Communications
Todays Meet is a free micro-blogging site without logins. It allows teachers to easily create a virtual chat room where students can speak up. Its interface is very easy to use and like Twitter, it uses a 140-character limit. The information discussed can be saved.
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Using Comic Strips (ToonDoo) to Teach Foreign Languages
ToonDoo is a cool, comic-creating tool from Jambav, a fun site for kids. Jambav is devoted to creating a unique array of free and customizable online games of educational value for children of all abilities. ToonDoo was the happy result of brainstorming session that was aimed at creating a new way of expression for those who do not have the talent to draw.
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Using VoiceThread in the World Language Classroom
A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too, all with no software to install.
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Cultures
Wikis are an effective collaboration and organizational tool to archive student and instructor coursework, lessons, videos and other instructional materials. Wikispaces is a free and easy to use wiki resource currently used by faculty members, instructional technologists and students in a variety of fields.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY&w=640&h=480]
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Using Woices to Create Custom Audio Tours
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.
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Connections
Brainshark is a free online tool that allows you to upload PowerPoint slides, images, PDF files, documents and other media, and then embed your narrations over the content. Additionally, you can add music and multimedia to the presentation to make it more engaging. The final output file can be streamed online or embedded onto your website or blog. This software could be used for online presentations, slideshows, flash cards or even podcasts.
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KEEPVID - A useful site to download online videos
Keepvid is a website that you can use to download any video from a website so that you can insert it to your presentations to use offline.
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Creating a Personal Collection of Online Resources with MERLOT
This module is designed to introduce new users to the features of the MERLOT World Languages collection and to demonstrate how to use MERLOT as a teaching resource.
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Comparisons
Todays Meet is a free micro-blogging site without logins. It allows teachers to easily create a virtual chat room where students can speak up. Its interface is very easy to use and like Twitter, it uses a 140-character limit. The information discussed can be saved.
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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.
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Communities
Audacity is an open-source (aka 100% free) program for recording, editing and exporting sound files. It can be used to record a voice track that can be exported into other programs, or to mix music, narration and sound effects together into a single file.
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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.
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Using dotSUB to Share Your Videos with Your Own Subtitles
DotSub is a free program that allows you to upload, transcribe, translate and share your own videos in multiple languages. You can easily bring in video content for use in dotSub by linking to any video in YouTube. This is a great tool for new learners as they can easily switch between the English subtitles and the subtitles in the target language.
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