Got this one from Nik Peachey’s blog. A great tool for instantly creating meeting spaces. More info here.
Posts Tagged ‘software’
Great meeting tool: today’s meet
Monday, January 23rd, 2012Prezi - now with an educational license
Monday, April 12th, 2010One of my favourite tools is Prezi - it’s an alternative to Powerpoint and lets you create really cool presentations. The educational license lets any qualifying educator use the programme for free without the need to make presentations public (a requirement of the normal free version). Find out more here.
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Automatic transcription and captioning (an amazing tool from Google for teaching and learning)
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Google has combined several technologies into one, powerful new tool. Its ASR engine (automated speech recognition) will automatically transcribe any audio source, including the audio that is part of video material, such as that on Youtube. This has now been made to work with Youtube’s auto-caption system. Put the two together and anyone can upload or select a video and have it captioned automatically. In addition, it adds the timecodes automatically so that the captions appear exactly when those words are spoken (a very time-consuming job to do by hand!). This is great news if you use video materials in your classroom or self-access centre, or if you would like your students to have access to materials outside the classroom. I could imagine using this myself with videos that I enjoy watching and to play with turning on and off the captions to see how much I could understand. To use it with your self-produced videos, just set up a Youtube channel (it may take another couple of months before it is rolled out for everyone). You can download the captions and, for example, print them out for use in class for further discussion. The feature is also particularly helpful for people with a hearing disability (and was created by someone who is deaf). Someone on www.twit.tv’s podcast also pointed out that this was a great feature for people who speak a language but are unable to read it (although this tool is currently only available in English - this is set to change in the future).
There are so many good, free tools out there these days. In discussions with various institutions I visit, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that the need for proprietory software is becoming smaller and smaller.
Excel as a tool for language teaching and research
Thursday, September 10th, 2009I am an intermediate user of Excel at best and really only use it to store and manipulate research data. As I was watching Hans Rosling’s excellent TED presentation I was amazed both by his ability to make statistical data come alive as well as by the way he visualised the data using moving graphs. Rosling used a Google gadget that is integrated into its online spreadsheet programme. I had never really looked into this and for some of you this may be old hat, but by plugging in your data and clicking ‘insert’ and then ‘gadget’ you have access to an array of tools that let you present data in numerous, and very exciting ways. Here are a couple of my favourites:
The motion chart gadget is ‘a dynamic flash based chart to explore several indicators over time.’ This is excellent for example for displaying language development over time, test scores, and other time-based data. It displays as a mini video file that you can forward or rewind to stop at a particular moment in time or view to see the changes over time (this is what Rosling used). Another tool that is excellent for presenting information to an audience is the QR code generator that includes all the data in your spreadsheet. A simple picture with a cellphone lets your listeners take all your data with them.
qrcode.kaywa.com
For qualitiative research the word cloud is useful as it displays the frequencies of items in the data as a word cloud; more frequent items appear larger. Excellent for example for presenting interview data or conversation/classroom interaction analysis.
There are also tools directly useful for language learning. The Word study gadget lets you ‘create interactive flash cards. You can guess using word jumbles, type-ins, or multiple choice, and you can choose to have the hints come from Google images, Google translation, or your own spreadsheet.’ There is also an excellent flash cards gadget that lets you do exactly what it sounds like and a word search gadget which lets you ‘create an interactive word search from a column of words in a spreadsheet, with a user-specified number of rows or columns’, as well as a translation gadget.
If you have used any of these (or found other useful) tools for teaching or presenting research, let me know!
The best free software…
Saturday, December 13th, 2008From www.lifehacker.com, one of my favourite websites, a list of the 46 best free software applications:
The 46 Free Desktop Software Applications, Webapps, and Projects We’re Most Thankful For
