About two weeks ago I wrote a post about an amazing site called Brainshark ( see post here) and today I want to show you the first thing I’ve done with my elementary students.
In the first video , Karen and Alice– from 1st year -perform a role-play called “At the Sports Centre” and in the second one Laura and Alba– from the 2nd year – do likewise with a role-play that I called ” At the grocery”.Thank you ,girls! It was funny, wasn’t it?
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.
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?
Exactly and now what?
Surprisingly , a publishing company has given the English Department an overhead projector and given that we have to almost beg for our own children’s books I can only describe it as an act of utter generosity. 
I should maybe have to explain that although education is compulsory in Spain until you’re 16 ,books are not free; not even kept at the school and handed from student to student . So you can only guess at how much publishing companies earn out of textbooks.
Right , so now I have an overhead projector but… I don’t have an Internet connection. The thing is that I have a funny video that fits like a glove with my next lesson and I want to display it using the OHP.
That’s where this little tool comes very handy. It’s called Savevid and it allows you to download videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Metacafe an
d some other popular sites to your computer or USB . The only thing you need to do is paste the url of the video you want to download, choose from 5 formats the one that suits you best and play it on your computer.
Step 1. Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them, write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing. Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is gold”.
Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post. How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments if hopefully I have already published nine comments), leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.
Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.
Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .
Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine, requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s. Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.
Step 5. Singing Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette