Learner Autonomy----embedding a Youtube video in your blog.

Dvolver Moviemaker

My movie (adapted from Notting Hill)

http://www.dvolver.com/live/movies-705686

What does this tool do?

Dvolver Moviemaker can help you make a short video with lines appeared on the screen when your characters spoke.

Firstly, click the button Make a Movie.

http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/index.html

Only with seven steps, you could accomplish your movie.

Step 1: select a background and a sky.

Step 2: select a plot, among which could be rendeze-vous, pick-up, chase, and soliloquoy.

Step 3: select the characters.

Step 4: type in the characters' lines

Step 5: select background music.

Step 6: select a movie title design.

 Step 7: preview your movie and send it to your friends.

How might you use it to foster language learning in class?

Obviously, this method could be used to design a talk in speaking lessons.Role-play motivates students, helps them lose their inhibitions, serves as a means to augment verbal skills (Purcell 1993:912). Teachers could select any context to generate a real-life dialogue by this tool as well.

Limitations:

Each character's line is limited into 100 text characters, which could hinder users from designing a comparatively complicated dialogue.

A Vocabulary Learning Platform-----Learning Chocolate

                                http://www.learningchocolate.com/

Learning Chocolate is created to facilitate L2 learners to  memorise English, Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) or Spanish words in an stimulating, easy way that practically functions.The exercises utilise pictures, sounds and games to make learning a new language as interesting as having a bit of chocolate.

To begin with, select your language preferences.Secondly select any vocabulary topic link from the homepage to start learning new vocabulary. After reviewing the vocabulary, you can play up to 5 fun games to check what you learned.The strategies reported as used more often by the more successful students (  Green 1995:261).Repetition is a good learning strategy to memorise groups of words.

Limitation of this tool

In real-life English conversation, for example, loads of vocabulary you cannot find here. It seems to be more suitable for learners below intermediate level. In real life, you need know the word "banquette" , suppose you want to order one for lunch!

Video content on the web

Hello, dear friends!

This is my first blog and my first blog entry ever.
I'll learn to use some current technologies in the field of ELT and be happy to share them with you.

Today, I would like to introduce a brilliant website to you.

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/

Teacher training video, created by my teacher Russell Stannard, provides free, help video, step by step videos to incorporate technology into teaching, particularly into language teaching. All you need to do is choosing what technology you want to learn and click on it. Then it is simply opened up onto the screen. You would be taken through the particular tool you have chosen. You could stop and play to rewind the video until you totally catch up everything.

 Let's start.