Video and tech – Page 18

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Business English teacher

Jan 122012

Business English teachers are a mixed bunch. Some come from teaching or linguisticky roots, some have business backgrounds, and some … well, take a look and see for yourself. I asked some friends just what they’d been up to before they became business English teachers and here’s what they said:

The video was fun to make, so click the ‘Like’ button if you’d like to see a sequel one day. And let me know if you’d be willing to become part of the cast. You just need a webcam, skype and five minutes.Perhaps we should do one for general English teachers?

Tech stuff

Video and tech 5 Responses »

Jun 282011

I had a very techie week last week:

I went to NYC to learn more about Adobe’s editing software
I attended a BESIG conference online. (Thank you @carldowse and the BESIG BOT for making virtual attendance possible
I went to a face-to-face edubloggers conference in Philly (saw the delightful Shelly Terrell, who incidentally was astonished that I don’t have a US cell phone or a tablet computer – am I weird that way? )
I unpacked a new desktop computer and discovered it has a sort of Star Wars appearance and theme. Apparently I share an attraction to fast graphics cards with video gamers who tend to be interested in scifi. I even found a baseball cap with an alien on it in the packaging. ( ‘merican husband thinks it’s very appropriate. To him, I am an alien)
I made a 30 second video of Brad Patterson speaking about a free dictionary app that EduLang has developed called SnaPanda. (I included shots of real pandas, for those who prefer the non-virtual kind.)

Phew!

Quick thoughts on tech and teaching:
We’ll be seeing more mobile apps for English learners and more data in the cloud. But my hunch is that the tech that may impact most on EFL/ESL course design and teaching soon is voice recognition.

Speech-to-text has been slow to materialise, but…
1. Youtube/Google does a good job matching captions to videos when I provide the script now.

2. My video editing software also does a good captioning job with a script. And importantly it can also tag when each word is spoken in the metadata of the video clips, and make them quickly searchable. (I mentioned the search capabilities over at English Central the other day – similar thing.)

These speech to text capabilities mean we can automate the compilation of metadata – so we’ll have much better search capabilities. I do hope we use them wisely though – just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I wouldn’t like to see a proliferation of unthought out learning objects. More on that another day, but in the meantime, whaddya think of my new baseball cap?

Imagine…

Video and tech 11 Responses »

Jun 242011

English language course books tend to be populated with characters that live and die in the space of a short dialogue. Context is constrained because it takes time to set it up. But these writing restrictions get loosened up with video. We can take in a lot more information when we can see things happening.

Body language conveys meaning, obviously, and so does how we say things, so for example ‘Yeah right’ can signal agreement and ‘Yeah right’ can signal sarcastic disbelief. And things mean different things depending on who says them and where. If we’re going round an art gallery together and I point to a picture and say ‘That’s a nice one’, you’ll think I like the picture. But if you’re a sales person in a green grocers and I point to a cauliflower and say ‘That’s a nice one’, it means ‘I want to buy it’. We play a lot of different roles in our lives and what role we’re playing at a particular time impacts on meaning.

So imagine what it would be like to have access to a large spoken corpus that’s made up of video. Instead of reading things that people said, imagine you could see and hear people saying them. And when you burrowed down to look at how a word had been used, instead of reading rows of written text, suppose you could see and hear people saying the word in different contexts.

So imagine someone took lots of videos -say lots of interesting and entertaining and videos on Youtube. And suppose they started putting them into a database that keeps growing. And imagine that teachers and students could access and search the video corpus.

If you think this sounds cool, check out English Central’s site because they seem to be doing just that. I had low expectations when I entered the website. I had to register and wondered if it would be worth the bother. It was and I’m glad I did. What do you think?

Another business English sing-along

Video and tech 14 Responses »

Jun 022011

I love video. I think it’s a treasure chest for teaching English. With video we can provide context more quickly than we can with just audio and bring the outside world into the classroom. And another benefit is it can bring movement to highlight rhythm and other stuff that can make language memorable and enjoyable.

Here’s a (rythmy) video for elementary and pre-intermediate students that I made with my son. (Thanks Tom – love that c-walk!) It’s designed to review the days of the week and common lexical phrases for making arrangements and appointments. It ties in well with Business Objectives unit 8 or other similar lessons. You can set it as homework, or play it in class if you think your students might enjoy a sing-along.

It should be simple to use. They just watch the first video a few times so they get to know the the tune. Then video two is the karaoke version and they sing along. I’m thinking I might need to add a video three with just a few word prompts, so they can test themselves.

Please thumbs up if you or your students like it, or even better, leave me a comment and tell me what didn’t work as well. I’m still experimenting and learning how to do this stuff and all advice and suggestions are really welcome.

The music in this video comes from: http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/08/24/how-to-finding-music-for-youtube-videos/

Some other professional English video lessons you might like:

Troubleshooting – technical English – Lucy and the typewriter

Customer service – United Airlines

A handy dictation

Another totally unrelated thing: I’m giving some online webinars for Pearson next week. They are free to join – you just need to register and have an internet connection. You can register here. Hope to see you there!

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