Mybrainshark

Create your own stuff, Slides, Speaking

Today I want to show you a tool which has a lot of potential in the classroom. It’s called Mybrainshark and it offer lots of possibilities .

Mybrainshark allows you to:

♥Add voice to a PowerPoint. Upload your Power point presentation and add audio to every slide by using a microphone. You can also add background music.

♥Upload a document and add audio. It might be very useful when you want to explain a grammar point or when you want your students to improve pronunciation.

♥Upload a video and add your voice to it or/and add background music.

♥Make your own photo album and comment on it or add music.

♥Make your own podcast.

Besides, it’s free -you only need to register – and it’s easily shared or embedded in a website or blog.

I’m planning to immediately use it with two levels.
♥Elementary levels. Record students while doing a role-play. I’m going to use the Photo album option and take pictures of them.
♥Intermediate levels. Students narrate their own speeches illustrating them with photos. They can either use the Power Point option or the Photo album option.

Give it a go and if you have any ideas about how to use it the classroom, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Teachers being taught!

Games, General, Students' Corner, ,

I’m still at the high school. I can’t complain. It has been my own decision and nobody said it was going to be an easy path to walk . Teaching highly motivated adults is very easy, there is no argument here! But teens, oh my goodness!
Lack of motivation in some rural areas has been an ongoing problem for some time and this big crisis is not helping much.

On the other hand, I find it really challenging to find new ways to motivate my unmotivated and/or under motivated students. That’s why when I suggested they try and be teachers for one day designing some strategies to revise the grammar for the Present Tense and two of my students showed a tiny bit of enthusiasm I readily encouraged them. Sadly, one of them didn’t come up to my expectations, so it’s not worth mentioning but one of my students ,Eva, did really well. She revised the present tense, she wrote some exercises for her classmates to practise and she even made us play TIC TAC TOE, which we had been using for Frequency Adverbs and Interrogative Pronouns. This is a picture of Eva below. Well done, Eva ! Teaching is in your genes!


 

All right, I have an OHP and now what? Part 2

freeware,

Dear reader,
About two weeks ago I wrote the first part of this series which I should have called “Adventures and Misadventures of a teacher with nothing but a projector “.
The next obstacle in my path was the lack of a computer in this classroom. But, of course!.. 😉  we have one laptop for the English department but… it’s not always available. So, we have to take whatever laptop is available from other departments. The problem is that not all laptops have programmes installed that can read Flash or whatever format your video is in so the innocent teacher, unaware of this fact, walks into his classroom with a video downloaded from the Internet ready to be played, some questions about the video ready to be answered and some hours and a lot of effort put into this task and realises that the laptop cannot read his video format. Swearing and bumping your head against the wall is not a good option,  trust me on this one, I have already tried it, so what’s left?
Downloading VLC media player, which is player that reads most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio Cds, VCD …etc .

You can easily download it into your computer from this site (Click here) though I strongly recommend you download a portable version of this programme and carry it around with you, in case you have to borrow a computer from some other department. (portable version, click here).

Will I ever need to write Part 3? What are you guesses?

My Crafty Side:Turn a bar of soap into liquid hand soap

My Crafty Side

If you follow this blog you’ll surely know that this section is not mine, so at the end of these lines you’ll find the link to the blog I got the idea from.

I’ve been for ages storing complimentary bars of soap from the hotels I’ve stayed in. I should have got rid of them ages ago , but for some sentimental reason I’ve always put it off. Now, I’m glad I didn’t throw them away. I’m not going to ever buy liquid hand soap again .You’ll never guess how easy it is!

You are about to read the original  recipe, which might work just fine but I’ve slightly modified it: I’ve added two spoonfuls of liquid glycerin instead of one and added another cup of water because  I felt it was too thick, but I guess it all depends on the  kind of soap you’re using.

Source: Savvy Housekeping. Click here to read the article and good luck