[W9] MailVU: The Connected Classroom for the Future

Hello!

Have you ever heard about the 'connected classroom'? How does it work? If you want to know more about it, let's read this article.

So, today I would like to share a new tool that can be very significant in the implementation of connected classroom, that is MailVu. MailVu is a website that allows users to record a video through their webcam at their own home! 

MailVU Website Link

How to Use MailVu in Learning?

MailVu is an extremely powerful option for teachers and learners to use in language teaching and learning. For teachers, recording lectures in a 10 minutes recording and send it to students via email is just brilliant! For the students is even more exciting, as MailVu can be treated as a tool to enhance their communicative language skills such as speaking and listening and other enabling skills such as vocabulary and fluency skill. Apart from that, MailVu can increase the speakers' awareness on pronunciation and paralanguage or non-verbal communicative elements such as facial expression, body language because they can watch their live and recorded speaking activity which enables them to reflect upon their communication and hence improve it. 

Clean interface of MailVu

MailVu can become an intelligent tool for the implementation of the connected classroom as it can take place outside the classroom and collaborates learners in engaging activities that develop their language skills and knowledge. An example of activity that teachers can carry out is giving a debate topic for students to work in pairs. In the classroom, teachers could elicit the important vocabulary sets and suitable grammar structures that are useful to be used in the debate. Students can also be encouraged to brainstorm the ideas and points to be said during the debate. As a homework, teachers can ask learners to record the debate activity in which the video involves both students. They can work together at home or they might want to work after school hours at the school ICT room. Later, they have to email the recorded debate to teachers and teachers might as well give feedback using the same medium. The idea of making learners use language outside the classroom with the instruction and guideline on contents and skills during the lesson is called 'a connected classroom'.

Below, I put a video explaining about the connected classroom:

Advantages:

• Users can see themselves being recorded and they can play the video again and again with just a click.
• MailVu can be a useful means for students who are quite passive in the classroom to involve in speaking activity and express their ideas as they can do it at home, just in of their own comfortable and less-anxious room. 

Disadvantages:

• The free subscription account blocks many useful functions such as uploading the pre-recorded video into a video gallery, embedding and downloading videos created to be places such as in blogs and creating video testimonial widget.
• Sometimes 10 minutes recoding is just too short, and we might wish for a longer recording time limit.  
• The free account is only available for 14 days before termination. 

[W8] Ello : Online Listening Library

Hello English language teachers!

Have you ever thought about expanding your recording and listening activity collections for English class? If you have, then you can easily log on to Ello and be surprised that you can find more than 1000 listening activities with multimedia, mp3 files, vocabulary task, language notes and many more that you can choose to be carried out in just a click. 

Ello Website Link

How to Use Ello:

Ello promises 5 active sections which can be explored by teachers such as Views, Mixer,Games, Videos, Scenes, and News. It is so well-organised that teachers can easily look up for the activities according to the number of task set and topics. So let us explore some of the section and see what it offers...

Picture 1: VIEWS section

1. VIEWS

• VIEWS provides a downloadable recording conversation based on the topics with transcription for teacher use. 
• The quizzes provided are vary according to the focus for example- Quiz 1: Vocabulary Focus and Quiz 2: Comprehension Questions. 
• There is also an embedded video response with subtitles available that is shared by a respondent and learners can enhance their knowledge about related topics while listening to other people's opinions. 
• VIEWS section also provides learners with Audio Notes which focuses on the elaboration of the vocabulary items that are introduced in the conversation.  

2. MIXER 

• In MIXER, there is a combination of speakers from different regions with different accents.

3.GAMES

• GAMES provides merely the same tools and functions of what VIEWS has, but the only difference is on the task. GAMES provides 3 tasks which are believed to be more focusing on the language skills involving vocabulary, reading and speaking quizzes. 

4. NEWS

• In NEWS, learners may choose to listen to more than 20available news broadcastings before answering some vocabulary and listening questions. However, there is a slight drawbacks in this section, which attempts when we start to play the video. When we have played a news video, we cannot pause it until you answer the question. However we can still replay the video.   

Picture 2: VIDEOS section

Advantages:

• One of the good thing about Ello is that it offers tutorials for new users to explore this website. 
• It involves speakers from various regions and this may expose learners to variety of accents and  may as well enhance their intercultural competence. 

Disadvantages:

• Ello can sometimes be confusing since there is no clear instruction for each sections, regarding how to carry out the task and how to use the audio notes (especially!).
• Since anybody may send a video response, we may want to know about the background or perhaps the reliability of language and ideas being presented (but not really a limitation, because the world of internet is a free place for all!). 

[W2] Lyrics Training

Lyrics training is one of the famous websites that tackles language learners, especially teenagers who are keen to music to improve their language. This website allows learners to transfer their listening skill into other important language skills such as spelling, through an easy and fun method. Learners of foreign language can improve these language skills by completing the lyrics of thousands of music videos provided. Lyrics Training allows learners of different ages and language levels ability to choose the different levels of challenge and difficulty that are suitable for their own pace. It provides 3 different levels of exercise which are beginner, intermediate and expert. For the beginner level, learners are asked to fill in the blanks in which only 10 percent of the full lyrics are removed whereas for the intermediate and the expert level is 100 percent.  

Currently, Lyrics Training provides videos of seven different languages (English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German) besides a translation button to help learners check the unsure vocabulary.

Lyrics Training Website Link

Benefits:

• Lyrics Training lets another method of teaching that regards young learners' interest and thus link it with learning approach. 
• Lyrics Training allows learners to record scores and analyse their performance by creating account. Learners can choose to use this website either by registering for free or without registering.
• While completing the blank fills, Lyrics Training allows learners to pause the song if they are not sure of the correct words and also, it is automatically paused whenever it approaches a blank so that learners have ample times to type down the answer. 

Weakness:

• Since there is a skip button (Tab) where learners can leave the unsure vocabulary that they have heard, there is a possibility that learners may become demotivated to try and tend to use this assistance tool.  
• There may be a small distraction towards learners' attention while using this website since there is a Facebook social plugin at the right site of the page
• Language teachers may have to deal with the inappropriate content of videos which opposes to the society for example videos and songs that promote yellow culture and abusive behaviour.

[W1] Dvolver: Students as the Movie Director

Dvolver is a fun moviemaker website for language teachers to teach students on how to produce creative movies for the communicative purpose. This website provides plenty of selections of styles, settings, characters and music which allow students to construct dialogues while creating stories. This website is suitable for secondary school students of age 13 and above since teachers can modify the instruction of activities according to their students' language level. The idea of making this website as an interesting approach in language learning is that students can practise their language within the context for the communicative purpose through a fun way.

Dvolver Website Link

Here is an example of video that students can create using Dvolver:

Advantages:

• Dvolver allows learners to embed the movies to their blogs (if exists) and also, they could send them into the preferable email address. Therefore, learners could send their homework straight away to the teachers' inbox.

Disadvantages:

• Dvolver involves several characters and scenes that might be unsuitable for students of the school level age as it involves obscenity. Therefore, teachers need to do extra work by telling them which characters that they are not happy with and are not allowed to be used in the movies.