Shaun Wilden's Blog

Looking through recent bookmarks I notice that I seem to have accrued a lot of photo-related ones. Perhaps I am just obsessed with photo apps (see earlier postings on the use of jigzone and pixuffle)

Three that I seem to have been using most recently in training sessions and talks are :

Fotobabble, which has been blogged about quite a bit. I have been using it as a way to personalize training talks, snap a photo of the place I am in, record a description of it and use it to exemplify how this can be used for speaking and listening practice.   I see this is a great way for students to increase their own speaking and listening practice.  Students upload a picture, describe it and there are a number of ways they can use it  – exam students can get feedback on their picture describing skills, students can create listening exercises for each other i.e. create a set of questions they share with class mates which then listen and answer.  Though of course they could simply describe things for fun with no need for a task, just for sharing and community building.

This one I a made for a training session in Padova, Italy as an example:

I’ve also become a fan of blabberize.  This, for want of a better analogy is the photo equivalent of voki.  Basically any photo you upload can be given a mouth, you record what you want to say then when you press play it animates the photo. I think it can be a fun exercise for students to mess around with, a motivating way to get students to play with language. Here is one I made for my marmite metaphor in a recent talk.

Thirdly, there is befunky which allows you to edit photos, personally I enjoy making cartoons out of them and though there are plenty of sites for cartoon stories, I like the fact you can use this along with photo babble – go to Befunky first, make the alterations then upload that to fotobable and say what you’ve done and why. This is a photo from IATEFL that I turned into a cartoon.

Anyway since I am only training and not teaching at the moment I can only give reactions based on training but they have been wholly popular so I hope you can get as much fun out of them.

Shaun