Mybrainshark- Presentation is fun and easy!

Mybrainshark is a site which allows normal presentation to be an audio presentation. This would include powerpoint presentation, video, document, photo album  and even podcast.

Application in language teaching:

• For teacher:

As an alternative to classroom teaching.For example, in case where teacher needs to go to short course, students can continue their lesson by accessing this audio presentation at the computer lab instead of having replacement teacher giving random exercises.

•  For students:

1. Classroom activities:

a) Story-telling. Students work in groups. They need to create their own story in form of either PowerPoint presentation,video,photo album. Then, one student as a narrator, the others as characters in the story and they need to voice over the characters which they records in their presentation. This is done in classroom and their final works are then send to teacher and class blog. This activity promotes colloborative learning  through  the process of discussing their story and assigning roles, which also helps to develop their communicative competence, creativity and teamwork.

b)Giving feedback. Students comment on each others' works. This helps them to reflect on their own learning in which metacognition awareness is raised, further enhances learning.


     2.   Outside classroom activity:

Enable students to practise pronunciation and tones in presentation before the actual presentation. As they do this, they are more aware of the language use and mistakes since they would usually check their presentation before saving it. This deepen learning as they are able to reflect and raise their  metacognitive awareness(Krashen 1985). Another aspects of improvement are fluency, motivation and confidence .

Advantages:

•  The account is free and has access to other presentations of various range of topics.This access could be utilised by creating activities using the various presentations available.
• The works can be shared and tracked. This allows teacher to monitor and check individuals works while students can learn from each others' works.
• Fosters creativity in students and active engagement in creating the tasks. Since they can hear their own voice which suggests that their works are being heard, they would be more motivated to do the tasks as the sense of ownership is increasing.
• Encourages shy and intimidate students to try speaking and presenting since there is no face to face audiences.This helps to build their confidence.

Disadvantages and limitations:

•  The unfinished presentation cannot be saved and edited later. It will automatically saved as finished presentation. Therefore,if students want to edit the presentation, they need to do the recording again from beginning.
• The audio for each slide on its own cannot be edited at specific minutes. Users need to repeat the recording from the beginning if want to edit the audio.
• The session is limited and users need to login again after certain time. This could disrupt the project progress as any unfinished project will  be saved automatically and they need to start again from beginning.

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Wordsift- 4 in 1

Wordsift is a learning tool which main function is to summarise text into keypoints in form of word clouds. The site also provides additional tools in relation to the text 'sifted' where it draws the mind map of the keypoints, provides alternative links and videos as further references, a thesaurus, and a dictionary with examples of sentences from the text.

Application in language teaching:

• For teacher:

1.  Helps  teacher in the process of designing and adapting materials. As teachers need to select the suitable materials, wordsift helps in skimming and scanning process.This means, teachers are able to have general view of  texts through the word clouds which saves time for teachers.  
2. The site also provides several other references/articles related to the text as alternative or further readings. This provides teachers with alternative of variaty of texts to choose from if the selected text is not suitable, which saves time for teacher to search for new article.

• For students:

1. Pre-writing/pre-reading:

a) Guess the content of the text from the word clouds. This activity can be used as pre-writing activity to activate students' schemata.

b) In groups, asks students to read an article and list out keypoints of the article. Then, asks them to compare and discuss their lists. Finally, teacher gives them the word clouds to confirm their lists.

     2.   Writing activity:

Create a story using the word clouds. This activity helps to develop students'cognitive ability since they need to use all the words in the word class to create a whole new story. The process is similar to matching up pieces of jigsaw puzzle. 

      3. Speaking activity:

Match pictures with suitable word clouds and justify. In groups, students are to match given picture with several word clouds. After they have chosen the suitable one, they are to justify and present their choice with other groups. This activity allows discussion which helps to develop communicative competence and stimulate their cognitive ability.


     4.   Vocabulary learning

Fill in the blanks with suitable words. This activity can be done either as pre-writing/pre-reading activity or as post-activity where it supports vocabulary learning through the contextualisation of the words from the examples from the text and helps reinforcement of the vocabulary memorization if done in post activity .

Advantages:

• It is free and  no need to sign up or  have accounts.
•  Teacher can custom own wordlists into word clouds.
• The words can be sorted out  in  few categories which includes common to rare, rare to common, A to Z, and Z to A.
• The words can be identified according to genre or subjects such as Social Science, Mathematics and Language. This helps students to understand words use according to its contexts.
•  There is workspace available if teachers want to use it. This workspace could ease students' note taking or copy some exercises.
• Examples from text of selected word, which provides students its contextualised word use.
• Thesaurus and mind map at hand to foster study skills and encourage autonomous learning by students.

Disadvantages:

• The design of the word clouds is simple and of only one colour. This issue is resolved by alternative site which is Wordle, which offers more designs for the word clouds. Below is an example:

• Need to have suitable Java software, which is a hassle as one needs to download it if their computer/laptop do not have it.