Present.me

https://present.me/

What is this?

With the help of Present.me, you can now do your away from lecture hall or classroom to your audience. You can have your presentation with PowerPoint, documents from Microsoft office, pdf, etc. Present.me not only allows you to record your voice, but also the image of the speaker. You will see the document on the left hand side while the speaker's image on the right hand side. 

How to use it?

1. Go to https://present.me/ and create a new account, try the new version. It is more economical in covering most of the necessary functions. The free version is adequate for presentation. 

2. Click the button "create" and choose what you want to record. You can choose from four of them: "Slides and Video", "Slides and Audio", "Slides" and "Video".

3. If you are going to make "Slides and Video" through Present.me, then you click "Slides and Video", press "Proceed" and "presentation file" on the next page, and start the presentation.

Why is the content good for language learning?

1. it is a great tool for students to practise speaking, students can repeat practising till they are satisfied; it is especially helpful to less confident students who are afraid to speak in classrooms.
2. students can also send the recording to teachers for feedback for improvement, the mistakes can be clearly noticed as everything is recorded
3. this presentation can be done outside classroom, it saves more time because teachers may not always free to listen to the whole presentation in school, more classroom time can be allocated for other academic purposes
4. it is a very effective tool, teachers can give feedback when students send them the video recordings

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

1. teachers can ask students to design a presentation about a specific topic, students then give their presentation after class, it saves more classroom time; the nonverbal language and confidence of speakers are clearly shown for fair assessment
2. project presentation can be done in Present.me, teachers can assess the groups from the recordings outside classroom time; teachers can train students for a particular speaking competition in this way
3. with this great tool, students can have lecturing at home; distant learning teaching is possible for teachers to explain ideas which are complex

Limitations

1. your equipment: computer and Internet need to be very advance and fast enough to support the video. 
2. it is quite time-consuming to a certain extent: it took me XX minutes to wait for the upload of video.
3. the amount for uploading videos is only 10 each month, the time limit is 60 minutes per video
4. once you are not satisfied with your video recording, you have to start the whole recording again and it takes even more time for students to finish that
5. there is quite a lot of work for teachers to give feedback through Present.me.

Wallwisher

http://padlet.com/

What is this?

Wallwisher is a free online web tool, everyone can create an electronic wall. The messages are shown in post-it notes on the wall, in the form of texts, images, videos, maps, slideshows, documents, etc.
It was originally used for designing gift cards for birthday or some special events. It surely can serve as an educational purpose also. It is easy to make a wall by yourself. You can set privacy once you have created it.

How to use it?

1. Register and create an account, you can log in with your gmail account. You can then start creating your wall. 

2. Click "Build a wall' in order to start, you can modify your wall from adding title, description to changing background and privacy. 

3. When you have set up everything, you can start decorating your wall. When you double click the wall, this allows you to post a message and write whatever you want. Below is a collaborative example done by  my coursemates and me about what to eat and do in Madrid, Spain.

The tutorial on how to use Wallshier by Russell in his teachers' training website is definitely worth taking a look:

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

Why is the content good for language learning?

1. Wallwisher is genuinely attractive and multimodal in catching readers' attention 
2. it provides students the chance of discussing and compromising ideas on a specific task within limited amount of words
3. it provides students to practise speaking in disucussion
4. it demonstrates clearly the work done by students with Wallwisher
5. it is good for students to make feedback on each other's wall

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

1. it is a great tool for group activities, teachers can divide the class into several groups; each group, each student is responsible for different tasks.
2. students need to report what they have found and report to the whole class their wall
3. it will be a good idea for brainstorming acitivies for warm-up section before the class
4. the wall is a collaborative work done by students, they are more familiar with it
5. if it applies to vocabulary activity, it will leave deep impression to students

Limitations

1. a computer is a must in completing this task, for a class of more than 40 students, it is better for to share computers among pairs or groups
2. the word limitation (maximum 160 characters) limits students to practise writing
3. it takes longer time for students to come to a conclusion and the wall content is crowded when everyone has the right to edit or delete information on the wall
4. there is a potential problem for cyber bullying