EFL+&+ESL

toc

Hi I'm Jane Curry and I teach English at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Aust. I first heard about voicethread at an AMEP conference and then I heard more on [|twitter] and did an Elluminate session with Alice Mercer through edublogs live. I finally got around to using it in my classroom with Certificate 3 level AMEP students. This is about intermediate level, a little lower. We [|did this] one, based on the theme "Emotions",and expressed our feelings about crocodiles, bush fires and the tireless CFA fighters (Black Saturday) and a lovely sunset.More to come, I think it is a great tool to teach language with. I hope you enjoy this and feel free to drop a line, thanks so much, Jane media type="custom" key="4190837"

Example of Karaoke-Style Captioning-Subtitles video at http://voicethread.ning.com/video/physics-1

EFL / ESL
Great EFL/ESL resource at [|http://eflclassroom.ning.com]

[|Language learning: Using Voicethread for practising speaking skills.] In this tutorial we will:
 * present and show how to use a publising web resource [|Voicethread]
 * demonstrate how it can be exploited for language learning practice
 * suggest how it can be used for students and teachers across the world to collaborate together

My name is Michael Stout. I'm a Canadian teaching English at Toyo Gakuen University in Japan. This voicethread was created for a class I teach called Interest-based English: Music. This was my students introduction to voicethread. I made the slides. In class my students looked at the slides, watched YouTube videos from the various genres depicted in the voicethread, read about the genres and artists on wikipedia, and then made comments. Some of them asked me questions and I replied. Please feel free to make comments. You can see more work by my past and present students on my [|blog]

media type="custom" key="735607"

The second voicethread was done almost entirely by the students. They chose the genres, found the pictures, and made the comments. media type="custom" key="859653"

An introduction to Brazil:
My name is Ronaldo and I'm a Brazilian English teacher. This [|voicethread] was created by some of my advanced students in March/2008 as part of a bigger intercultural project - sister classes, which has a [|Teachers' blog] and a [|Student Showcase blog]. My students chose which they believed to be the 5 most important cities in Brazil, then chose pictures that best represented them, and recorded their descriptions, in order to make an introduction of Brazil. This is the result:

media type="custom" key="570523"

Feel free to leave comments/questions and also to visit my students' blogs at [|our 21classes portal].

Hello!
My name is [|Mona Bran] and I teach English at the [|University of the West from Timisoara], Romania. I am also part of the [|Sister Classes project], initiated by Mr.[|Larry Ferlazzo]. The students involved in this are in their first year of study at the University, but not in their first year of English. They are majoring in I[|nternational Relations and European Studies] which is why I thought this would be a useful learning and intercultural experience for them. We decided to put together a voicethread about our country and our city.

Even if the students weren't familiar with Voicethread when we started out, they learned quickly and easily how to use it. They really enjoyed finding relevant pictures, posting voice and text comments and working together. The project is not finished and we are thinking of creating new voicethread presentations on other topics.

You can watch our [|work]so far: media type="custom" key="694317"
 * Hope you'll enjoy it and leave some comments! :)**

About Venezuela
This is [|Bertha Leiva], a Venezuelan university EFL teacher in Caracas. I work at a public university, [|Universidad Simón Bolívar], basically geared toward engineering and basic sciences five-year study programs. All our freshman students (around 1,000) have a required EFL reading course but there are other extraplan or elective courses students may decide to take to improve their EFL skills. This term, like my colleagues Ronaldo and Mona, my elective EFL writing course participated in the [|Sister Classes] project led by [|Larry Ferlazzo] in May this year.

Not only did we use the presentation for this international exchange, but we also shared it with a group of 19 japanese EFL university students in Nagasaki whose teacher was Dr. Sergio Mazzarelli. We held our project during the month of June. I also shared the presentation with my third level freshman reading class in [|our class blog]. So Voicethread really helped us out in promoting our country and university, students were able to upload their pictures and record their scripts from home with little instructions. We all used a common account and shared the username and password. It worked perfectly well, students from the writing class were very proud of their work and students from the [|reading class] enjoyed watching it as well. It was really a wonderful cultural experience and my writing course students were able to interact with a real audience made up of other EFL students and teachers in different parts of the world.

Hope you enjoy it.

media type="custom" key="912067"

=**Using VoiceThread for an international collaborative project**=

I'm [|Ann] and I work for the British Council in Bilbao and I've used //**VoiceThread**// a lot with my students on their class blogs. Now I'm excited by tacking this a step further and to get students using VoiceThread to communicate with each other across the globe.

This [|idea] originally came from [|Mary Hillis]. Her suggestion is to tag photographs and blog posts about food and recipes with the tag "globalcookbook".

She has started by tagging photos "globalcookbook" on [|Flickr].

The same could be done very effectively with **//VoiceThread//**:


 * Students take or search for photos related to food or recipes and then create a //**VoiceThread**// and record themselves talking about them


 * They then create a post on their class blog and tag it "globalcookbook".


 * Thus when anyone does a search using [|Google's blog search] or [|del.icio.us], they will be able to find contributions from all over the world, comment on them and start an international dialogue going.

Here is an example of using voicethread to practice food items in a language class. What I really liked when I shared this voicethread with teachers is that they often used more than just one-word answers that gave the assignment a little more personality. Options: use it as an assessment and keep moderation hidden, ask them to say something not mentioned, really take advantage of the drawing tools, and/or include participation from people/students outside of your class/school.

media type="custom" key="4320303" My name is [|Anisoara Pop] from Targu Mures, Romania. I teach English at [|Dimitrie Cantemir University] and have been using Voice Thread which we embedded in our [|Class blog] blog. The VT project was entitled [|The Interview] as students had to rehearse the interrogative and at the same time practise speaking. As you will see, there were other younger digital natives (my students' friends, brothers, sisters, as they confessed) who jumped in with their comments.