Break free from the IWB

The interactive whiteboard has certainly been one of the great breakthroughs in teaching of the past decade, but, initially at least, it did nothing to liberate the teacher from the front of the classroom. You were still stuck there, either tapping frantically on the board or dashing across to your computer keyboard and doing the tapping there  to keep things rolling. A remote was of course the answer. Until recently I had a rather ancient bit of kit held together with parcel tape and boasting a very slow facility to move the mouse pointer around the screen. Not very dynamic. After seeing a presenter use a gyroscopic mouse very effectively a couple of years ago at some conference or other I realised that was the way forward. And finally I’ve got one!

I went for this fairly basic gyroscopic air mouse as it seemed to offer all I might need in the classroom and first impressions suggest it does. It takes but moments to set up and not much longer to get the hang of waving it around after the manner of a Wii remote. It’s pretty speedy and accurate and one of its benefits is that you can switch in an instant from using it as a normal mouse on a desktop at the back of the classroom to using it in air mode as you stride purposefully amongst your class. You can programme it to recognise gestures and assign particular actions to the three spare buttons, eg to provide a pointer or go back a page or whatever. And it’s really portable: the USB dongle fits right inside the mouse and there is sweet little mesh pouch to slip it into. Stick it in your pocket and you’re off. So far so absolutely brilliant. Everyone should have one!

RTC

More IWB tools from Triptico

A while back I wrote a post about Word Magnets, a great IWB tool from that clever man David at Triptico. On re-visiting the site recently, I was struck by how many excellent resources are available on the site. Often just clever packaging in Flash of simple everyday things, there are tools to fit many classroom situations.

I particularly like the random student selector, which will generate lots of tension! Or the score board for team games. There is a nice simple but very clear timer which will count up or down and, for quick activities, a one minute countdown timer. For teaching the time, there is a clock that will generate random times – a simple idea brilliantly done. For those Rolf Harris ‘can you tell what it is yet?’ situations, you can use the image spotlight. If you want a calculator for the IWB, you’ve got one. And then there’s Draft It, one of those tools you think there must be a use for …..

All in all, a really useful site that will help out in lots of situations. And just to show I’m not biased, you might also be interested in what the Sandfields site has to offer, too.

RTC

Jose Picardo Visit

We really enjoyed the visit of Jose Picardo to KEVI last Thursday when he gave a presentation to the MFL faculty, not forgetting our classicists. It was great to hear someone with his experience talk about just a few of the possibilities for integrating Web 2.0 into our teaching and learning. Some of the things he covered are in the clip below.

I for one came away with a fresh determination to make use of some of the tools now at our disposal. If you need a reason why, Jose puts the case pretty effectively in another presentation:

Thanks, Jose, for inspiring us.

RTC

ten things german

Some earlier posts here made mention of the work I was doing during my sabbatical about 18 months ago. My intention was to create a website based around resources for learning (or teaching) German grammar. It may have taken rather longer than anticipated, but a website of sorts has finally seen the light of day at www.tenthingsgerman.com.

It may not be quite the imaginative, exciting site I had in my head, but sometimes ambitions have to be compromised to fit the realities of available time. That said, I like to think that at least some of the explanations of various aspects of German grammar have at least a flicker of originality about them and may fill a little gap somewhere out there in the big wide world of language learning.

RTC

YouTube Odds and Ends

We all use YouTube in the classroom at some time: here are a few little tips that might help with this.

First, there’s YouTube XL, a supersized version of the video site that gets rid of a lot of the clutter. It’s really designed for tv and formats like Nintendo DS, but it looks good on a whiteboard. As it runs in Flash, the workaround to get a direct link to a single video is to share it with yourself so you get the URL sent to your inbox (thanks to Jose Picardo for this tip!).

Next, here’s a handy trick using the normal YouTube site. Copy the URL in the usual way from the little box, then, when you paste it in, insert _popup after the word watch in the link. Clicking on the revised link will bring up the video in all its individual glory in a new full-sized window. Sometimes I have found you get the ‘cannot display the webpage’ message, but clicking on Refresh sorts this. Click on the image below and see what happens!

An alternative to this is to use the Safe Share site. This will allow you to create a new URL for your chosen YouTube video. Even better, it lets you edit a portion of the video and create a link to just that portion. Brilliant.

Sometimes you might want to embed a video into a blog or a PowerPoint show. The former is fairly straightforward using the embed code from YouTube, but watch out for some quirks, eg with WordPress, where you have to disable the visual editor in your personal settings! Getting a video to run in PowerPoint is actually quite easy but is best demonstrated visually. There are a number of people who can show you how: see, for example, this clip.

An alternative to all of this is to download your chosen video. Real Player is very straightforward for this, but gives you an .flv file, which is not much use if you want to play it in PowerPoint, for example. For a choice of download formats, there are a zillion sites that will do a download and conversion for you, so take your pick. After trying out a few, I find I like Zamzar, which has proved quick and reliable. If you can bear the popup adverts, that is.

So there you have it. There’s a lot more that could be said, but the few points above will allow most of us to get the best out of the vast resource that is YouTube. Daily Motion, anyone?

RTC

Hold the Front Page

Language teachers have always made much use of foreign language newspapers and magazines for teaching purposes. In the old days we used to bring back suitcases full of them from exchange visits or holidays or pop down to WH Smith for a copy of Paris Match. There is still a lot to be said for hard copy fresh or not so fresh off a real printing press, but the web now offers us much more choice (French language papers from Africa, for example) and the chance to be really up to date. Most of us have already got lots of newspaper and magazine websites in our list of bookmarked pages, but there are also some useful gateway sites that bring them together.

 

Let’s just stick to three of the best. First, The Paper Boy. The legendary Australian site  offers links to newspaper websites from all over the world. It allows you to filter by country, so you can see everything from France, Switzerland, Ivory Coast or wherever. This site is everything you need. Well, nearly. Second, Today’s Front Pages. Aha – now we can see what’s on the front page of the actual newspaper on this very day as well as what’s on the website (plus an archive of previous front pages). Not as easy to filter as The Paper Boy, admittedly, but a handy site. Third, Kiosko. Now this site doesn’t have the range of titles that The Paper Boy can boast, but it does the today’s front page thing, so you can see what’s à la une then visit the relevant website. Plus – really clever, this bit – you can see images of all the front pages of a paper for the preceding week.

         

And the winner is? Extensive as The Paper Boy is, I think that, for sheer flexibility and ease of use, the gold medal goes – for now, at any rate, to Kiosko. It’s a good read.

RTC

German Grammar on blip.tv

I recently downloaded the beta version of Office 2010, which is available as a free download which will expire on 31st October. There are a few new things in PowerPoint, one of which is the ability to save your PPT as a Windows Media file (.wmv). The result is a largish file playable on Windows Media Player as a seamless video; animations stay intact and transitions are done automatically. This is potentially the only real problem with the conversion, as any lingering at the end of a slide is eliminated. It might be more of an issue with slideshows containing lots of click-to-advance animations; the ones I converted were all done on timings apart from slide transitions.

The conversions I made were of the German grammar slideshows I was creating during my ‘sabbatical’ periods and which I originally converted to Flash. I still think this is the preferred output. However, an interesting benefit of converting to .wmv is that you can then upload your videos to sites like YouTube. I’ve not done quite that, probably because YouTube is owned by Google, but have instead uploaded them to blip.tv where the .wmv file is converted to Flash video (.flv), although you can watch in either format. I have embedded a couple of examples above and below which will play if clicked.

Apart from the issue with panicky slide transitions, there is some loss of quality, though not anything too bad. It soon becomes clear that certain colour combinations for text and background which might work in PPT don’t necessarily work outside that format. But this new development is an interesting one and opens up exciting new possibilities for all those old PowerPoints you have filed away somewhere! I think the two important factors are (1) opening up formats more widely useful than the original PPT one, and (2) by holding the videos centrally on YouTube, blip.tv or wherever, you can avoid having to upload them to any VLE course you want them attached to. A simple link will suffice.

Anyway, the rest of the PPT conversions are available here. Unfortunately the drag and drop facility for organising the files stopped working today, so you may find them in rather random order (or not, if it’s been fixed by the time you read this!). There are 23 videos so there are 2 pages (you will arrive on page one of two).

RTC

Translation in Microsoft Word

There are lots of tools available out there to translate things and students usually choose the most desperately inaccurate one when trying to take a shortcut on their homework, so it’s not hard to spot! But, used sensibly, these tools can be useful: I have written before about the really very useful Lingro, and Germanists have the brilliant Dict.cc.

But it’s worth mentioning Microsoft’s entry into the fray with the translation facility in Word 2007. It’s far from brilliant but it’s a start, I suppose, and could be useful as a way of working within a document without going out to external tools. To turn on the facility, you go to the Review tab on the ribbon and select Translation (fourth from the left). This pulls up a vertical window on the right of your document within which you can select your languages to translate from and into. After that, if you click within any word then right click and choose Translate then Translate again (why twice??) your translation will come up on  the right hand side.

It is limited but it is functional. There is also an option to translate an entire text, but that is as dire as they come and only worth doing if you want a laugh! There is also an option called Translation Screen Tips, which is meant to provide a translation when you hover over a word. I’ve never got it to work in either Vista or Windows 7. If anyone has managed to pull off this trick, do let me know!

RTC

Word Magnets

There are quite a lot of ways of dragging text around an IWB, but Word Magnets is one of the better ones, being simple yet flexible. And knowing how to put a sentence together is an important thing for learners of languages like German, for instance. It’s an online resource made available by the clever people at Triptico who offer a number of other IWB resources, well worth looking at. All you have to do is type in (or copy in) the text you want to play about with.

On pressing Next you will be asked if you want to change the background. This throws up lots of options for organising words on the screen, but mostly it’s best just to leave it blank (or blue, as it happens) by pressing Next again. This then brings up a screen with your text chopped up into the separate words which can then be dragged around the screen. So far so good, but fairly unremarkable.

Where I think Word Magnets shows its strengths are in the simple ways it offers to increase the size of your text items if you need to, remove or add text items, and to change the background colour of the items.

The potential of this last action is interesting. If you click on one of the fill colours along the top menu, the next text item you touch will change to that colour. So, say your words are still in their intial state, ie scrambled and with a white background, you can ask a pupil to point out the subject, the object, the verb, the past participle, a TMP element (for Germanists, that one!), whatever you like, and magically their selection becomes the colour you have chosen. You can mess about with this almost infinitely!

The downsides? Well, you are stuck with one font, Comic Sans MS (oh dear), and you can’t save your work. Is it then better than just doing it with the software already on the IWB? I think so, in view of the capabilities for changing things around I have mentioned.

PS. If you like this kind of thing, you will also like (or know) Fridge Magnets, a similar tool which is more suited to spelling than to text manipulation, from those other clever people at Sandfields. This resource needs to be downloaded as a zip file.

RTC

Lingro

Now this is quite an interesting website which has a few tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, it offers online dictionaries in a range of languages from or into English. In the usual way, you type in a word and suitable translations are offered. Where Lingro differs is that it has an intuitive function so that suggested translations appear as you type in your word. It really is pretty fast, as it claims to be, and – as it is largely based on Wiktionary – the vocabulary base will continue to increase.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Its second trick is to offer a web viewer – very similar to what Wordchamp does, though admittedly not quite as well. Insert a web address and you can view the web page within the viewer and clicking on a word will pull up a translation or translations in a neat little box. Click on the word again to close the box. You can set the languages to translate into and from at the bottom of the page, as with the dictionary. Lingro gets one back on Wordchamp by offering a browser plug-in that allows you to go to a web page, activate the plugin (in IE it’s a bookmark or favorite) and you automatically see it in clickable translation mode. Very nice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Its third trick – also one up on Wordchamp – is that there is a file viewer which allows you to pull up, say, a Word document or a pdf in a viewer that offers the same click-on-a-word translation facility as for web pages.

Google, as we all know, can create pretty effective translated versions of complete web pages, but the approach offered by sites such as Lingro are more useful for language learners and teachers. Give it a go sometime.