On Thursday I was able to attend the NERALLT (New England Regional Association For Language Learning Technology) Conference at Brown University. It was nice to get a chance to speak with so many colleagues interested in teaching languages with technology! I attended a workshop on using the Ipad app “Adobe Voice” and it was very interesting. The App which so far is only available for IPAD (not even Iphone) allows users to create a simple story with text, image, and audio. We created our own stories to try it out. My first attempt showed that I have to slow down and add some time between slides but here is my first story so you can see what it can look like here. In my story I asked students what they did over fall break (we just learned past tense) and if I were using this in the classroom I would then have students create a short story about what they did over break. It’s very easy and quick to use and it seems like it could be a good alternative to having students create power Point presentations in class.
In a panel presentation (in which I presented ten free tech tools), I learned that glogster is a nice tool for creating Posters. The presenter showed some really neat examples. I have used glogster before but wasn’t aware of all the functions such as the opportunity to embed own videos as well. I also enjoyed learning about ZeeMaps, a tool where you can create an interactive map. The presenter showed a project in which students created videos about themselves and then uploaded them on the map to their hometown. This seems like a very engaging activity especially in a classroom with students from many different places in the world.
If anyone tries these new tools I’d love to hear about your experiences with them!