Graspr.com – Instructional Video Network

I spent some time back home with my parents a few weeks ago and as has been the case every time I go home lately, a good portion of the time was spent helping them figure out computer related stuff. My parents are both older but I’m super proud of them for trying to stay on top of the world of technology. They’ve come a long way from the days of my Father hand-writing his research papers for college so my mother could re-type them on a non-electric typewriter. So the fact that they’re now asking me to help them download photo-editing software, starting to work with google apps and so on is a HUGE step for them.  Of course, with their attempts to learn come many patient or not-so-patient repetitions of how to do this, that or the other thing. As my mother always says, “I need someone to show me, tell me, show me again, write it down, let me try and then show me yet again to be able to do something with this “beast” (her name for the computer).” So when I stumbled across Graspr.com I was pretty excited. Here finally, might be a solution to my mom’s learning and my patience dilemma!

So what is Graspr.com? It is a website that houses instructional videos on just about any topic imaginable. There are videos on computers and technology, marketing, quilting, cooking, car repair, music and even relationships to name a few! There is also a section for educational how-to videos, some of these are language lessons or math lessons and some are science demonstrations like this one which shows how to create your own twister.

How could these be used in a classroom setting?
For any content class, check out their educational videos here
If you’re trying to learn a language there a quite a few videos about different aspects of language learning: How to order food in French, How to say goodbye in Italian and so on.
Also, if you’re teaching language, there are many different examples of How-to’s for you to have your students watch and comment on, or recreate themselves.
If you’re a business major, there’s a set of videos on different aspects of advertising/marketing using social networks.

If you want to learn how to do something less academically inclined, there are even videos about how to make drinks or special meals for your next house-party or gathering.

There are many many different options here, and although I didn’t find exactly the type of video that would be needed to answer my mom’s question, I might just have to make one of my own. Once I do I’ll upload it to Graspr so she and others like her could learn that way too.  Have fun exploring!

50 Places for Free Ebooks

Are you teaching a reading class? Or a debate class? Would you like to offer your students a number of choices of free e-books instead of forcing them to buy a book?

From my own experience I know it can be extremely tiresome to browse website after website to search for appropriate e-books to share with students. This website here looks like it’s going to save me a lot of time. It’s a compilation of 50 websites with free e-books. You can browse the webliography by genre or alphabet.

ExploreLearning: Amazing Gizmos that support learning and teaching

ExploreLearning offers a catalogue of interactive simulations called Gizmos. They’re fun, easy to use and flexible enough to support many different teaching styles and contexts. Even though the focus is clearly on simulations in match and science for grades 3-12, the Gizmos can easily be integrated in content-based instruction (CBI) in English. The Gizmos supplement curriculum materials that are aligned with state and national standards. There’s a choice of over 450 Gizsmos including curricular materials, all with the aim of sharing the “A-Ha!” moment with teachers and students. Not convinced you want to use them? Watch a demonstration and read the teacher testimonials….

Google Earth

I’ve downloaded Google Earth before but never explored it too much; after seeing that you could build a 3D model in Google SketchUp and upload it to Google Earth (go to the 3D Warehouse for tons of really cool examples), I got curious about it again. So what does Google Earth do? According to the website:

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.

Take a tour of some of the awesome features of Google Earth here. You can go back in history (a few years back or several decades, in some cases) to see what the earth used to look like, or explore the ocean.
sf

So, how to use this in teaching? Gabriel M. Valdes, in the paper “The Use of Google Earth in the Teaching of ESOL, Foreign and Dual Languages,” gives some ideas specific to language teaching, including: having students show in Google Earth where they are from; direction-giving activities; and giving tours of world cities (some, like New York and San Francisco, have 3D models of downtown buildings). There’s a nice record feature in Google Earth, so you can record your travels. Also, users have tagged several locations with beautiful panoramic photos and live webcams.

Here’s a video created by Ravi Purushotma with more ideas for using Google Earth – the accompanying website for the game he describes at the end is here. Finally, from the Juicy Geography website, many Google Earth lesson plans – not language specific.

What ideas do you have for using Google Earth?

Our Friend Wordle, making repetition visual

I’ve been reading through our daily updates here at work, exploring what others have been up to. I began to see some common threads, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was influenced by my own interest- seeing what I want to see.

I read that Maryanna had made a Wordle last week, and it inspired me to make an April 13-17 Wordle, using all the text from our updates.

Now I can easily see that we’ve been devoting a lot of time to learning, QP12 (our workshop series), attending events, reading and writing blog posts, and talking about language.

I’ve got a series of rather dry, monotonous classroom observation write-ups that I’ve been sitting on, wondering how to make them more accessible and transparent. I might try creating a Wordle gallery as an accompaniment.

Check Wordle out for yourself, at www.wordle.net

You can browse the gallery, or create your own wordle by cutting and pasting text or composing an original piece, on the spot!

Scribd: Aggregator of e-documents

Scribd offers a collaborative platform where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. There are over 50 million people who share and upload documents each month. More than 50,000 documents are uploaded daily, and overall the documents are in 90 languages. Here’s a review of Scribd that gives a pretty good overview of what you can do with it. It’s claimed that you’ll find more information on Scribd than on Wikipedia – about 5 billion words versus 2 billion. You can not only use it for document sharing, but also as a place for storage where you can manage all your files online. Instead of having students upload their assignments to Moodle, the teacher can use Scribd for submissions and for giving feedback.

Typically, uploaded documents are PowerPoint presentations, academic research articles, school papers, free online books, Excel spreadsheets, essays, and more. Naturally, unauthorized copyrighted material is prohibited.

I signed up for a free account and searched for dictionaries: within a few minutes, I downloaded a dictionary on psychology, philosophy, a glossary of linguistic and education-related terminology, a college dictionary, and a Longman dictionary, an English language learning program for kids, a lesson plan on cultural differences, and finally a set of language tests including solutions. The docs can be downloaded as PDF or txt files.

I think it’s a goldmine for teachers who are looking for ebooks and any other readings they want to share with their students. It can also be recommended to students who are researching on a topic. I’m sure that all the above documents are available elsewhere on the internet, but Scribd is a nice aggregator of all these files, which makes the search process so much more efficient than having to browse twenty different websites.

StumbleUpon

While I was researching other social bookmarking tools for the Quarter Past 12 Workshop this week, I came across the tool StumbleUpon.

stumbleupon

From Wikipedia:

StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.

I signed up for StumbleUpon to try its “StumbleUpon” feature – sort of like a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, but based on your web site preferences. The first step was telling StumbleUpon what subjects I was interested in. Oddly, they didn’t have any! I looked for education, teaching, CALL, Russian… but none of those can be selected in your preferences. I tried a different route, typing the word “Russian” into the StumbleUpon search then stumbling around Russian websites, but there wasn’t anything that caught my eye. I tried editing my preferences, selecting some music-related categories. I stumbled upon about five sites, and one of them was of interest.

Overall, I didn’t like the StumbleUpon feature. Maybe if I were to spend more time “liking” and “disliking” webpages on StumbleUpon I would have better luck. But since I already use (and love!) Delicious, I doubt that I would want to duplicate my bookmarks I have there. If you’re in the market for an online bookmarking service, and you’re starting from scratch, I would suggest exploring all the main sites, including Delicious and StumbleUpon, to find the one that works best for you.

Bump Top

Bumptop is a new and fun way to interact with your desktop. As they makers of Bumptop are quick to point out your desktop is boring (even if you have an enigma desktop). Desktops have been the same…well for as long as I can remember, the first GUI. Your desktop is kind of like combustible engines, they are tried and true but outdated and old fashioned. Bumptop provides users with a 3D interactive desktop. The technology that they are using is imitating the multi-touch screen type of object interaction. Bumptop basically is taking this kind of interaction and giving us mouse and keyboard users a chance to play with something new. I tried Bumptop out and found it to be very fun and quite useful in organizing my the data that I interact with on a regular basis. It is intuitive and easy to use and has great face value. Some drawbacks that I encountered included: the fact that it is not free (you can play with a limited version for free) and it crashed every time I was using a lot of my system resources. Other then that I found it to be good. You can watch the video below to get a better idea of what it can do and what it looks like. You can download a free version here. Have fun.

 

Livemocha: Social Language Learning

www.livemocha.com is a free platform where you can learn a language. You can enroll in online language courses for free where you’ll develop all the skills and confidence to begin conversing with native speakers. You can also make friends with whom you can practice your skills in a chatting platform. You’ll receive tips from native speakers, who review and score your speaking and writing assignments. Finally, you can earn points for completing exercises, which will help you to keep on track and reach your goals.
I signed up for Livemocha and it seems to be very popular. They even offer a TOEFL preparation class, which will be of special interest to ESL and EAPP students. So I think that teachers should recommend this website so that students can benefit from these wonderful resources and community (and, if they have time, to review and score assignments submitted by Livemocha users).