MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS

Larissa and an audio message from Elizabeth, TexTESOL

Microblogging

Twitter

A few weeks ago, when confronted with a definition of Twitter during a videoconference, I came up with "a telegram-type communication tool". The presenter, Jonathan Finkelstein (Learning Times) liked it very much, because it was very clear and to-the-point.

According to Wikipedia, Twitter is "a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers".

Let's take a look at my Twitter page, see what I've been tweeting about, browse through the pages of people that I follow and... see what it's all about. Maybe we can come up with ideas to use Twitter in the EFL classroom.

Text-to-Speech

iSpeech 

• random example that I picked up to try out this tool
• Bahrain (from CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/03/11/bahrain.pearling.industry/index.html )

Free Text to Speech

• Bahrain (page with the .html code of the widget above and where you can download the audio file)

• read about "how it works" (main page)
• click the "Demo" button to try it out

Workshop

Free Text to Speech  (Teresa's tweet in the workshop)

Images

Tag Galaxy

• need a recent version of Adobe Flash Player 
• enter a topic or tag browse through Flickr photos in 3D with this flash application
• let's enter "Webheads", the online community of practice that I joined in Jan. 2002 

• let's think about possible applications for this software in EFL

Screenshots

MWSnap (take images of the screen...)

Irfanview (resize images, rop/cut the part of the image you want...)

Wrap up

• impressions of the week 
• most useful tool(s) to start using in class immediately
• what else could have been shown 

Computer lab activities (suggestions)

• explore the tools and discuss how you would use them in your class