Create Spelling Games and Tests

Spelling City looks misleadingly simple but is really a fantastic site for creating or getting students creating their own interactive multimedia word tests, games and practice activities.

Students simply type in the words that they want to revise and then decide which of the three modes they want to use.

The three modes are:

1. Test - In test mode the students get a simple audio test. They can hear either the word in isolation or in a sentence and they have to type it into the field. This is a great test to use with words that sound similar as it can give students the opportunity to test their ability to hear the difference both in isolation or in the context of a sentence.
2. Teach - In the teach mode the students hear the word alone and in a sentence and then the word is spelled out for them.

3. Play - In the game mode the students have the choice of a range of games that they can use to develop their ability to use the word in context or just test the recall of the words and ability to recognise them.


Matching activity

Hang Mouse
How about using this with students?

• You can either get students working alone on Spelling City revising their vocabulary or if you have an interactive whileboard or data projector in class you can create the tests in class in response to the new vocabulary demands of your students during class. just collect any new words that come up during the class and towards the end of class or at the beginning of the next get the words up on the board and click to create some interactive tests live in class. Just add your words then click to test, teach or play a game. If you use a game you can click the small icon in the top right corner to see the game full screen on the board.
• Many of the games will also provide a print friendly version of the activity for you to print and use in class, so you caould also use this tool to creat a range of paper based word game activities too.
  

Spelling City is a great tool that can really help EFL ESL students with their spelling, vocabulary, listening and receptive pronunciation. Would be marvelous if you could download and save the activities that are generated, but I guess you can't have everything.

I'm also not sure how big the database of words and audio sentences is, so I'm not sure what kind of coverage this would have for higher levels, but for lower level learners and for kids, I'm sure it's a winner. Hope you find it useful.

• Here you can find lots more vocabulary activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey

Multiple Media Search

I have to say that I think Spezify has just become my favourite new search engine. I think this is a really great search engine to use in class with students or to get them to use. It's really simple. It displays all results as images and it searches a wide range of multiple media sources such as video, image Twitter etc, not only text.
To make a search you just type in your key word and all the results start to appear as images.

If you click on the small spanner icon at the top right you can adjust the setting.

There is a safe search option here which is on by default, so that's handy. You can also turn various other options on or off so that you restrict which sources are included in your results.

As I said I think this is a nice search engine to use in class on IWB / data projector or for students.

• You could type in keywords to brainstorm around topics or themes for the class you are doing.
• You could type in a keyword and get students to choose one result that they think will be interesting and get them to explore it as a warmer.
• You could get students to find an image, a text, a video and a tweet and write / talk about the connection between them.
• Or you could just use it to reinforce and find examples of vocabulary.

Hope you like Spezify and find some good uses for it in your class.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage

Best

Nik Peachey

Multimedia Business Simulation

I've just been playing with JA Titan which is a marvelous multimedia business simulation that is great for higher level business English students or other business students.

It's a kind of variation on the Lemonade Stand game, but with lots more bells and whistles.

You get audio reports from your staff, who you can hire and fire, with tips and advice that you can either take or ignore. You can also listen to news reports and check out report data. Your staff will also help you with some analysis of the data.

You are competing against other companies (These can be controlled by real people or in practice mode against the computer). When you are ready, you submit you business plan for the quarter and then find out how your company did against the market.


You can then go back to your staff and listen to their opinions on what you should change. You can adjust prices of your product as well as things like the amount you spend on marketing and R&D. You can play for up to 15 quarters.

The level of the language is quite high, but the audio is backed up with text bubbles and for a reasonably good intermediate class of business English students it should be vocabulary rich and challenging, but not beyond them.

Students do need to register and will need to submit an email address, but it is free, doesn't require any downloads or software, will run in most browsers and was built for educational purposes, so it should be pretty safe for teenage students too.

Hope you enjoy this.

Related links:

• Playing the Stock Market
• Advertisement Project
• Using 'How to' videos
• Create an Online CV in English

Best

Nik Peachey

Publishing Multimedia Projects

I'm always looking for interesting free tools for multimedia project work and I recently stumbled across a very nice one called Museum Box. It describes itself as providing 'the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box".

To use the site you need first to collect up your various media. You can upload videos , images , audio files, collect links and add documents.

All of these are uploaded to sectioned boxes, and each section of the box is a cube with 6 sides to which you can add your media.


When the box is finished you can publish and share the results and users can view the different sections of the box.
I think this is a wonderful idea and a great way of publishing your students' work. There are already quite a collection of boxes on the site, which students might find interesting.

The projects don't have to be historical, you could create a box with a section for each member of your class, or students could create boxes about their local city or environmental problems.

Hope you enjoy this and find it useful.

Related links:

• Advertisement Project
• Drama project tools
• Student Made English Advertisements

Best

Nik Peachey

Multimedia Vocabulary Website

Babbel is one of the few really effective vocabulary building websites that I've seen on the web. It's actually a social network and can help you to make friends for language exchange etc, but the core of the site is it's interactive multimedia vocabulary building exercises.
These work with words being presented along with images and the sounds of the words. The exercises then move on to recognition of the sounds of the words and then you have to spell out the words for the images as you see and hear them. I know this all sounds a bit PPP (Present, Practice, Produce) but for EFL or MFL students working alone, I still think there is some value in this.
The site isn't only for learners of English, but also has exercises in Italian, French, German and Spanish.

This is one of the great strengths of the site because it draws on students from more languages, it makes it possible for students to connect with and practice their language with users from the target language.

As always it would be wise to be careful with this and to protect your students' privacy etc, but there certainly is some potential here and I do like the design of the vocabulary building activities so for that alone, it's worth the free registration.

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Multi Player Vocabulary Revision
• Multimedia wordsearch
• Animating vocabulary
• Games With a Purpose and a Social NetworkImprove your Vocabulary and send Aid to Children

Best

Nik Peachey

Free Sounds for your Multimedia Teaching Materials

Digital sound effects can come in really handy for multimedia materials design projects and to inspire the imagination of our students.


Soundsnap is a really nice site which has a good size collection of free sound files. They are neatly catagorised and easy to search and you can preview them before you download them and most of them come in a variety of formats from wav, mp3, aiff.


You can register, but you don't need to.

Earlier this year I wrote a posting on my technology blog which looked at SoundTransit and I suggested a few teaching tips and ideas there, most of which would apply to these clips too.

See: Soundscapes from SoundTransit

Soundsnap is a really nicely designed user friendly site with a great collections of sounds.

Hope you enjoy these.

Best

Nik

The WorldWide Telescope

I've just downloaded Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope from:

• http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/experienceIt/ExperienceIt.aspx

I have to say that it is pretty impressive. My daughter is pretty keen on astronomy and she loved being able to zoom in on planets and constellations and move around them. Here's just a very quick video clip I created to show you how it looks in action.

Click to watch the video clip (859Kb swf)

The download (about 20Mb) once it's installed also gives access to some pretty impressive tours of different star systems that come complete with audio commentary.

You'll need a reasonably up to date computer (PC or MAC with Bootcamp) and a good quick connection to get the best from it, but if you have a data projector and some speakers, this offers a great multimedia interactive experience for your students.

Nice one Bill. Hope you enjoy it.

Best
Nik

Create Projects for iPod

This is a website that on the surface of it seems like quite a good idea. It's called Mogopop and it supposed to help users create and share multimedia projects for iPod.

You have to register (for free) and this gives you your own space (up to 50Mb) to create your own projects. You can create an image and video library them create pages and add or link the media to them, then when you are ready you can publish the whole thing on the Mogopop site for other to download and enjoy.

As well as creating your own projects, you can of course download other people's (if the they are public), but this involves downloading and installing the Mogopop manager (18Mb).

It's pretty quick and easy to install, but you have to be using the right kind of iPod. I wasn't, so I still haven't got any of the projects onto mine, there's also no way of checking out and viewing what you download before you download it, which for me is a huge disadvantage.

There is an education section and there are some promising titles in there. I also liked the interface and it did seem really easy to create projects, but downloading them and viewing them seems to be the main obstacle.

Anyway, I think this is a really good idea and one that students might well enjoy, so I'm going to persist with it for a bit longer. If I have any luck you may well see a tutorial on http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ in the next few weeks.

I'd love to hear from anyone else who tries / has tried it.

Best

Nik