Collaborative online tools
Christine Bohlander & David Tual
christine.bohlander@durham.ac.uk
david.tual@durham.ac.uk
Collaborative?
Who:
- Within a group: S(s) ↔ S(s), T ↔ S(s)
- Beyond the group (resources by other teachers or students)
Why:
- Not reinventing the wheel but building up on other people’s contribution
- Learning from each other’s mistakes but also having examples of good
practice
∂
- Acquiring skills by working as a team using web tools
What:
- Vocabulary building
- Blogs and Wikis
- Screen capture software
- Video collaboration tool (VoiceThread)
Online vocabulary building
http://www.studyblue.com/ : flashcards and quizzes creator; nice-looking,
professional; you can share with others by inviting them by email.
http://getrevising.co.uk/ : designed for students to make revision easier.
http://www.flashcardexchange.com/ : big repository of flashcards, but only
basic services free. One-off payment
∂ for printing, etc.
http://www.flashcardmachine.com/: big repository of flashcards, absolutely
free, not that intuitive.
www.wrds.eu: allows the students to create vocabulary lists, hear the
words (for some languages), learn and share them with other students.
www.mind42.com: allows to create mind maps and to invite people to
collaborate to them or to view them (without collaborating).
Blogs and Wikis
Blog:
individual entries (posts) on the same blog
– example: individual book reviews about the same book on
amazon
∂
Wiki:
one entry, everybody can edit it
– example: Wikipedia
∂
Collaborative blog
•
•
•
•
Written (or oral) homework
Teacher creates one blog per topic with concrete learning aims
Students can see each others‘ entry
∂
What the students like about it:
“I find it useful to get some inspiration for my own blog but also for
gaining more practice in writing by seeing others‘ mistakes.“
Online feedback
Corrective feedback can be divided into three categories
(James,1998 and Ellis et al., 2006):
1) Correction: provision of the correct target language form
∂ has been committed
2) Feedback: an indication that an error
3) Remediation: metalinguistic information about the nature of the error
∂
Screen capture software
http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html
http://screencast-o-matic.com
http://www.screenr.com/
∂
 Lets you record your screen and a voice-over
 Easy to share online
What can you do with screen
capture software?
 Guide/give instructions to a whole class (how to use
a website for example)
 Set a speaking task for the students to complete as
∂
homework or in the language
lab (ex: website review)
 Feedback tool
“The video feedback was a really good way to pinpoint
my mistakes and correct them and would encourage
me to correct my errors more than written feedback“
www.voicethread.com
 Great for all levels/all languages
 VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia tool that holds
documents (.docx, .ppt, .pdf, images, some videos, etc.) and
allows people to navigate pages
∂ and leave comments in 4 ways
- using voice (with a microphone), text, audio file, or video (via a
webcam) and share them with anyone they wish.
Russel Stannard’s
www.teachertrainingvideos.com
Blogger: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBlogger/index.html
Jing: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/Jing/index.html
∂
Screenr: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/screenr/index.html
VoiceThread: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/voiceThread/index.html