English Central

What is English Central?

English Central is a website that help people to learn English by watching videos. It is perfect for students to practice speaking and pronunciation as well as vocabulary. Most of the videos are authentic materials, ranging from famous speeches to popular TV serious. It offers different categories to meet all kinds of students' needs, including academic English, business English, media English, social English, travel English and even English for young learners.

Click here to check out my introduction of English Central's homepage.

How to use English Central?

This is an official tutorial video on how to use English Central to 'speak a video', and to learn vocabulary.

What are the strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths

• It is the so far the best website (I have ever seen) to help English learners with their pronunciation.
• And it is FREE!
• It automatically analyzes your pronunciation and then tells you your problems in RED subtitles.
• There are plenty of videos to choose from for learners of different purposes, ranging from videos for younger learners to business English, from famous speeches to updated movie clips. Learners could choose the video according to their own preference. Therefore, they are likely to be more motivated.
• It also classifies videos according to the learners' level of difficulty, so that learners can choose videos according to their own proficiency.
• Some of the videos, especially those for higher proficiency students, are authentic materials, which are closely related to their real life topics.
• Besides practicing oral English, students could also learn some new vocabulary.
• Some videos, especially famous speeches or TED talks, are beneficial to learners in a much broader sense. The ideas and knowledge in the videos can be very helpful to learners in many aspects other than English.
• It is likely to enhance learners' motivation and autonomy.

Weakness

• It requires relatively fast internet speed and good computer system. Sometimes it doesn't work smoothly since it contains video playing and audio recording and pronunciation analyzing at the same time. It takes time especially when it analyzes your recordings. So just be patient and don't press any other buttons before it finishes the analyzing process.
• There are still some technical problems when analyzing recordings. Sometimes when we speak fast, it can not distinguish words that are pronounced together without obvious pauses.
• In order to get a good recording for analyzing your pronunciation, you do need to have a good earphone and microphone connected to your computer.

Voki

What is Voki?

Voki is a website that enables users to express themselves on the web in their own voice using a talking character. 

For the visual part, you can customize your Voki in many aspects, for example you can choose your favorite character, the background picture, you can choose his/her clothes and even the color of the eyes.

And when it comes to voice, you can either directly record yourself speaking on Voki, or you can upload a recording, and you can also choose another voice and type your sentences so that he/she would read it for you.

After finishing your Voki, you can send a link to others' email or embed it into your own blog or your face book account.

How to use Voki?

Why language teachers should use Voki?

What are the limitations of Voki?

• The recording is limited to only one minute, which is too short for speaking practice. But if you pay and become a member, you can get more time to speak and record.
• There are so many options for customization that young learners may be easily distracted to the look of the characters rather than focus on speaking practice.
• It seems you can only embed one Voki in one post, you can't do more in one post.
• At least on my computer, the recording doesn't go well, therefore, I made a recording on Vocaroo and then upload it on Voki. Hopefully, it works well on others'.

Vocaroo

What is Vocaroo? 

Vocaroo is an online voice recorder. It allows people to record their voices and email it to others or download the document or embed it in a blog.

How to use Vocaroo?

Russell Stannard, a leading scholar for ICT in ELT, has a very helpful website called Teacher Training videos. It is especially designed for language teachers. This website introduces many fabulous language learning websites (including Vocaroo) or software for free. 

Please click here for further instruction of using Vocaroo.

Why language teachers should use Vocaroo?

• With this fabulous tool, teachers can get students to really practice speaking outside the classroom, which has long been a very tough problem for language teachers using traditional teaching methods.
• Recordings seem to 'exaggerate' any minor mistakes, hesitations, repetitions, accents and mispronunciations etc, which are often ignored in a natural conversation. Students, by listening to their own recordings could notice their own weakness and make efforts to improve on those points.
• There is a 'Retry' button so that students can record as many times as they want until they are satisfied with themselves. Therefore, this tool encourages learner autonomy.

How can Vocaroo foster language learning?

• Speaking Assignment. With this fabulous tool, teachers could give speaking assignments to students. After school, students could record their themselves talking about the topic they have just learned in class and then simply send a link to their teachers. According to Stannard's 'The Connected Classroom' theory, the more the teacher connects what students have learned in the classroom with what students are required to talk about outside the classroom, the more motivated students would become and the better they would perform in their recordings.
• Correcting pronunciation. This tool can also be used to help students correct their pronunciation. For example, students can download an audio piece of BBC news, listen to it, read after it and try their best to imitate the reporters pronunciation for several times. And then, students could record themselves reading out loud this piece of news and compare it with the original version to discover the differences so as to improve pronunciation. This is a typical example of how Vocaroo could promote learner autonomy.
•  Vocal feedback. A traditional written feedback takes a long time and contains only a few information. With Vocaroo, teachers could give students vocal feedback within a short time that contains a lot more information. Students, by listening to the teacher's vocal feedback, may feel more engaged and motivated because they can feel the emotion and  the emphasis from the teachers' tone.  Students can also give each other feedback using Vocaroo. 

What are the limitations of Vocaroo?

• Because the recordings 'exaggerate' all the mistakes, students may feel discouraged by their poor performance and become less motivated.
• It can only record voices. But when students want to use some pictures or power point slide to illustrate their points, Vocaroo become less useful.

TodaysMeet

What is TodaysMeet?

TodaysMeet is a virtual online meeting room that allows for communication and collaboration without time and space limit. Anyone, as long as you can access the internet, could create a room, save the web address and send it to your students or classmates or colleagues so that they can enter the room and have an online conversation.

How to use TodaysMeet?

1. Go to http://todaysmeet.com/.

2. Name your room (If there's a red cross under the name of your room, then it's not available. Usually, just add a number after the name, and it would become available.)

3. Select how long you want this room to be available for, ranging from 2 hours to one year. And then click 'Create your Room'.

4. Copy the web address of your room and send it to whoever you want them to join.

5. For students or people other than the room creator, go to this web address and type in your name.

6. Type in whatever you want to say and simply click 'say'. 

7. All people's talk will be presented immediately in the 'Listen' box on the left of the page.

8. After you finish all your conversations, you can save the transcription for future reference.

Why should language teachers use TodaysMeet?

• It's about sharing knowledge and ideas and even questions.
• It stimulates collaborative language learning because not only teachers but also students have the freedom to express their own ideas and also 'listen' to others' ideas.
• It is classroom-based group, but it doesn't have any time or space limitations.
• For most of the time, students' talk are language output. Students construct their own language, through which they collaboratively construct ideas. The rationale behind this online virtual classroom is constructivist language learning.
• It's very easy to use and all the conversation can be saved or downloaded for future reference.
• In a traditional conversation, normally, only one people could speak at one time, otherwise, it would be very noisy and people cannot follow clearly what others say. TodaysMeet allows for multi-speaker conversation at the same time without missing others' talk becasue they can read the transcription later.
• It enhances multi-dimentional conversation flow: teacher to students, students to teacher, and student to student interactions.
  
• There's no need to register or create an account, which would normally take much time. (This idea comes from my friend and classmate East.)

How can TodaysMeet foster language learning?

1. After class online Q&A between students and teachers.

It often happens when after class, students go to ask teacher questions individually and the teacher may answer the same question many times to different students. Or there may be a situation where student A think of a question but other students don't, in this case, they may never have the opportunity to think of the question or know the answer to it. An after class online Q&A session on TodaysMeet can solve these problems so that the teacher can answer once for all and students can share others' questions they haven't thought of and 'listen' to the teacher's answer.

2. After class pair work/group work task discussion.

Usually, students don't have many opportunities to meet each other and discuss pair work or group work face to face. In this case, students within a pair or group could simply create a room on TodaysMeet and discuss their assignments or tasks online. Additionally, the teacher can ask students to send him/her the transcription of their discussion to check and therefore give certain help when necessary. The teacher  may even join the students' discussion but it may be too time consuming.

3. Classroom simultaneous feedback for report or presentation.

This is only adaptable when all the students have their own PC and access to the internet in the classroom. For example, group A is giving a report or a presentation or a role play in front of the class, other students, as well as the teacher, in the classroom can give simultaneous feedback by writing down some notes or comments on Group A's performance. After the presentation, students in Group A could see the feedback from the teacher and all their classmates. This activity can develop students' ability of evaluation and reflection, as well as critical thinking, which are high level learning abilities.

BTW, this method can also be adapted in an academic conference where there is an off-line real life presentation by the lecturer, and meanwhile, an online discussion between the audience.

What are the limitations of TodaysMeet?

• It can be easily replaced by other online communication tools, such as Facebook (you can build a group on Facebook to chat), or chat rooms in Skype or QQ (a Chinese online chatting software).
• You cannot upload or share any document online through TodaysMeet. It's very common when people discuss ideas online, they may want to share a Word or PPT or PDF document with others. The lack of this function sometimes may result in inefficient or inconvenient online communication.

Dvolver

What is Dvolver?

Dvolver is an online free movie maker. Teachers, as well as students, can use it to create your own cartoon movies, and send them to others' email or embed them in your blogs.

Click here to access Dvolver: http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/

How to use Dvolver?

Dvolver is very easy to learn for everyone and even students can learn to use it very quickly. Basically, you can just follow the instructions (the words in yellow in the upper left corner) and click "Next" (on the lower right corner) until you finish. Below is a Step-by-Step instruction, which presents an example of how to make cartoon movies using Dvolver. 

1. Select a background and a sky.

2. Select a plot.

3. Select one or two character(s).

4.Type in the characters' lines. 

5. Select music. IF the dialogue is not finished, select 'Add a new scene' and repeat the previous steps until you finish the whole dialogue. Otherwise, select 'Finish movie'.

6. Select movie title design and type in the movie title and director's name.

7. Preview and send the movie.

8. Copy the code in the white box and make sure paste it into your blog in "HTML" mode.

Done! It's just as simple as that. And this is the movie I made.

The dialogue above is cited from Longman New Concept English Book 1 by  L. G. Alexander.

Why should language teachers use Dvolver?

1. It is absolutely a more interesting way to present dialogues than textbooks.
2. Students/Teachers have many choices of the characters and the scenes. You can type in any dialogue you like. Therefore, students are better motivated, especially young learners.
3. It is easy to use, for both teachers and students.
4. Students can create their own dialogues. They are not just 'passive knowledge receivers', instead, they are encouraged to be explorers and creators of language (Brown, 1991).
5. It assists Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), for example, role play tasks.
6. It stimulates students' imagination.
7. Once you finish a movie, it is saved online, so it doesn't take up your computer space.

How can Dvolver foster language learning?

Role play

1. When teachers first introduce the text or dialogue to students, traditionally, by playing a tape or simply reading the dialogues to the class. Now, you can play a cartoon movie.
2. Instead of teacher giving some example sentence and asking students to read after him/her, students can make up their own dialogues using the grammar patterns they have just learned from textbooks. 
3. Teachers can type in the students' dialogues, make a movie in class and ask students to do a role play by dubbing for the movie.
4. Instead of asking students to recite the text, teachers can ask students to make their own movies and send it to the teachers or embed it into students' blogs.
5. Teachers can also use Dvolver to give feedback using the 'one person speaking' plot.

What are the limitations of Dvolver?

1. There's a 100-letter limitation for each speaker in one single turn. Therefore, it can't be used for very long or many sentences.
2. There are only six turns in one scene. But you can add as many scenes as you like. Theoretically, the dialogues can be as long as you like, but they have to be breakdown in to separate scenes.
3. The characters are limited. Especially, in a Chinese EFL context where I belong to, students are not really familiar with any of these cartoon characters.
4. It only allows for one or two character(s) at most and it doesn't work for three or more speakers in one scene. 
5. You can't download the movie. You will have to access the internet in order to watch. I suggest you use a screen recording software to record your movie and save it in your computer so that you can use it where you like.

Lesson plan using Dvolver

This is an sample task to show how teachers can use Dvolver to make short dialogues and use them in the classroom for students to make up a dialogue of their own. 

Context

In this class, students are 14-15 years old in a public junior school in China. Their mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese. This is a speaking class and the topic for this class is 12 zodiac signs.

Role play situation

Situation A

You are an Aries man. You are due to get married next month. Last Saturday you went to a party (without your fiancée) and met another beautiful girl. You fell in love with her immediately and, as a result, you no longer feel you can go through with the marriage. You decide to phone up your fiancée to try to explain in as nice a way as possible why the marriage is off. You may tell the truth that you fell in love with another girl, or you may tell a lie, make up an excuse. But remember you are Aries, and you are likely to be self-centered and hot tempered.

Situation B

You are a Virgo woman. You are due to get married next month and are really excited about it. You are sitting at home one evening when the phone rings. It is your fiancé. You are glad he has phoned because you want to discuss whether or not to invite some of the people you work with to the wedding. Remember you are a picky, indecisive perfectionist. 

Task Design

Pre-task

• The teacher give instructions to students about how to do the role play.
• The teacher offers students with an example using the Dvolver. The teacher could provide an opening dialogue  between the two characters, which is displayed above.

Task circle

• The teacher asks students to discuss and make their own dialogue.
• The teacher observes students' discussion and scaffold students when they are in need of help.
• Students in pairs, present their final dialogue to the rest of the class. (If students have computers, they can make their own short cartoon movie using Dvolver and present while their are doing the role play.)

Post task

• The teacher gives students feedback of their role play performance.
• The teacher explains some language focus to the students.