My latest article for the Korea Herald is now out and it is on web 2.0 in the classroom. Read it at the Korea Herald site or look in the extended entry.

Hope you find it useful. I know there are many many more sites that could be introduced but due to space constraints I had to limit myself.

My Last Column

This is also my final column for the Korea Herald. I notified my editor when I submited this lasted column. I’m just too busy to continue writing this column. I’ll be watching the Expat Living section to see who my replacement is and I’m sure I’ll be linking to it in the future.

Korea Herald Readers

Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

What does web 2.0 offer the language teacher? Your first thoughts will probably be of sites like YouTube (http://youtube.com) and Flickr (http://flickr.com), but web 2.0 is much more than that. Using web 2.0 applications and web sites will allow you to extend your lesson beyond the walls of the classroom and give learners the tools they need to continue learning on their own.

Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) is receiving a lot of attention from language teachers due to the high level of interaction between participants. There are several groups of teachers involved in promoting Second Life in language teaching. One of these is Second Life English (http://www.esl-secondlife.blogspot.com/). Using second life you could bring classroom roleplays to a whole new level. This may be difficult for some teachers to implement due resource requirements such as computer labs, but it is worth a look.

Chinswing (http://www.chinswing.com/) offers more structure than second life and provides learners with an opportunity for listening and speaking that is a little more controlled. Essentially Chinswing is a message board where you record your voice and listen to other people talk. Instead of reading threads you listen to them. The site is organized into channels allowing learners to more easily find discussions of interest to them.  With this site, you could have a thread devoted to your class where students talk about an assigned topic and respond to each other. Another simple assignment would be to have students choose their own discussion and participate in it and share the link for homework.

I have used Bubbleply (http://www.bubbleply.com) with students. This a great way for students to interact with a video on YouTube. Last September I introduced Bubbleply on my blog (http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/bubbleply-revisited/)
Bubbleply takes a youtube video and allows you to add a variety of speech, thought, narration, or subtitle bubbles to it. Clearly this gives the teacher opportunities to annotate a video, add English subtitles to aid in listening comprehension, add thought bubbles for comedy or even have students find a video of their own to bubblply for task based English use. My students will be finding their own youtube video to bubbleply and then adding it to their class blogs.

Kantalk (http://kantalk.com/) requires the use of Skype (http://www.skype.com) for recording voice or actual live chatting. One feature that I think is useful is the transcribe a youtube video option. Simply add a link to a YouTube video and the video will be embedded on the page with a place to transcribe the video. More than one person may transcribe the video and other users are able to comment as well as rate the transcription. This is definitely a good listening exercise for learners.
Last semester I used BitStrips (http://www.bitstrips.com/create/comic/) as a make-up homework assignment (http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/bitstrips/) for one student and will probably use it with all students this semester.

FaceYourManga () is an avatar generator. Using this site you could have learners create avatars of themselves, print them up and bring them to class.  You can then redistribute the avatars so that learners have to find the person whose picture they have using language learned in class. This is also useful if your students are blogging or using Moodle and you want them to have avatars.

There are too many web2.0 sites to use with classes to be able to fully introduce all of them here, but others to consider include: Voice Thread (http://voicethread.com), Flickr (http://flickr.com), Chuala (http://www.chuala.com/), Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/), and Word Learner (http://www.wordlearner.com/).

Two excellent blogs that will keep you informed of useful web sites for the classroom are Larry Ferlazzos Websites of the Day (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/) in particular check out The “Next Best…” List (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/08/25/the-next-the-best-list/). The second site to watch is Langwitches (http://langwitches.org/blog/).

If you have other sites to share, please leave a comment on my blog (http://eflgeek.com).