Category Archives: CALL

Free tools for teachers: Teacher guide

Microsoft offers free tools to help engage students in a variety of subject areas—from art to music to science and beyond. Teachers can use these interactive tools to encourage self-directed learning or to create fun, dynamic group projects.

The tools are simple to download from the Web. For the most part, they don’t require special training, so you can start using them quickly and help your students do the same.

via microsoft.com

There are a lot of cool suggestions here. Good going Microsoft. This is how you provide value to the community.

Read more..

BubblePLY & Screenr

[EDIT 10/3/2012 – I removed the links to BubblePLY. After trying it out again, I got virus warnings. My old video links directly to the download page now. Overall, I just have bad vibes about it and I don’t want anyone going there off of my recommendation.   However, Screenr is still wonderful.]

BubblePLY is a very cool annotation tool for online videos.  It accepts more than just YouTube, but it makes no guarantees about those it will accept.  I suppose you’ll just have to try it out and see.

 

BubblePLY enables you to put text annotations, subtitles, and even images and video on top of the video.  This is a great tool for teachers.  Imagine the benefits of being able to annotate instructional videos.

 

Here is a sample (though, not good one) from my personal video collection:

 

[edit – The embed doesn’t seem to work, which is unfortunate. I hope that they fix this. Here is the link to the video.]

 

 

Here is a screencast of the process done with Screenr.  You’ll notice the audio isn’t very good.  I think that’s my microphone (and/or audio card).  Both BubblePLY and Screenr is a great job, though.

 

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