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From the Voki for Education Newsletter Voki in the Languages Classroom

An example of how Voki is being used in language lessons.

An example of how Voki is being used in language lessons.

"consists of about 3000 images useful in the teaching of basic vocabulary in a variety of languages. Its purpose is to provide a set of those graphics most basic and useful for low-level language-teaching, and at the same time, to make them as easily searchable as possible. Transparent an matte images included."

"Laptop and microphone Joe Dale is an independent consultant working with CILT, Links into Languages, The British Council and the BBC. He is host of the TES MFL forum, former SSAT Languages Lead Practitioner and is a regular conference speaker. Joe has been podcasting since 2006, you can read more in his blog Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom. Creating and listening to podcasts offers many learning opportunities for pupils both in and out of the classroom. The cyclical process promotes speaking, listening and writing skills and can improve pronunciation, confidence and engagement. Scripting, recording and editing caters to a range of learning styles, facilitates peer assessment, pupil voice and collaborative project-based learning. Pupils are able to access higher order thinking skills, foster creativity, revise lesson content and deepen their understanding as a result. Podcasting also allows pupils to publish professional sounding audio inexpensively to a real audience, giving them a sense of ownership and a more relevant and meaningful purpose to their work. Showcasing pupils' work in this way can forge links with the wider community and celebrate achievement too. Downloading podcasts on to a computer or mobile device lets learners review their learning at their own pace at a time which suits them wherever they may be and as many times as they want. Providing a transcript makes the content even more accessible and enables further personalised and distance learning to take place."

Catroid is a visual programming language for Android devices that is inspired by the Scratch programming language for PCs, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is the aim of the Catroid project to facilitate the learning of programming skills among children and users of all ages. No desktop or notebook computer is needed.

With over 3 billion Youtube videos watched every single day and 48 hours of footage uploaded every single minute to the world's most popular video sharing website we wanted to produce a useful guide for getting the most out of the service. You'll struggle to find somebody who uses the web and who doesn't watch Youtube videos on a daily basis but there is so much more to Youtube than just little funny videos of cats. The list also provides tips and tricks for publishers who are the people who make the site what it is today. Over the coming years we can expect Youtube to continue it's growth especially on mobile and possibly even on to our smart TVs in the future to form a core part of our daily entertainment experience. Here is how you can get much more out of Youtube… Leanback Youtube introduced this feature so as you could watch all the great footage on Youtube tailored to your tastes without every having to click a button. It serves you up videos based on what you have watched before and the idea is that you can "lean back" and just enjoy the content without worrying about searching for new videos. Disco Great way of using Youtube to serve you up an endless playlist if all the music you love. All you have to do is think of the name of your favorite band or artist and click the disco button. It will automatically create a playlist for you featuring only tracks from that person or band. It's a great way of getting free music and just leaving it playing in the background. Charts You simply have to bookmark this page if you want to get the best videos on Youtube. It is essentially a chart system that shows videos depending on the amount of views, ratings, comments etc that they get and you can choose to view it by day, week, month or by all time. It's a great way of finding all the latest content with the crowd doing all the hard work to filter though the billions of videos for you. Create You may have seen some of the animation videos on Youtu

" Author of 20 Great Youtube Features And Tricks You Need To Know 20 Great Youtube Features And Tricks You Need To Know June 7th, 2011 by Niall Harbison in Video inShare124 With over 3 billion Youtube videos watched every single day and 48 hours of footage uploaded every single minute to the world's most popular video sharing website we wanted to produce a useful guide for getting the most out of the service. You'll struggle to find somebody who uses the web and who doesn't watch Youtube videos on a daily basis but there is so much more to Youtube than just little funny videos of cats. The list also provides tips and tricks for publishers who are the people who make the site what it is today. Over the coming years we can expect Youtube to continue it's growth especially on mobile and possibly even on to our smart TVs in the future to form a core part of our daily entertainment experience. Here is how you can get much more out of Youtube… Leanback Youtube introduced this feature so as you could watch all the great footage on Youtube tailored to your tastes without every having to click a button. It serves you up videos based on what you have watched before and the idea is that you can "lean back" and just enjoy the content without worrying about searching for new videos. Disco Great way of using Youtube to serve you up an endless playlist if all the music you love. All you have to do is think of the name of your favorite band or artist and click the disco button. It will automatically create a playlist for you featuring only tracks from that person or band. It's a great way of getting free music and just leaving it playing in the background. Charts You simply have to bookmark this page if you want to get the best videos on Youtube. It is essentially a chart system that shows videos depending on the amount of views, ratings, comments etc that they get and you can choose to view it by day, week, month or by all time. It's a great way of finding al

Translate text into another language to learn Spanish, German, French, Italian and Chinese. The text is levelled to your ability

PollSnack is the easiest online tool for polls & surveys, allowing you to create and conduct market questionnaires without having to learn complicated software. Also, the reporting is very simple and straightforward, with results being displayed in real-time. With PollSnack you can:     - customize the look of your poll and survey widgets     - create polls and surveys in any language you wish     - embed polls in your website     - store your data securely for an indefinite amount of time     - export your data as CSV Because of its flexibility and ease of use, PollSnack can be used by bloggers who want to set up a web poll, marketers and product managers who wish to conduct an online survey, as well as social networking users who want to create a personality quiz of their own.

It is free It is easy and simple to use It has a user friendly interface It supports several languages including English, French, German, Italian, Portugues and  Latin It provides pre drawn characters and dialogue boxes Users  have a huge flexibility when editing their strips They can change the size of each character or dialogue bubble, bring elements forward within each box or even change the sequence of each box It offers some writing prompts

"Another form of online creation is possible. From a simple grid, the significant design concepts at the heart of the Documenta interface, together with its powerful multimedia functions, allow you to create new audiovisual languages and narratives in a versatile digital environment, and to adapt them to your needs or those of your target audience. With Documenta you can reinvent yourself on the Net, "

Branching scenarios can be a pain to design. Happily, you can use a simple tool called Twine to easily draft the scenario and produce it. In this post we'll look at a scenario that I wrote to demonstrate Twine's basic features and to make a point about teaching through stories. In the scenario, you're a journalist in a hurry to get to a hot story in Zekostan, and your "guide" can't speak English or drive. You have to quickly learn the necessary Zeko terms to navigate the roads and respond to events along the way. The scenario was inspired by a language-learning activity designed by Kinection. Try the activity, keeping in mind that it's a casual, unfinished experiment. Then come back here for more about Twine and my design decisions.

An amazing 'must try' animated storyboard creator downloadable program. Make superb storyboards, complete with sound, by simply clicking and dragging backgrounds and characters into place from the library. You can even upload your own images. It's so simple to edit that any age of student can use it.

"Little Bird Tales lets you easily make slideshows where you can add text and, more importantly for English Language Learners, provide an audio narration. On nice touch is that you can virtually paint/draw artwork in addition to uploading images (unfortunately, the site doesn't have the ability to grab photos off the web by url addresses). It's free to use, but I'm unclear on if there will be an eventual cost to use the site. It appears to have an upper limit on the number of shows you can produce."

Phrasr is an interactive web-based application that uses Flickr images to illustrate the phrases that users submit. She can choose every image and then publish the entire phrase, which is shown as a personal slide show.

I've been reading lately about the novelty effect for increased attention spans in education. I believe "iFake Text" is a great example of  a simple tool that can allow your students to show what they know in a unique or novel way by emulating a text message conversation on an iPhone.

A private social platform to share with teachers and students to share ideas, files, events and assignments. Secure Social Learning Network for Teachers and Students

"10 Great ways to use Audacity with your Students"

Ideas for using Audacity to improve language learning

"provides free stock images from 10 categories all of which are in the public domain."

"a rich source of information on a enormous number of creatures."