She mentioned using it in a first lesson to make a class picture. That got me thinking about how easy and for what purpose online collage makers could be used.  A quick google shows a wide range of collage makers both paid and free to use. However I stuck with the suggested one, which was pictures2life. You need to make a free account to get the most out of it. Having done so you simply upload pictures and then choose a collage type. It’s as simple as that though you if you have more time then you can fine tune things.  While there is no embed feature, you can download your finished collage.

So how to use it? Here are three ways.

Well apart from simply showing photos, the speed in which you can make collages makes it a great resource for personalised speaking tasks.  For example the collaborative task of an Cambridge Exam as in the collage below. (In this case the task was for teachers, deciding what factor of language learning is shown).

It can also be used to augment activities like find the odd one out.  For example, the students can use their phone to take photos of their weekend and add one that isn’t true. They then share it with their colleagues who try and guess.  In this case one of the pictures is not from my recent trip to South Africa.

Thirdly it can be used to help storytelling.  The students can make a collage of pictures to go with a story.  Alternatively as the collage maker randomises the order of the photos then the collage can be the prompt for the story (a little like the concept of the five card flickr site.). As Anette points out, the added joy is that the students can generate the collages themselves thus creating tasks for each other.

I imagine can be used with any task requiring multiple photos so hopefully my three ideas have started you on the way to more.

You can download a pdf of the slides here –  What’s the internet got to do.  (right click and download)

Here are the links:

English grammar questions.

Collage maker

Oxford English Testing

Link to Splendid speaking podcasts

Vocaroo voice recorder

Fotobabble

Quizlet.com

Two mind maps site:

http://www.text2mindmap.com/

https://bubbl.us

Cloze text maker

Lyrics training

Audioboo and a link to the audioboo app

Online noticeboards:

http://linoit.com

http://wallwisher.com

On May 25th International House World will hold its second online teachers conference as part of the ongoing celebrations for 50 years of IH Teacher Training.

As part of the celebrations we intend to make aspects of the conference open to all, so watch out for details of that. We’d also like to have a running theme throughout the day based on the number 50.

Following this theme, we will be sharing 50 Tips with teachers and teacher trainers and this is where we need your help.

It doesn’t matter if you work for an IH school or not, teach in a state school or a private language school, whether you love dogme or a coursebook – what we need are your ideas!

To make it easier we have come up with five categories for suggestions

Tips for new teachers

Best tips for classroom management

Tips for CPD

Things that make a special teacher

Materials-free, student-centred tasks

Between now and the week of the conference we are hoping to have hundreds of your suggestions pouring in by the sack-load! We’ll then look over the suggestions and choose 10 for each category. These tips will then be presented to you at the online conference.

After the conference we’ll share them all on a blog and in the IH Journal. We may even have a vote to decide the best tip of all.

So do you have a few minutes to spare? Please go to this link and enter a suggestion. You don’t have to give a suggestion for every category and you are more than welcome to go back again and again to add more suggestions – the more the merrier!

Thanks for giving us your time. Tune in to the social media channels and conference on May 25th to find out what was suggested.

Take me to the suggestion form

In this case I was about to do a talk related to Harry Potter so I asked people as they were coming into the room to vote. I displayed the url on the screen and told those that could to vote (some had computers, others had mobile devices)  Give the url to whoever you want to vote and voila. If you have a class mobile phoned students and free wifi – you have a free polling system.

The added bonus is that the poll url stays active so you can go back to it. So feel free to go vote in this poll.  It could be used in class for a whole range of things and would definitely make for an interact vocabulary quiz.  Personally, I’m looking forward to trying it out at future talks and will certainly be making the most of it during the #eltchat symposium at IATEFL next week, when the poll can be used to garner the views of those online and in the room at the same time.

Here are all the sources I used in my talk in Prague last weekend:

Why didn’t Harry Potter use google?

Kids’ Cognition Is Changing—Education Will Have to Change With It

Sesame Street – ABC

Wikipedia definition

ABC flashcards

Alphabet taught these days

Summer holiday text message

Guardian Article on handwriting

Consider this video

Facebook uses reduces grade

Twitter dumbing us down

Twitter reducing big words

Poor memory? Blame google

Students thoughts on wikipedia

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times

New Media Literacies video

Mark Pegrum’s digital literaces (though I recommend them in full in his book)

Aha video

UNESCO booklet on teachers and technology

View from my hotel

The dancing and waving gifs were found using google (I goggled stick figures)

Eddie Izzard technology clip

Wallwasher

Linoit.com

12 excuses not to do your homework

Nirvana Video

I think therefore I learn or do I?

Homework from chills to thrills

Digital literacy

Erica’s class blog

Speaking tools

The one we demoed – vocaroo, fotobabbe

For the others you should google:

Voxopop

Voicethread

MailVU

Screenr

Knovio

Brainshark

Other things:

Audioboo

Quizlet

dfilm

Blog Sites:

Edublogs

WordPress

Posterous

Blogger

Student Sites

English corner online

My English club

And here is a pdf of the slides

These are the links I used to put together the talk on Extensive Reading last week.

Romeo and Juliet on twitter

Extensive Reading

http://extensivereading.net/

http://www.eltnews.com/columns/extensive_reading_listening/

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Bell-Reading.html

Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us.

Activities on the OUP blog

How to teach…..Charles Dickens

My smmr hols wr CWOT….

And here are the slides as a pdf.

If you want the other talk, look at the posting from Germany where I did a similar talk.

Sorry it has taken a couple of days, I couldn’t get the slides to upload as the files are too big but you can download the pdfs by clicking on the links.

Here are the links to things in my blended learning talk:

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/4/456.short

http://oupeltglobalblog.com/2011/06/14/not-digital-natives-immigrants-but-visitors-residents

http://oupeltglobalblog.com/2010/11/18/a-cocktail-of-ideas-blended-learning-and-student-autonomy/

http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=18535

http://elt.wikia.com/wiki/Blended_learning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_learning

http://small-changes-big-returns.wikispaces.com/Blended+Learnin

http://www.slideshare.net/gtcs/planning-for-success-in-blended-learning-national-education-conference-28-may-2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWxYAbTO4SA&feature=related

PDFs:

“Blendedlearningfinal”

Integrating modern and traditional approaches to ELT

Of course, you need a Mac and an iPad to fully ‘play’ with the author. Having both, I duly spent a fair few hours ‘messing about with it’ on Thursday evening.   With the permission of a colleague, I took her M.A. project (on #eltchat), which she published on her blog and used that to try out Author.

As a desktop publishing program (DTP) it is certainly easy to get to grips with  – a series of menus and toolbars make turning the blog work into a ‘book’ very simple.  I guess it will take a little longer to master the finer points but in a matter of minutes I had chapters, images and video all in book format. Being able to constantly look at how the final version would appear on my iPad screen as I went along was a boon. Fair play, Apple, it certainly is easy to produce professional and multimodal work.

Having completed my first book, the task of submitting to Apple for iTunes was relatively easy, though made slightly more complicated by me wanting to submit to a category that doesn’t quite fit into the others; perhaps this is a metaphor for the ELT profession as a whole.  However, a few clicks here and there and Apple seem satisfied. It took a day or so for the book to appear in iTunes, but it is there, and should you want to, you can download it. Of course, you do need an iPad to read it, though it is possible to share it with people as a PDF.

So, is this enough to make it game changing?  Well, it may be in mainstream education but I think it will be a fair while before it makes a difference in ELT.  For a start, how many of your students own an iPad? Or for that matter, how many of you / your schools own a Mac (and a Mac running Lion at that)?  I can see the main publishing companies having a look at it but I think it might be a while before their coursebooks go that way, especially with the rather strict and somewhat greedy EULA that Apple have that basically gives them all ownership of anything uploaded.

I can see it perhaps finding a place with the small publisher, and it may be the ideal platform for something such as the round project (though, again, the EULA may prove off-putting). A lot of people lost in the moment began to dream of publishing their own course material – certainly something that could happen but remember that having access to DTP doesn’t give you access to an editor or people to help you shape your work. You may find producing a coherent interactive coursebook is a lot harder than you think.

I can definitely see it being a professional way to share texts with students, grouping them together in a book keeps them tidy, for one.  As a teacher trainer I think it would be great to be able to put all my handouts from a course like CELTA into one book that a trainee could download.  Likewise, instead of simply sharing slides from talks I can make interactive books for iPadded attendees to download.  Though, since I constantly reference work on the Internet and use sites such as YouTube, I dread to think of copyright implications. Maybe I’ll just stick to collating ELTchat stuff.

However, one thing it might well change is the student project.  As with so many of the tech tools we recommend, perhaps the most immediate thing to do with iBooks Author is put it in the hands of the student. Encourage collaborative learning; let them produce their own work. Even if the end result is a PDF rather than a work in iTunes, Author opens up a world for students to work together to do professionally produced projects and the processes that the students use working together in English may well, in the end, turn out to be the real game change.