Communications
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.
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Using Audio Tools (Audacity) in the World Language Classroom
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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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.
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Cultures
Nearpod is an App for iOS devices. (Nearpod’s School Edition works for Andriod devices now.) It allows you to create multimedia presentations to share content with your students and to manage the flow of the lecture in real time.
Your students use Nearpod on their iOS/Android devices to receive multimedia content and to participate in engaging assessment and collaboration activities. Your presentation can be engaging and interactive through polls, quizzes, videos, drawing interactivity, website-sharing, self-guided quizzes and more.
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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.
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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.
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Connections
Windows Movie Maker comes with Microsoft Windows and is software to edit video files. It features transitions, title and credit animations, which helps movies to look professionally done.
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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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Comparisons
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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Creating Screencasts with CamStudio
CamStudio is a free software download that allows you to take video screen captures of content displayed on your desktop. This program allows you to create video segments of anything that you can show on your screen, from websites to software applications to simulations and demonstrations. You can not only narrate as you record the screen, but you can also add special cursors, annotations and even an embedded video box from a web camera. The videos are saved out as either AVI or SWF files.
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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.
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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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