After 20 years of teaching teachers to use technology in language teaching working at
the university of Westminster the university of Warwick the university of king's college
London and now working with Nile what are my three biggest pieces of advice and what
do they mean in practice what I'm gonna do in this video is highlight three key observations
that I've noticed when working with teachers but then I'm gonna make this really practical
by showing you lots of specific ideas related to the point I'm going to make
if you watch this video the whole way through you're going to get loads of ideas that you can
try out in the classroom but you're also going to get a few key principles to think about when
you're working with technology and language teaching really hope you like the video and
as always if you do please like it please share it with other teachers I'd love to
know which of the ideas that I talk about you find the most interesting let's get started
so the first point I want to make is that teachers often know little bits about technologies
what my advice would be would be to focus on the key technologies and to learn them
really well and this happens to me all the time when I'm doing training teachers often say to
me ah we know this technology and yet when I demonstrate a few ideas with that technology
they say to me oh no I didn't realize you can do that I had exactly this problem
this week when I introduced Padlet and the teacher said to me yeah we know this technology and yet
all of them admitted afterwards and there was a group of about 40 teachers that none of them
actually realized you could do certain things I'm going to demonstrate some of those things now so
the first thing is learn the technology really well let's look at some examples of what I mean
let me show you some examples in Padlet okay so the sorts of things that where I think that you
know it's a great tool it's got loads and loads of options it's perfect for language teaching
and yet teachers spend time learning other technologies and learning a little bit about
them rather than say spending a lot of time on Padlet let me just do an example with
canvas because canvas has got lots of options I'm just going to demonstrate a couple of things and
I'm going to just I'm going to put here Russell's I'll just call this Russell's examples okay so
just going to click on next I'm going to start first thing I'm going to show you watch this I'm
going to click on the screen and I'm going to just record myself so I'm going to say
if I don't even need to put an introduction I can do that afterwards I'm going to click here
and I'm going to record myself speaking so I'm going to do a quick introduction to myself okay
so I'm going to click on this button here hi yeah my name is Russell Stannard I'm a language teacher
I've worked at various universities and these days I work for NILE or I work a lot with NILE and I'm
also the founder of teachertrainingvideos.com right let's finish there click on stop I'm
going to save that okay I'm going to put my name here so I'm going to say Russell says hello so
immediately we've added up an audio file okay I'm going to publish that as well
okay so a lot of teachers don't even realize that you can add up audio but watch this I'm
going to show you another lovely trick okay I'm now going to add up a picture of myself so I'm
going to click on this one here upload and I'm just going to quickly go over to my computer
and this is for example an idea that I've used many times as a sort of introduction when I want
students to meet each other so I just want to find a really simple picture that will do fine
I'm going to put that in there I've uploaded a picture now I'm going to publish that picture
and what I'm going to do now this is what you can do if you're in canvas mode is you can click
here and you can connect okay and it will show you all the posts on the screen and you'll say
whatever one you want to connect it to so I want to connect it to that one and now I've got a
connection between the two so students can easily add up their pictures and then record themselves
doing a little introduction and then connect the two objects together and I presented this last
week and a lot of teachers didn't know you could do that I'm going to show you a second example
here this is what I'm doing currently with the group of students that I've got so I've asked all
the students to record themselves and introduce themselves to the rest of the class and then what
I did is I went over to this button here I came down and I turned on comments so you can allow
comments you can come here and turn comments on okay you can turn it off and turn it on
and by turning on comments it then meant that students could listen to other people's recordings
and then add their comments or questions underneath so I asked all the students to
listen to what other students have written and then to add at least one question underneath
two different profiles again such a simple idea because it then gets the students to both record
themselves speaking but then listen to what other people have said and then ask them questions and
then what you can do is you can put the students in in groups and get them to discuss the answers
to their questions as well so really really lovely ideas that work with Padlet so my advice is
particularly with tools like Padlet Quizlet YouTube these are technologies where we got lots
of lots of kind of ways that we can use them in language teaching and I would really spend my time
looking at these technologies with more detail because it's better to do that and to say no
lots of technologies but not really know how they can be used now if you want to know more about
padlet there's a link now on the screen where you can click on and watch a video that takes
you through padlet in lots of details i'm now going to move on to my second point
the second key point is that the more you know a technology the more creative you can be of
it and i'm gonna demonstrate one technology now and show you about three or four different ideas
that you can do with that just one technology to demonstrate how powerful it is when you get really
really sure of a technology you tend to become much more creative when you know a technology well
I'm going to show you now what is definitely my favorite technology but I'm going to show you
lots of ideas with just one technology so learning this one technology could
allow you to make grammar videos to give feedback to your students to get your students to develop
their speaking skills to help your students with for example their pronunciation and their
vocabulary just one technology so many things that you can do with it we're going to click on
launch free recorder and it record launches this kind of recorder here and what i'm going
to do now is i'm going to minimize my screen because when you launch the recorder it opens
like a little app I'm going to minimize that and in the background here on another page
I've just got some pictures of Tudors uh the Tudors um work monarchs uh or in in Britain or
uh during the kind of uh 1400s 1500s so I'm just going to just do a little bit of a video about
the Tudor so I'm going to click on this button here to start recording it's going to record my
voice as well and just imagine this you know I could get my students to do this to talk over a
picture or to talk over a series of pictures but i could be for example demonstrating how they do
this activity and then send the recording to them or i could be talking over a powerpoint
slide now but i'm just going to demonstrate really simply how it works so click on here
so this is Anne Boleyn this is the second wife of henry VIII and In fact it was the reason why he
uh wanted to divorce from Catherine of Aragon this is a very famous Tudor it's Elizabeth the
first that's actually the daughter of henry the eighth and finally this is a picture of henry viii
um who actually married six times click on the button video I click on done that video click
on save and that video is actually ready look I've made a video in just seconds and I'm going
to play it back now this is Anne Boleyn this is the second wife of henry viii and uh in fact it
was the reason why and so I could now save that onto my computer or I could even upload it onto
my YouTube channel or I could even upload it onto my YouTube my google drive now I'm going to share
a link on the screen so you can learn more about screencast-o-matic it's a fantastic technology
it's free and you can do so many things with it but what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just
demonstrate some other ideas let's look at the whole area of pronunciation and vocabulary and go
through an idea just a really quick break from the video I hope you're enjoying the video and if you
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five days let's get back to the video so let's do an example with pronunciation I'm going to click
here on launch free recorder again it opens up the recorder i'm going to minimize that and what i've
got on the screen this time is some notes from a lesson i've done with my students and these are
some of the words that they were having difficulty with and what i'm going to do is i'm going to just
record myself going through these problematic words and then i'm going to send them the video
really really easy i'm just going to click on the record button to start so just click on there it
starts to record and what remember whatever you do on the screen so watch this if i say
okay guys this is the difficult words for this week that I want you to prank the to practice the
pronunciation first word accommodation don't forget the stress is on the fourth syllable
accommodation next word third photography stresses on the second word photograph stresses on the
first word so note that we say photography but we say photograph this next one is incredulous
okay stresses on the second syllable and the next one idiomatic stress is on the final syllable
sorry on the third syllable idiomatic let's quickly go through those again accommodation
photography photograph incredulous idiomatic see so I can make that video click on done save that
now I could email it to my students I could upload it onto YouTube so if I click on here for example
if I've connected my YouTube account then I can just literally add in the title so I'm going to
call this vocabulary okay and then I can literally publish this on YouTube once you've connected your
two accounts and notice I've got a fairly fast internet connection that video goes straight up
onto my YouTube account and then I can share the link to the video with the students see
it says copy link so I could copy that link and now email it to the students let's actually have
a quick look at that video on YouTube so I'm going to paste that link in and just press enter
and there is that video already on YouTube it just takes a few seconds to get ready and what remember
whatever you do on the screen so what's this if I say okay guys this is the difficult words
for this week that I want you to prank the to practice the pronunciation first one accommodation
don't forget the stress is on the fourth syllable accommodation next word so you can see how easy it
is for me to make a video and then share it with my students now I could also get my students to
use this technology remember this technology is free and that's what i'm saying about learning
the technology well and becoming creative because once you're confident with using this technology
then you can pass it on to your students and get them to do all sorts of things speaking talking
over pictures talking over powerpoint slides talking over graphs talking over maps answering
questions that you've put on the screen reading out stories all sorts of things that you could do
with this one technology that is completely free if you want to learn more about screen capture
technology in terms of all the different ways it can be used look at the video that's on the screen
now and click on it and it will show you loads of ideas both for you as the teacher and the student
different ways that you can use screen recorder software the third point I want to make is that
we really need to focus on looking at tools that can really help our students to study on their
own and we do need to learn about these tools now there are obvious ones Quizlet google translate
YouTube and I'm going to highlight some examples in a minute of exactly what I mean
there are many things that you might not know about YouTube that would be great to pass on
to your students and again when I do the training teachers often say to me I didn't
realize you could do that what a great thing to show the students so i'm just going to highlight
examples of what i mean what i'm trying to say is that we really need to focus on what
the students can do on their own and how we can help them to do it more effectively
so let me try and show you some of the fantastic things that you can do with YouTube and that
you can show to your students whenever I do a questionnaire with teachers often they say to
me YouTube is their most popular technology but it still amazes me that they don't necessarily
know many of the things you can do let's look for shopping in English okay so I'm just gonna
do an example shopping in English okay so let's imagine that we want to teach our students some
English we're gonna get loads and loads of videos so we can see that but a great thing
to show your students or really useful for you is that you can filter so we're going to click
here and what we're going to do is we're going to find videos that are only 4 to 20 minutes long
and also what we're going to filter again and we're going to find videos with only subtitles
now we get a whole series of videos all these videos have got subtitles really useful I'm
going to click on this first one here I'm going to show you a couple of things now that you can do
straight away first thing that you can do that's really interesting with the video like this let
me just close that down is that because you're using subtitles and it does depend on the type of
subtitles but if they've added the subtitles as a text into YouTube then you can click here and open
the transcript of the video okay now you can even turn off the timings which can be a really
good idea okay now what you can do is jump to any part of the video so I could jump to here
so the first thing we can do is that we can now use this transcript to click to certain parts
and just jump to that part of the video so in fact in fact if I was
playing this if I just played a video and if I jump now to here if I jump to here
and it will just jump around in the video to the places that I want to play the video so
that's a really great way of of working the fact that you can just use these transcripts
as well now I'm going to show you another lovely thing that you can do let's imagine that you
really like this video and you want to save it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on save
and i'm going to create a new playlist and i'm going to call this one shopping
examples in english so that i can save this in what we call a playlist click on create
so let's imagine a few weeks later we find another video that we really like about shopping and we
want to add it into exactly the same playlist we can come down to here click on save find that
shopping examples in English and click on it and add that video so now we've got two videos saved
so let's imagine then a few weeks later that we suddenly find another video that we like and we
think okay we want to share this and keep it with all our other videos about shopping
so this is great for teachers because they can build collections of videos that they can share
with the students or great for students if they want to study on their own so you come down to
save again it gives you the list of all your all the list of all the playlists that you've created
click click on the one click on the one that's the correct one and then add that so now i've
got three videos in my playlist now you might ask yourself where'd you find your playlist well easy
just click over here and come down here and you'll see all your playlists now i've got hundreds i use
playlists all the time for many of the things i'm interested in like learning music so playing
the guitar things about technology things about studying for about you know languages for example
i have playlists for polish for example published television series that i like all sorts of things
but if we come here we can see that playlist that you and i just created together i can come
up here and i can see here shopping examples i can click on it and it shows me the three videos
so i've got them always together now there's lots of great things about this playlist as well let's
have a quick look at some of the things we can do with it now there are lots of things you can do
with playlists and if you want to learn more i'm going to put a link on the screen now to a video
that goes into playlists in detail but i'm just going to focus on a few things first of all you
can always delete an object from a playlist so if you come over here and decide well you don't want
that video in that playlist you can just delete it from there another thing about your playlist is
that you can make them public if you want other people to find them and people often do that
you know collections of videos around speaking in English or shopping in English or whatever
then people often make them public so that other people can find those playlists people do that a
lot for example with music then you can actually make a playlist public though if you're going to
work with your students and you don't want to make it public we'll make it unlisted that's the best
thing to do because then only people with the link can access the playlist now if you wanted to share
this playlist with your students the easiest thing to do is to click on play all right it will open
up the playlist and start to play and then we can see that and we've got the option now to actually
share this playlist with our students the easiest way is just to click on share and to copy that
link if you copied that link and then sent that to your students your students would also be able to
access your playlist now there's lots more things that you can do with youtube i've just showed you
a couple of things if you want to learn more about some of the things you can do with youtube there's
a video on the screen now that you can click on that will go through many more features in youtube
really hope you like that video please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com
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you can contact me from the website thank you very much on the screen now I'm going to leave you
some more videos that you might find really useful to do with language teaching and technology
Thank you