagxed0 http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/5ba486ca9e4349fc but shows minus photo

made with wordle.net

More educational technology, certainly, than what I would have written, say two years ago. A nice surprise. But good to know that content still rules.

Related Blog Posts

• Word clouds to integrate reading and writing
• Tech Tools & Pedagogy II – Word Clouds (you can see a Tagxedo os Shelly Terrell’s blog and one for Nik Peachey’s blog)
• Using word clouds in class – a lesson plan

This is not the image a heartbeat. It’s the burst of energy of hundreds of tweets which are sent by the many ELT professionals participating in an online discussion called #ELTchat every Wednesday at two different times, at 12:00 p.m. GTM and  at 21:00 p.m. GMT.

http://archivist.visitmix.com/473f9c70/1/Volume

What is #ELTchat?

Every Wednesday at 12:00 p.m. GMT and 21:00 p.m. GMT, a great number of ELT teachers from all over the world log into their Twitter account and for one hour they hold an online discussion (chat) on a topic they have selected.

The conversations can be followed by following the #ELTchat hashtag (please read the last section if not sure what a hashtag is); so anyone who posts a comment, a link, a question, must put #ELTchat somewhere in their message (status update or tweet). This way everyone who follows this hashtag can see their tweets.

A good number of topics have already been discussed, from learner autonomy to using Web 2.0 tools, and the chat seems is very popular and attracts a great number of ELT teachers every week.

Anyone can join and comment or just follow the comments until they get used to the flow of the conversation and feel ready to add their own comments, responses to other colleagues or suggestions and links.

Number of tweets recorded on September 21, 2011

#ELTchat: a ready made PLN for ELT professionals

In the summer of 2010,  Shelly Terrell, Jason Renshaw, and, later, Berni Wall, Andy Chaplin and myself started discussing creating an #ELTchat, our vision was to create a communication channel which would allow teachers to:

• continue with their professional development using this freely available social network
• hold short and focused conversations
• share and learn from each other
• find a ready-made PLN for ELT professionals or expand their existing PLN

All five original instigators were in full agreement about wanting to

• maintain a record of transcripts for easy reference by participants and non-participants
• be open and democratic in the way topics are selected and voted on
• allow  participants to access their conversations and share them on their blogs in any way which the chats stimulated them to write on a topic as a follow-up to the scheduled chats
• encourage further engagement through reviews and interviews with participants
• share content freely on http://eltchat.com/
• spread the word and include colleagues from around the world whether experienced or new to the profession

A decision was made, via skype, twitter and e-mail and #ELTchat kicked off on the 15th of September 2010.  Meanwhile,@olafelch set up the blog which would house all the transcripts, reviews and much more, such as reviews and podcasts!

They can all be found on the  #ELTchat blog which you should bookmark now!

The Numbers!

Here is an overview of the volume of tweets at the time of writing this post and the engagement of various fellow #ELTchatters!  99,052  tweets! Amazing, isn’t it, in such a short time!

Obviously, as moderators, we tend to show higher numbers, but the #ELTchat timeline is alive all week long, not only on Wednesdays.  By now, it has come to be included as one of the standard hashtags added to updates connected to English Language Teaching on Twitter!

The Moderators 

Of the four oroginal moderators  working on #ELTchat every Wednesday, two had to stop moderating,  either for health reasons (@olafelch)  or because their work circumstances changed drastically (@englishraven) but we were very very fortunate to have great ELT colleagues step in and take their places

@Shaunwilde and @barbsaka – Shaun Wilden and Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto are the great new additiong to our team of modetarors

The Volunteers

But the moderators are not the only people actively involved in #ELTchats!

More recently, we have had started inviting guest moderators, experienced teachers,  teacher trainers and authors who can enrich our #ELTchat conversations and our first two guest moderators were:

• Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto (@barbsaka on Twitter) who is a well known ELT author and teacher trainer living in Japan  (Barbara has since become one of our moderators)
• Chuck Sandy (@chucksandy on Twitter) another well known ELT author also living and working in Japan

Since all moderators are also working people, we ourselves  cannot be online to moderate every single time.

On those occasions, whenever we have called upon colleagues online to help at the time, we have had fantastic responses and a great show of good moderation skills by #ELTchatters such as @esolcourses (Sue Lyon Jones), @bcnpaul1 ( Paul Braddock) and @ceciliaoelho (Cecilia Coelho).

It’s been great working with so many keen and talented colleagues!

How are #ELTchat topics chosen?

Every Saturday, one of the moderators  will ask teachers who follow #ELTchat to propose some topics for the next chats through a blog post is (here is an example) and the link is posted on Twitter and re-tweeted by all the moderators several times throughout Sunday.

#ELTchat followers – or anyone else, in fact – can go to that post and suggest topics in the comments under the blog post. Sometimes good suggestions for topics are suggested on Twitter itself!

Then on Sunday evening, the moderators look at the topics suggested, review them in case they have been covered before, sometimes edit and reword them slightly to make them more clearly focused and create an online poll such as this one which was used for the topics of our previous chat.

One hour before the 12:00 p.m.GMT chat begins, the poll closes automatically and the first or second topic (we alternate each week) is discussed during the one hour of the chat.

So how can you get involved too?

If you are not a Twitter user you need to know these basic facts about it:

• You need to create a Twitter account
• It’s important to identify yourself as a teacher; teachers like to follow other teachers!
• You can post status updates just like Facebook
• Your status updates cannot be longer than 140 characters
• You can follow anyone and they don’t need to follow you back
• You can follow any conversation that has a hashtag.

If you are new to Twitter, the concept of a hashtag may be alien to you. Don’t worry!

We’ve all been there as newbies on Twitter and it’s perfectly normal.

The best thing you can do if you are new to Twitter or even if you haven’t got a Twitter account, is to watch this great Teacher Training Video, An Introduction to Using Twitter , created by Russell Stannard,

And even if you are not a Twitter user, you can still view the conversation while it’s taking place on Twitter by searching for #ELTchat postings either on TweetGrid , What the Hashtag or on Tweetchat

What if you can’t follow ALL the #ELTchats?

After each chat, the transcript is posted on the #ELTchat blog and more recently, we have started asking fellow Twitterers for summaries and, would you know, we have had an enthusiastic response!

One or more of the chat participants, write up a summary of the main points and ideas that came up duing the chat and post them on their blog, or if they don’t have a blog, we post directly on the #ELTchat blog.

Here are some of thes summaries with name of contributor,  Twitter handle, and their blog link so you can follow them on Twitter and read their blogs.

• Sandy Millin  – @sandymillin –  Blog post:  Encouraging English in Teen Classrooms &  Convincing colleagues that online professional development (PD) is as effective as face-to-face (posted on the #ELTchat blog)
• Dave Dodgson – @DaveDodgson –  The role and function of humour in the EFL class: from “Ha, ha!” to “Aha!”
• Sue Annan  – @SueAnnan – To Test or not to Test? And if we don’t what then? – #ELTchat Summary 19/01/2011 (posted on the #ELTchat blog)
• Vicky Saumell – @vickysaumell  –  Teaching English through Songs (part 1 of 4)
• Fiona Mauchline –  @fionamau -  Using songs in the EFL/ESL classroom (posted on the #ELTchat blog
• Shaun Wilden – @shaunwilden –  Can translation (and translation tools) facilitate language learning and how can it be used to best effect
• Vladimira Michalkova – @vladkaslniecko –   Ways to develop learner autonomy – tips for learning outside class time

The #ELTchat blog  is fast becoming a wonderful and rich resource for ELT  teachers whether they join the chat or not. We were all very pleased when, as early as October 2010, #ELTchat was named as “Site of the Month” on http://www.tefl.net/ !

Who owns #ELTchat?

#ELTchat does not in fact belong to anyone. It was a concept that popped into different minds and the time was auspicious to start it, but it is not owned by the moderators – it is owned by everyone who participates and is engaged in the scheduled conversations every Wednesday!

We hope this will keep going as a collaborative project and effort which enriches its followers as well as its creators (!) with new ideas, many of which are simply born by the stimulating interaction and buzz which is created during the chat itself!

Oh! The tweets do come down fast and furious and fingers on keys catch fire during the one hour dedicated to these online discussions!

But it’s been a great trip so far and I have loved it just as much as I have loved getting teachers who were reluctant about even getting a Twitter account typing furiously every Wednesday and leaving each chat with expressions which show their enthusiasm, the great injection of energy, the inspiration it brings into their teaching and the great sense of being connected with colleagues on the same wavelength!

I rest my case.

If you have not joined by next week and are on line, you will be the one to miss out on a great opportunity. And life is too short to miss great stuff like #ELTchat!

A ready-made PLN for ELT professionals

Postscript 1

Luke Meddings thinks it IS the heartbeat of #ELTchat! I love that! Or maybe the heartbeat of ELT?

Postscript 2

What is a hashtag? A quick explanation before you watch Russell’s video

A hashtag is the symbol # before any word or abbreviation, which allows you to follow anyone in the world who puts the same hashtagged word or hashtagged abbreviation in their tweets.

Hashtagged comments on Twitter- called a backchannel – are very common during conferences/ talks/  presentations & workshops during which the audience as well as interested people who have not been able to attend, are able to post updates, comments, hold conversations while the even is on, and often continue the discussion and commenting on Twitter long after an event has finished.

Hashtagged chats or conversations are not new. Already a great number of different groups of educators hold regular discussions on topics of their choice on Twitter. Jerry Blumengarten, known to Twitter users as @cybraryman has compiled an excellent list of all the education focused chats with details of days, times and hashtags used here in his great internet cybrary! No wonder many teachers call Twitter their ‘global staffroom’ because they can share and exchange ideas 24/7 with like-minded educators from around the globe.

Related Blog posts

Twitter Chats for ESL/EFL Teachers and how to participate in them on LARRY FERLAZZO WEBSITES OF THE DAY blog. This post includes another two great links about how to participate in Twitter chats.

Tweet count on November 29, 2011

I have been playing with story animation tools for a long time, learning from colleagues’ blogs and links on Twitter.  Recent posts include Burcu Akyol’s  4-3-2-1 Action! Online Tools For Making Movies in the Language Classroom and Shelly Terrell’s presentation on Digital Storytelling which includes some excellent ideas. Here are a few additional ones, which you can use with technology as well as without technology.

Animations

“Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement.” (from Wikipedia)

If ‘rapid’ is a pre-condition, then I guess some of my examples aren’t real animations, but mere illustrations but I have decided to use the term ‘animating’ in the sense of ‘breathing life into a narrative’ by creating a picture story board with Web 2.0 or conventional tools.

In a lesson which some of my trainees created some years ago, in the absence of Web 2.0 tools, they created a great storyboard poster with character figures they could move at appropriate moments during the story-telling. Teachers of younger learners are sure to have used techniques such as this,  or flannelboards or flannelgraphs (as some call them) and, of course, magnetboards! But even your own board or IWB can serve as a fantastic backdrop for moving figures!

Here is my trainees’  lovely animation; Red Riding Hood and the wolf are movable characters:

I have chosen to stay with the James Thurber version of Little Red Riding Hood. I am very partial to this version written in 1932;  the wolf gets it at the end of the story, because, the moral goes, ”It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays”…. It’s a great story to use with adults, because many of its elements are reminiscent of the original fairy tale, which most of them will know, but it comes with a twist, a sting in the tail and the humour of it may appeal to some learners.

This is a text I have used in seminars for all sorts of sessions, from Running Dictations to learning how to make flowcharts (and other information transfer diagrams) for narratives.

You can view some interesting techniques on my Materials and Downloads page, where you can find and download the lesson plan written by one of my trainees and the beautiful materials collaboratively prepared by her teaching practice group. You can find it as one of the files I have uploaded in a ‘Box”. It’s called “The little Girl and the Wolf”.

This version of the story is, of course, not suited to using with young pupils, but you can very easily make the original story with a young class if you think it’s a story you want to work with…

Here is an animation of the same story I made with Creaza Cartoonist, chosen because it had the characters, backgrounds and images needed to create this animated story and was very easy to create. There are many other tools available and I intend to compare them in a later post, but for the time being, this was the one which had the characters I needed readily available.

Note: I used jing to screencast  both versions of my animated story because I must say that the cartoon created with Creaza is a bit unstable and sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can’t.

Some suggestions for activities with this story animation (and other story animations):

Reading

The students can be asked to do one or more of the following

• Read the actual story and compare with their own version
• Read the actual ending and compare to their own
• Reorder scrambled parts of the story first, then watch animation with or without voiceover and confirm or correct, e.g.

Listening

You can do one or more of the following:

• Give the students parts of the story (as above) to memorize and then recite their parts and put story in order; later they can assign their sentences to cartoon slides
• Dictate story as a dictogloss (or dictocomp, as I first learnt to call this activity) – this is an activity integrated with writing
• Read out the story with some mistakes while the students follow animation and ask them to spot your mistakes (of fact or added detail, not grammar or other mistakes) or use recording – the one I made below was with Jing but if you can use other tools you could also add some background sounds.

Writing

• Write their own narrative after viewing all the slides or all but the last three
• Write what the characters are saying and what they are thinking
• Supply the ending (if you have kept the last few lines back!)
• Rewrite the story from the point of view of the wolf or the grandmother

Speaking

The students can be asked to:

• Create a conversation between the characters in each slide – roleplay each scene while the teacher is projecting the slides
• Record the conversation with a screencast tool like Jing or Screenjelly and post on a school blog
• Narrate the story as told in the pictures – listen to all stories and vote for best or closest to original
• Get groups to retell and insert some “lies” in the story – other groups listen and spot the lies
• The message of the story (the moral here, for example) can be discussed to encourage opinion sharing

Integrating the various skills

You can do one or more of the following

• Encourage students to collaborate and say/write their own fairy tale; help them create their own animation of the story with dialogue bubbles, or voice-over narration using a screencast application
• Allow Ss to edit your own story animation and create one of their own with a different ending, perhaps even the original, then narrate orally.
• Students can create a new animation in which they change a well known fairy-tale and give it a new ending. or
• Students can create a modern day version of a children’s fairy tale, e.g. Cinderella, or a movie they watched and liked, or a song that has a story, e.g. “She’s Leaving Home” by the Beatles.

Narratives are very powerful tools as the activities they can generate do not limit themselves to just what happens in the story but they can very easily lend themselves to all sorts of activities which use the story as an inspiration or a springboard.

Typical activities include

• Writing a journal
• Turning a story into verse
• Writing legal documents the characters may have received or sent
• Turning a story into drama, a mini-play and then creating an animation

N.B. This post needs finishing and updating when my arm is back in synch.

For the time being this will have to do because I don’t see myself being able to write much before  mid November.

Please comment &/or add links to your own blog posts in which you have used story animation tools. I would really love to read them

Related Links

The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling page – University of Houston

Key Digital Storytelling websites

Digital Storytelling a page by Shambles Guru

Stories Come Alive a Wiki by Traci Blazoski

kapitzvirt