My Personal Best

I've been blogging on this site now for just over a year, so I thought that just before I head off on my holiday for a couple of weeks, I would leave you with what I feel were some of my best postings over the last year or so.Creating audio-visual monologuesBack in April 2007 I wrote about a nice bit of free recording and lip syncing software that enables students and teachers to create small animated flash characters like this one. Interactive presentationsBack in September 2007 I discovered Voice Thread and wrote a tutorial and some...

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Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students

It's amazing how you can spend ages looking for something you want and then when you find it a whole bunch of other things come along with it. That seems to be the way things have happened for me with video conferencing. I found and posted about tokbox last week and then came Bubble Comment this week which I wrote about on my Quick Shout blog, and now Bubble Joy!Bubble Joy is a way of sending short (60 seconds) fun video messages to people.Click...

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Microblogging for EFL with Plurk

Well I never thought I'd say this, but I've become a fan of microblogging! I have to say that it's mainly because of Plurk. When I first saw Twitter some time back I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I had a look at a few 'twitterers' sharing such information as what they had for lunch or that they were washing their hair and decided there are levels of detail at which information stops being informative - if you know what I mean.Anyway, as the Twitter phenomenon continued to grow and other players joined the market I decided...

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Video conferencing for EFL

It's not often that you look at a product and think 'Ah! That's exactly what I've been looking for! And it's free!' But tokbox does seem to be that kind of product for me.For some time now I've been looking round for a suitable video conferencing type application and while there have been a few that look okay, like SnapYap which I reviewed a week or two back, when I saw tokbox this morning I realised that here was a video conferencing tool that had exactly what I wanted and a bit more.Here's a quick video demo of what it can do. To view the demo...

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Naming My Sources: Part 1

I've decided to start naming some of the sources I use to locate new and interesting websites and information. I've decided to do this for a number of reasons I just don't have time to write about everything I find, so this gives people the opportunity to find things for themselves and perhaps write about them.I always feel guilty that I don't acknowledge the sources of much of the information I get. This isn't because I'm guarding my sources, it...

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Karaoke with a Social Network

Well it had to happen! As every other kind of site these days has a social network attached to it, why not karaoke too?The site I've been looking at is called RedKaraoke and it has quite a few useful features. There isn't a huge range of songs there yet, but users can upload their own, it also has a web cam feature so for potential singers who want to be seen as well as heard you can have your web cam hooked up while you sing.As with most karaoke,...

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Creating a personal homepage

Creating your own personal homepage / feed reader can be really simple to do and can also help you to save time and stay in touch with what's going on in your professional and personal life.My own personal home page is something I use everyday and have open for most of the day. It brings me the news from all my favourite websites, blogs and yahoo groups and allows me to scan content from 20 -30 different sources within a few moments. This would...

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