Collaborative online tools

Christine Bohlander & David Tual

christine.bohlander@durham.ac.ukdavid.tual@durham.ac.uk

∂

Collaborative?Who:

- Within a group: S(s) ↔ S(s), T ↔ S(s)

- Beyond the group (resources by other teachers or students)

Why:

- Not reinventing the wheel but building up on other people’s contribution

- Learning from each other’s mistakes but also having examples of good practice- Acquiring skills by working as a team using web tools

What:- Vocabulary building- Blogs and Wikis- Screen capture software- Video collaboration tool (VoiceThread)

∂

Online vocabulary building

http://www.studyblue.com/ : flashcards and quizzes creator; nice-looking, professional; you can share with others by inviting them by email.

http://getrevising.co.uk/ : designed for students to make revision easier.

http://www.flashcardexchange.com/ : big repository of flashcards, but only basic services free. One-off payment for printing, etc.

http://www.flashcardmachine.com/: big repository of flashcards, absolutely free, not that intuitive.

www.wrds.eu: allows the students to create vocabulary lists, hear the words (for some languages), learn and share them with other students.

www.mind42.com: allows to create mind maps and to invite people to collaborate to them or to view them (without collaborating).

∂

Blogs and Wikis

Blog: individual entries (posts) on the same blog – example: individual book reviews about the same book on amazon

Wiki: one entry, everybody can edit it – example: Wikipedia

∂

∂

Collaborative blog

• Written (or oral) homework• Teacher creates one blog per topic with concrete learning aims• Students can see each others‘ entry

• What the students like about it:

“I find it useful to get some inspiration for my own blog but also for gaining more practice in writing by seeing others‘ mistakes.“

∂

Online feedback

Corrective feedback can be divided into three categories

(James,1998 and Ellis et al., 2006):

1) Correction: provision of the correct target language form

2) Feedback: an indication that an error has been committed

3) Remediation: metalinguistic information about the nature of the error

∂

∂

Screen capture software

http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

http://screencast-o-matic.com

http://www.screenr.com/

Lets you record your screen and a voice-over

Easy to share online

∂

What can you do with screen capture software?

Guide/give instructions to a whole class (how to use a website for example)

Set a speaking task for the students to complete as homework or in the language lab (ex: website review)

Feedback tool

“The video feedback was a really good way to pinpoint my mistakes and correct them and would encourage me to correct my errors more than written feedback“

∂

www.voicethread.com Great for all levels/all languages

VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia tool that holds documents (.docx, .ppt, .pdf, images, some videos, etc.) and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 4 ways - using voice (with a microphone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam) and share them with anyone they wish.

∂

Russel Stannard’s www.teachertrainingvideos.com

Blogger: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBlogger/index.html

Jing: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/Jing/index.html

Screenr: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/screenr/index.html

VoiceThread: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/voiceThread/index.html