Improve Your Students' Listening and Speaking Skills with SmallTalk

SmallTalk has to be one of the easiest ways of creating and sharing audio and voice communications with your students.

It’s a simple plugin for the Chrome browser that allows you to record directly into your Gmail messages. Simply open a new message and click on the icon in the bottom right. Click the tick when you have finished speaking and then just send the message off to your students.

Students who receive the message don’t have to be Gmail users. They receive your email message with a link to the audio file that they can play directly from the message or they can download and play the message.

This is a really simple way to create audio that can be used for a wide range of activities.

• You can record a dictation text for students to listen to and write down. You could then get them to record it and send it back.
• You can send students audio notes from your lesson. This could be a summary of new vocabulary and include models of pronunciation, or could be models of example sentences or language chunks students have been working on.
• Alternatively you could use it for communication and get students recording learning journal entries that you can respond to.
• If students have access to Gmail and can use the recording tool themselves you could start a Q and A session with them to get them asking and answering questions.
• Instead of sending students written comments about their homework you could send them an audio file for them to listen to.

SmallTalk is a really simple to use free tool that can save you time and enhance your teaching and students’ learning.

You can find 100 + more tools and resources like this in my ebook Digital Tools for Teachers - Second Edition or if you want to train other teachers to use these kinds of tools check out the Teacher Trainers’ Edition.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

A Tool to Encourage Students to Self-Correct & Improve their Writing

SAS Writing Reviser is a really cleverly designed Chrome Add-on to get your students self-assessing and improving their own writing. Once installed, you can open a document in Google Docs and then decide what aspects of your writing you would like to improve.

The add-on opens in the sidebar of the document, and you can select from a number of aspects that you would like to work on.

 Select from the menu, and you will see a sub menu that has more specific features to choose from.

 When you click on one of the features, you will see the places in your document where improvements could be made and get a list of them in the sidebar.

 You can then decide which sentences are okay and which you would like to improve.
You can also get some advice and explanation of the feature to find out how it impacts on your writing.

 This is a marvellous tool which I intend to start using myself. It doesn't do the work for the students like a grammar or spell-checker, but it does push them to think about their writing at a more stylistic level.
 It's probably more suited to higher level learners and particularly good for anyone working on EAP or studying for an IELTS or similar exam.

SAS Writing Reviser is a great tool for anyone using Google Docs. I hope it helps you and your students to improve your writing.
 

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Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd