Novice
Animoto is a web application that, with the click of a button, produces videos using images and music that a user selects. Language teachers and students can choose culturally-appropriate images and audio to produce short movies that can be used in language presentations. These can be looked at on the web or embedded in blogs to be shared with classmates. Some NOVASTARTALK products have included videos on Chinese food and Arabic scripts.
Begin Lesson
Bamboo Paper - Note taking with iPad
Bamboo Paper is a free app for iPad, which turns your iPad into a notebook. You can use it to sketch your thoughts and ideas in an authentic paper-like digital notebook and your notes can be shared visually and easily. You can also use it to practice your penmanship of writing in non-western language characters such as Chinese, Arabic, etc.
Begin Lesson
How to Create Your Own Blog Using Blogger
Blogger allows you to create your own personalized blog where you can post content (text, audio, video, images, etc.) that can be viewed and commented upon by your user community.
Begin Lesson
Beginner
PhotoStory3 is an easy-to-use free download that allows you to create photo slideshows with movie effects, music, and narration. You can edit the photos and audio right in the program, and output the video for use on the web.
Begin Lesson
Using Picasa to Facilitate Teaching in World Language Classrooms
Picasa is an image editing software from Google that helps you organize, edit, and share your photos. It's free, and easy to use and works on both PC and Mac. The program is free and has many features that you'd typically have to use an advanced image editor such as Photoshop in order to make those same changes without Picasa.
Begin Lesson
Keeping your students engaged with PollEverywhere
PollEverywhere is an online service that lets your audience interact with your live presentation using their web browsers, or mobile phones. You can also insert the polls into your PowerPoint presentations or web pages. The poll that is embedded there will be update in real time.
Begin Lesson
Intermediate
Woices is a free program that allows you to combine photographs, custom maps and voice recordings to create beautiful, interactive virtual tours. Tours can then be watched on the web, embedded on personal sites, or viewed on mobile devices.
Using Word Cloud in the World Languages Classroom
What’s a word cloud? It is a form of information graphic of infographic! It is an application that turns text into a visual representation. The words from the original text are arranged in collage fashion in the graphic. Word clouds visually highlight the most often used words in the passage.
You can use this type of tool to facilitate world language teaching. You can use it for activities such as topic introduction, vocabulary development, word association, practice writing, word matching, pre-reading, brainstorming, defining main ideas, assessment and reflection. For example, in a word-matching activity, you can write a list of words both in your target language and in English, and then using the resulting word cloud as a vocab quiz/worksheet. In a pre-reading activity, you can engage students’ discussion by using key words created in a word cloud and make predictions about the content before reading the actual text. In the defining main idea activity, you can create a word cloud out of an article in the target language and ask students to discover and highlight the main ideas in the article. Take a look at this article written by a Spanish instructor to see how she used the word cloud tool in her classroom.
There are a number of applications available that will allow you to generate word cloud: Wordle, Tagxedo, Wordsift, Worditout, Word Mosaic, Tagcrowd etc. Click on each of the link to find out how you can use it to create a word cloud.
Creating a Blog with WordPress
WordPress is a free program that allows you to create and edit your own blog where you can post custom content, audio, video and approved user comments.
Advanced
Flip video cameras are a useful tool in language classes as they are extremely easy to use and fairly inexpensive. With a class set of flip cameras, students can interview each other, perform skits in the target language, create their own "commercials" or music videos and much more. In order to produce a "professional" video, students will work on their project from storyboarding to rehearsal and finally to filming.
Begin Lesson
Using Google Docs for Collaboration in the Classroom
Google Docs is an easy-to-use online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor. You can use it to create, store and share your documents instantly, securely, and collaborately online in real time.
Begin Lesson
Haiku Deck - Simple and beautiful slideshow creation
Haiku Deck is a free slideshow creating app. It is a completely new kind of presentation app designed to make your slides stunning. It allows you to create unique presentations with artistic flavor. It allows you to pull a large database of striking background and images from the web. It is best to show a chart, image or screenshot with fewer words to describe it.
Begin Lesson