CALL_IS_VSL

The Virtual Presentation Assistant is an online tutorial for improving your public speaking skills. This site is designed to help you target your specific needs as a speaker by allowing you to access any or all of the contents listed below.

Friday, January 27, 2006 My students are blogging! Today I brought my intermediate students to the computer lab to get them set up on our class blog. They were confused at first, but I think they are starting to get the hang of it. After showing them around, I had them each post something just for the experience of posting. Then I had them comment on each others' posts. There was a lot of laughter and excitement as they were reading the comments. I am asking the to use the blog for some very specific purposes: to post daily logs, to post summaries of our reading, and to answer specific questions that I ask. I haven't decided yet if I will require comments. I hope they will pick up on it on their own, but I can easily build that in to my plan if they don't. I realized today just how technologically inexperienced they are. They can do email and, since last semester, use PowerPoint, but there is so much they can't do, but it is only because they have never tried to do it. I hope that this class blog will give them some skills and experience that will be transferable to other uses of technology. posted by Nancy McKeand at 10:41 AM

Administrators, learning designers, and teachers are facing a new kind of learner - someone who has control over the learning tools and processes. When educators fail to provide for the needs of learners (i.e. design learning in an LMS only), learners are able to "go underground" to have their learning needs met.

Wikis at School Educators at all levels are finding ways to incorporate wikis into their teaching. For every assignment that asks students to research a particular topic, there is a possible application for a wiki. Take, for example, a collaborative writing project. With a simple wiki, students from one class, multiple classes, or even multiple schools can post their writing samples for comment (see "High School Online Collaborative Writing"). The wiki structure makes it possible for several students to work on an assignment concurrently. Most wiki software packages track changes to a page so students and their teachers can see when and by whom the writing was edited. Or consider a different scenario: Students who are studying a complex topic such as the U.S. Constitution are broken into teams to research and present information about different aspects of the document and its history. In the past, this kind of student work might be shared with the rest of the class. With a wiki, it can be shared on the Web for anyone to read and use. Perhaps more exciting, parents, students in different classes or schools, and invited guests can add details, correct errors, and comment on what's been posted, making learning a truly collaborative process. Outside of the classroom, teachers and administrators are using wikis as tools for school planning and interaction with parents. The traditional printed newsletter, for example, can be replaced by a wiki that continuously provides announcements and other key information to parents. Some schools have chosen to use wiki software to build their entire Web sites.

Hello, I am James Torio, I live in New York. I wrote the paper for my master's thesis in advertising design for Syracuse University. I have a passion for design, innovation, creativity, strategy, branding, trend-spotting, problem-solving, all things viral and how they relate to building more dynamic relationships between brands and target audiences. The thesis is saved as a PDF, please feel free to download it and share it. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey and every along the way who freely gave advice. To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink. Click the green arrow button to start viewing it. --------> (More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found at the User Forums.) This is a good example of how you can create tutorials in Wink, by capturing screenshots, mouse movements and specifying your own explanations with them. And all this in a standard Windows-based UI with drag-and-drop editing makes it very easy to create high quality tutorials/documentation. It is estimated that Macromedia Flash Player is installed in more than 90% of the PCs. Using Wink you can create content viewable across the web in all these users' desktops. Similar applications sell for hundreds of dollars, while Wink is free with unrivaled features. So spread the word about Wink to your friends.

How blogs can make the link Blogs offer connection - between pupils and between schools, and sometimes with surprising results. Chris Alden looks at how some schools work with the medium, and wonders why more don't When children from Sandaig primary school, Glasgow, each wrote a poem for National Poetry Day last autumn, they could scarcely have imagined that their work would become the basis of a drama project at a school in the American south. But after class teacher John Johnston published all 150 poems on the Glasgow school's blog - an easy-to-use online journal for children and staff - the feedback they received was immediate and global.

Extraordinary edublogger Barbara Sawhill at Oberlin University's language lab in Ohio brings students of Arabic to talk with native speakers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia using Skype. This triumph over distance only works because Skype's sound quality keeps the high and low tones of sound; telephones and other VoIP software/hardware clip out those parts of speech.

On a Sunday morning in November, six students studying Arabicare crowded around a television set in the Paul and Edith Cooper International Learning Center (ILC), waiting for a video conference with students in Saudi Arabia to begin. The conference, which was organized by Barbara Sawhill, director of the ILC, and Wafa Hameedi, director of technology at Effat College, is just one example of the way faculty members are using technology to revolutionize the teaching of foreign languages at Oberlin. “This is just one example of how technology can create bridges between schools, cultures, countries,and languages,” Sawhill says. “It is extremely difficult for an American to travel Saudi Arabia, but technology can take us there – and once we are connected, we are able to experience an entirely different world.” Sawhill has also started using Skype, a free, voice-over IP tool that makes computer-to-computer long-distance “telephone calls,” as a way to bring additional native speakers to the students. She recently organized a conference call between Buthaina Al-Othman, a native speaker of Arabic and a professor of English as a Second Language (ESL) at Kuwait University, and the Oberlin students who are studying Arabic with Assistant Professor of French Ali Yedes, also a native speaker of Arabic.

English learners, teachers are plugged into new language technology in county's middle schools By CRISTINA DE LEON-MENJIVAR, Register Staff Writer Sunday, December 11, 2005 1:07 AM PST Alfredo Hernandez, left, celebrates a technological breakthrough with Ramiro Castaneda at Silverado Middle School. The eighth-graders discovered a way to add video to Powerpoint presentations after earlier attempts failed. Jorgen Gulliksen/Register photos Itzel Rodriguez, 13, came to Napa County from Mexico just two months ago. Last week, she was working on a Powerpoint presentation on English prefixes at American Canyon Middle School in Tracy Williams' Language Arts class.

Itzel Rodriguez, 13, came to Napa County from Mexico just two months ago. Last week, she was working on a Powerpoint presentation on English prefixes at American Canyon Middle School in Tracy Williams' Language Arts class. Itzel and her classmates are in a unique classroom, an English Language Development class that uses technology to help them understand and learn English. "The class makes me happy, and the computer helps me learn English. I like working with computers," said Itzel in Spanish.

Making the language lab available to the ESL students just seemed a natural extension of the foreign-language program, several school educators said. "It's just such an important tool to get the kids speaking and listening," Preisel said. "You get more in one session here than in an entire year" in just a classroom. For the non-English speakers, the chance to go through exercises slowly, to be able to repeat words and phrases, to hear themselves speak in English and to do so under teacher supervision seemed a perfect match with the lab's purpose, Moshi said. "It wakes the kids up. It's still English, but it gets their interest. I think it's a great motivational tool," he said. "A lot of the ESL kids aren't computer-literate, so there's an added benefit — it's an introduction to computer literacy."

On the outskirts of the village, a single computer sits in an empty room. The processor is not the fastest, the screen is an older style CRT monitor, but the sheer fact that it is here at all is enough. The village is now online, and with the help of Akash, a local who has been trained to use the computer, villagers now have access to a wealth of information.

Some 70 per cent of India’s citizens live in villages or small towns but only 2 per cent have access to fixed-line or cellular phones.