This month I’d like to focus on some search tools that mostly specialize in vocabulary. I don’t feel really comfortable using the term “search engine” since most people associate that with the Google-powered tool that sits prominently somewhere on the page that opens when you launch your browser. But most people are now making use of multiple search tools—Google books, image or video search tools, etc.—on a daily basis and just as you would use certain search tools to search for images, the tools here can be used to help you investigate and better understand lexical items (words, phrases, or longer fixed expressions).
First and most impressive this month is Visuwords. Type in a word or phrase and get a visual “map” of the word’s meanings and associations. Hover your cursor over any term to get more explanation or definitions. This must be seen to be believed. You will be impressed: I promise.
Next is ERek, a search tool that brings up instances or examples from either the whole web or only .edu (academic) sites or only news sites. This can be very helpful in identifying collocations or just seeing how the lexical item is used. A great tool.
Amazon.com allows you to search inside many books. If you would like some good examples of a lexical item in use in a certain area (economics, TESOL, etc.) you just choose a book in that area and search in the book for your item. For example, I just chose the book Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall Reeve (Wiley) and did a search for the word “identity.” My search produced 30 examples from the book.
If you would like to know how two similar terms (start vs. begin, for example) compare in usage volume (frequency) on the web, Googlefight can help you. Just input the two terms and the system returns the number of times they can be found on the web. This can also be used to check out cultural items (hambuger vs. hot dog, or Pokemon vs. Dragonball, for example).
And finally, there is a new search engine in development that may just be the way all search engines work in the future. It is called Wolfram Alpha. It tries to understand your questions and return data in a way that matches your needs. It is still in development, but vocabulary searches seem to work well. If you search for a term, you get definitions, origins, frequency information (written and spoken), pronunciation, and much more. Give it a try and taste the future.
Welcome to October. Though the column this month features Halloween as its topic, I’ll be introducing a variety of sites—something for academic searching, a place to be creative or let your learners get creative, and a tool that just might save you some time.
Halloween
On the train the other day I saw a poster for Disneyland with that unmistakable orange and black design. Disneyland has really embraced Halloween as one of its seasonal themes, just one of many signs that students in Japan are now familiar the festival and its imagery. The history of Halloween is more interesting than just pumpkin faces, however, and can be good content for an English lesson. Here are two sites that you can use as a resource, or even send your more advanced learners to.
CBBC (BBC News Learning Site) has a nice short summary of the festival and its history and images.
History.com’s Halloween page is a wealth of resources including videos, background information, pumpkin carving suggestions, and related stories.
A Free E-book Search Engine
It is remarkable how many books are now being released online for free these days under the Creative Commons license, usually in pdf form. I have recently downloaded Opening Up Education, edited by Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, and A Designer’s Log: Case Studies in Instructional Design by Michael Power. And recently I came across a new search engine for e-books, which should make it even easier to find free books online. It’s called Free E-Book-s.
Get Creative
Looking for a nice writing project for your learners? Storybird gives you the tools to write storybooks (like children’s picture books) online. Artists post their work at the site and you can just browse for images to use, choose a few, and write a story. The results are simple (as in not so much written text) but are surprisingly sophisticated. The completed stories can be viewed online and in the near future you will be able to print out your stories too.
Save Some Time
The Scholastic Vocabulary Quiz Maker: Here is a vocabulary test making robot brought to you by Scholastic. Go to the page, input your vocabulary (just the vocabulary, not the definitions or examples) and let the system create a vocabulary test for you. The system provides the definitions for you. And you can select the grade level of difficulty to control the difficulty of the definitions. It’s all in English—sorry, no translations are allowed—but it makes a test that you can easily adapt (copy and paste and edit) for use with your own learners.
When I first came to Japan years ago I was impressed by the widespread use of maps. People drew maps for each other when giving directions, for example, and almost every advertisement seemed to feature a map of some sort. Times have changed, everyone has a cell phone and businesses now all have websites, but the use of maps has not. There still seems to be one on every site these days—only now it is usually an embedded interactive Google map.
Google Maps uses JavaScript and XML, or KML (Keyhole Markup Language), an XML-based language. Using this code, some web tools have appeared that allow users to add additional information onto embedded maps, things like pins for locations, extra information or images, and more. For English learners, these tools can allow them to easily produce and share authentic and meaningful geographical presentations. Instead of just writing about their hometowns, for example, learners can identify interesting and historical places and introduce them on a map. Pictures and links to websites can also be added. Any assignment with a geographical or historical theme can make use of these tools, I think. The final products can be viewed at the tool site or embedded into a blog or CMS. Some sites don’t require registration either.
At Click 2 Map (registration required), you can create a map and add a marker at each desired location. Each marker can contain text, photos, videos or any other HTML content.
Quikmaps (registration not required for some functions) allows you to do much the same but you can also doodle on your map with a marker pen function. I find this allows the maps to look more personalized.
UMapper (registration not required for basic service) has similar functions to the other two sites. You can also create or try taking geographical quizzes for fun.
Many years ago I paid about $20 for a nice little software program called SnagIt by a small company called Techsmith. It did only one thing but it did it very well—it allowed me to take pictures of part or all of my computer screen and save them as files. Over the years, I have used that program countless times, especially when making instruction sheets for my learners. A year and a half ago I got reacquainted with (a now much bigger) Techsmith when I saw another one of their products, Camtasia, being used in a demonstration. Russell Stannard was using Camtasia to capture videos of himself correcting students’ writing on his computer screen that he would then send to the learners. It was a brilliant idea for feedback, but it took time, the file sizes were rather large, and the software was costly.
Recently, there are several screen capture solutions for still images, video, and audio available on the web and this month I’d like to introduce some of them. First is CamStudio (downloading needed). CamStudio allows you to record all screen and audio activity on your computer. You create AVI files which you then convert to SWF (Flash video) files and place them where you want, on your school server, for example. The most obvious use of this is for “How-to” videos for your learners. Instead of the old printed sheets with dark and almost unintelligible images taken from your screen, you create a short video introducing how to do something your learners need to do with the computer. You can have the video of you doing it and you can add an audio explanation too.
Next is Jing, a new addition to the TechSmith family of products. It also needs to be downloaded and does much the same thing as CamStudio, but it saves your video on a remote server (like YouTube) and sends you the link for embedding into your blog or website. This is a very user-friendly tool indeed. Here is a video demonstrating how to use it. The video was made with Jing.
Keeping track of your training videos can be a little difficult if you have them embeded here and there in different blogs and websites. But the web can help with that, too. Veewow is a site that allows you to create playlists for embeddable videos. You can keep all your training videos in one list and other videos you use with groups of learners in other playlists. With some institutions recently blocking YouTube, Veewow can be an accessible alternative.
This column was published in the July LET newsletter, but I thought I would start making a habit of posting them to this site as well.
You probably have a memory stick, a flash memory device that you
connect to your computer by plugging it into a USB port. In fact, if
you are like most people these days, you probably have more than
one―either on a keychain, in your bag, permanently plugged into your
desktop computer, or maybe all of these. Over the last few years,
these convenient devices have been increasing in memory capacity and
speed and decreasing in price. It is now possible to buy a high-speed
4GB stick for about 3000 yen. And this means that a memory stick can
do much more than just store your random documents and files and
pictures. You can now easily park programs on it and launch them from
there too. A few weeks ago at the JALTCALL conference I attended a
presentation called PortaCALL by Bill White and Shawn White where they
introduced applications you can put on a memory stick and take around
with you. This is particularly useful if you work at several locations
and would like to use programs you have configured to the way you want
them. But there are many reasons to go portable. A portable app works
as you move computers and it doesn’t require additional software on
the PC. It doesn’t leave files or folders behind on the PC or
interfere with any software installed. And in the case of Firefox,
after you have configured it and loaded it with bookmarks, you can get
your learners to download it so they are ready to learn with all the
links you want to give them in an ad free and English-based interface
complete with a Japanese dictionary function.
But there are many things you can do with these applications. The
following list of things you can do is from the website:
・Carry your web browser with all your favorite bookmarks
・Carry your calendar with all your appointments
・Carry your email client with all your contacts and settings
・Carry your instant messenger and your buddy list
・Carry your whole office suite along with your documents and presentations
・Carry your antivirus program and other computer utilities
・Carry all your important passwords and account information securely
But you really can’t appreciate the beauty of the many free
applications until you try them. The first place to go is
PortableApps.com, where you can find a wide range of programs to
download. And the first thing you should download is the web browser
Firefox. Then, you can configure your version of Firefox by
downloading various add-ons. Bill and Shawn recommended QuickProxy, an
application to make sure you can use your Firefox no matter the proxy
settings at the school you are at, Adblock, which blocks advertising
from displaying on websites you visit, BackWord, which gives
instantaneous translation for words you mouse over on a web page, and
a nice little tool called a Virtual Magnifying Glass that you can use
to enlarge sections of a web page to show your students.
But don’t stop there. You can also download a lot of other free open
source software that you will likely find useful. Open Office is a
suite of programs similar in functionality to the Microsoft Office
programs. In fact, you can save files as Office files and open
existing Office files with these programs. The sound editor Audacity
is also available here to download onto your memory stick. And there
is a very nice program called KeePass that can securely manage your
passwords, and an anti-virus program called ClamWin. And this is just
the beginning.
There are dozens of programs available now and new ones appearing
regularly. And did I mention that they are all open source and they
are all free?
http://portableapps.com/
Here is a video introducing connectivism. It was made by one of the students in the massive online multi-student megacourse run at the University of Manitoba last year. The instructors were George Siemans and Stephen Downes. If you want to know more, visit George Siemens’s websites: Elearnspace (http://www.elearnspace.org/), where you can download his book Knowing Knowldge, or Connectivism (http://www.connectivism.ca/).
The thing above is a QR (Quick Response) code. QR codes can contain various information including text, links, phone numbers, and even some images. They are primarily aimed at cell phone users recently and are becoming increasingly common in advertising. At the recent Wireless Ready conference, one presentation discussed the way in which QR codes can be used in classes. You see, these codes are easily generated with one of the many online generating services (just google QR cod generator). And once you have the code squares, you can print them out or paste them into a blog or website. You can use the codes to have learners put short texts (up to about 140 characters) into their cell phones. These messages can be saved and learners can take them with them. The presenter at Wireless Ready was doing interactive treasure hunts with groups of his learners. Of course, you could also give some important vocabulary or usage information. The best part is it involves no downloading for either the creator or the user, and no internet access fees.
