MyBrainshark -- A Concept of Online Presentation

MyBrainshark (http://www.brainshark.com/)

The interface of the web page



What is MyBrainshark?

My Brainshark is is a free website for you to add voice to your static presentation document, which realises the concept of online and distant presentation.

It is easy to create, share, and track!

Just upload the presentation documents (could be a Microsoft PowerPoint file, a Word document, or pictures, etc. ), then you can start recording your vivid voice explanation and creating your multimedia presentation document.  It's really easy and quick.

What's more, after regiestration, your online presentation can be shared in several ways:

•     shared through social networking (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
•     embeded into personal web page or blog
•     emailed to friends and teachers

MyBrainshark also has a smart capability to track the viewing information of your document. In other words, you can check who/when/where your presentation is viewed. And the detailed information will drop into your email inbox automatically.

The reasons for choosing MyBrainshark

• It is cloud-based, and very user-friendly.
• The static documents are enriched by audio explanation, thus self-evident.
• The students can use MyBrainshark to practice their oral English. Further, they can keep record of every piece of work for tracking their speaking advancement in the future.  
• It is motivating for the students, especially those introverted ones,  to practise speaking but avoid the embarrassment and anxiety of public speaking.
• Teachers' presentation can be downloaded and kept by the students, also they can be played and replayed for many times.
•  With tracking capability, the teachers can check the students' participation condition.
• The students can comment on each other's piece of work. It is a part of collaboration.

Limitation?

• The Brainshark presentation cannot video the presenters' speaking. Without 'eye-contact', facial expressions and body langauge, the presenter can easily lose their audience attention. In other words, the teacher cannot check how much the students are engaged in the presentation, even though they can check their physical participation situation by tracking function.
• It may cost much time for teachers and students to get used to speaking to a machine rather than humans who can constantly give feedback by their nods, eye-contact, or questions, etc.

Suggestions for Teachers

• The teachers can use MyBrainshark to create their personalised teaching materials.

For example, the teachers can do some vocabulary instruction (with pronunciation, explanation, picture demanstration, etc. ) before the class, and send them to the students, so that they can learn the useful words and expressions before they attend the class.

Also, the teacher can pick up some grammar points ( the key grammar points or the ones which he/she find the students are confused with) and develope them into a Brainshark presentation, so that the students can learn and review them after the class.

• The teachers are also suggested to ask the students to do their own Brainshark regularly as a record of their life and study.

In this way, the students can practice their speaking frequently, and after a period of time, they can trace their process of language advancement and their life stories. As a 'bonus', through sharing each other's regular Brainshark diary, the students can know each other better and build up their trust and sense of unity through this 'social networking', which benifits their collaborative learning from the perspective of constructivism.

• In a task-based speaking class, the teacher can group the students and ask them to make a Brainshark presentation as a goup work.

The students can discuss for their language accuracy when they record their voices. And through all they creation, they can negotiate with English, thus their speaking skills and interpersonal skills are practised.


The following is a demonstration of using MyBrainshark to do a self-introduction presentation.

Learning About the World While Learning English -- Breaking News English

News reports are commonly considered as one of the most useful English langauge learning resouces, because reading and listening to news are basic skills in routine life, also from the news, we are informed of the latest things happend in the English-language speaking countries and districts and get connected to their life and culture with ease. 

However, training the students to news listening and comprehension is always boring and torturous for both teachers and students.

Here comes a fantastic website Breaking News English, which makes teaching and learning news easily and funky!

What is it ?

Breaking News English is a up-to-date website providing free English teaching and learning resouces. Generally, every three days, there is one piece of news updated, more importantly, with a corresponding and comprehensive lesson plan as well as many interesting quizes. Teachers can use it via computer and internet or print out the lesson plan of great layout.


The reasons for choosing Breaking News English

• Two ways of teaching/learning the same piece of news

Every piece of news in this website is designed into both reading tasks and listening tasks. It's up to the teachers' choice. And both the PDF format file and the mp3 format audio file of the news is downloadable for free. Therefore, the students are facilitated with audio materials if they want to listen to the original native speaker's pronunciation and intonation after they finished the reading tasks, and supported by the transcription if they find some difficulties in listening comprehesion.

Free download files

From the perspective of the students' learning motivation, it's quite encouraging for them to know they can get enough help and surpport. Besides, it promotes learning autonomy a lot. The teachers can encourage the students to do the quizes and learning activities by themselves at home if there's time limitation in the class.

• Various well-designed learning activities and quizes

For each lesson, there designed various learning activities and quizes with different target language skills, namely listening, reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, etc.

                                               An example of the table of contents in the lesson plan

Speaking:

Basically, the speaking practices are put in the warming-up (general questions for ice-breaking) and post-activity (more profound questions for discussion) phases. As you can see in the following pictures, the speaking activities includes distinguished modes of problem-solving, debates, peer-interviews, etc., which promotes both cooperation and competition. Besides, students critical thinking and interpersonal skills are also practised.

Two examples of speaking tasks

Listening/ Reading

Listening and Reading are two core target language skills in the lesson plan. Aimed to practise listening/reading skills, there designed a blank-filling task which can be done either by listening to the news article or reading it.

Besides, for better preparing the students with their main tasks and activate their schemata, a couple of pre-activities are offered for choice.

Also, in the post-activity phase, there are more discussions concerning the listening/reading comprehension and social issues related to the news content. It reinforces the students' understanding of the materials and expand their thoughts to the surrounding issues.


Writing

In every lesson plan, there is a 10-minute's writing tasks related to the topic.

An example of the writing task

As you can see in the example above, the instruction of the task is very simple and not appealing to the students. However, it is worth using this task very much as a post-reading/listening activity in the class: after the heated discussions and comprehensive input of the language and knowledge, they students deserve 10 minutes to write their thoughts and points of view down. It is also a chance for the students to think about the language accuracy since they probably only focus on the fluency in their oral tasks. Thus, their piece of work becomes a perfect record of their thoughts as well as the language for future reference.

Another highlight of this activity is that it involves peer-feeback. The students can get their peer students' feedback after they finish, and they can learn from each other at the same time, which can be very collaborative and motivating.
Vocabulary and Grammar:

In every lesson, there are differetiated types of vocabuary and grammar tasks and quizes for the students. Following are some examples.

Traditional grammar practices: multiple choices, blank filling, etc.

  

Multiple choice

                                                      Blank-filling

There are also some interesting online quizes, for example fill-in-the-blank, matching, hangman, flash cards, sentence jumble, missing words, no letters and crossword.

   Different types of vocabulary/grammar tasks and quizzes

Flash cards and Crossword are advised to make into exciting word guessing games as post-activities in the class.

 A brief introduction of the usage of Flash Cards

Crossword

• Time efficiency

The most obvious and direct reason for choosing Breaking News English is time efficiency. Almost all the lesson plan and the activities and homework are offered for free. And every three days, there will be one new lesson updated. Thus, it is very convenient for the teachers to adopt some of them and they don't have to waste a lot of time preparing the teaching materials. However, it is also risky and not recommended to employ the whole set of the lesson without taking the class and students' situation into consideration.

Limitations?

• The genre of the teaching/learning resouces is limited to news. In other words, the students cannot get access to other genres, such as short story, argumentation, exposition, etc.
• It is risky employ the whole set of the lesson without taking the class and students' situation into consideration.
• The layout of the web pages is not neat and organised enough.
• The ads scattered around are annoying and distractive.

Suggestions for Teachers

• The Breaking News English is suggested to be employed both in the listening and reading class, and outside the class as students' homework/ autonomous learning resources.
• Teachers are strongly advised to evaluate and filter the materials before bring them to the class, because the amount of the resources is too big to squeezed into one class.
• The vocabulary quizes in Breaking News English can be developed into exciting guessing games either as the post-activity or as a warming-up activity of the next class.
• To futher motivate the students, the teachers can also look for some concerning pictures or videos.
• The practices provided can also be made into a mini test of reading/listening.

Here is a sample lesson plan provided by Breaking News English.

Learning English with Pictures and Stories -- Bubblr

Bubblr is an interesting and free website you can create and share your original comic strips, and possibly realize your childhood dream of being a comic strips writer!

•   How does it work?

There is a search engine for the users to search for the potential images they like. It can be done either by searching the key words or the owner of the images.

                                                                                    The search engine

 Right away, the search results will pop up in the upper part of the web page. The image storage is rather large, thus very possibly you can get thousands of optional images.

                                                      An example of research results

Then, you can choose any pictures you like, drag and drop it into the 'comic strips' template. And you can add a couple of pictures more as you like. 

                                                    An example of choosing images

Now it's time for you to write the story you want to share! You can choose a shape of bubble and put it wherever you like on the pictures, followed by typing a few words describing it. Once you finish editing, you can publish the work, and share it with anyone you like by sending their the published link via email, or clicking the SHARE button to shere it on the Facebook, Blogger, and so forth.

An example of adding words to the pictures

• The reasons for using Bubblr

1) Task design
The teachers can use Bubblr to design a speaking task easily within one minute, such as story-telling.

2) It can involve the peer collaboration and competition
The students can be arranged into pairs or small groups to create their own story. They should discuss and decide the story topic, negotiate, compromise, insist, agree or disagree with each other, which can improve their cooperative spirit and interpersonal skills as well as the speaking ability.

From the whole class perspective, the activity could be developed into a little competition. The students can vote for their favorite stories created by their peer students.

3) Motivation
It is undoutedly much more appealing  to students to have colorful images in their class.

Also, as long as the students are producing something interesting and creative by themselves, they will feel the stuff they are engaged with is meaningful rather than dull and meaningless.

Besides, it also adds to the students' learning motivation that they can share, appreciate and evaluate their piece of work online with their friends, teachers and peer students.

                    Just click the SHARE button, you will find several ways to share your fantastic piece of work with others

• Limitations?

 The way of using the Bubblr is quite limited: either the teachers produce the comic strips and arrange the students to tell the stories, or the students create their own ones.

Additionally, if the students want to talk about their own pictures, it is not so convenient, since the images in this website is sponsored by the photo sharing website – Flickr. (http://www.flickr.com/)

There is also a danger of the content of the images. The teachers should be careful about the drug, pornographic, violence elements when they are dealing with teenagers or young learners.

• Suggestions for teachers 

The teachers are advised to use the Bubblr in speaking class. 

They can produce the comic strips in advance and arrange the students to do the story-telling activities, or it is also interesting to arrange a story-prediction activity.  

OR the teachers can devide the students into pairs or small groups (if the class size is bigger) and let them to create their own stories.

Jing -- An effective electronic teaching assistant

Let Jing help you with your work!

Try Jing by downloading free version (http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/default.asp)

What is Jing ?
Jing is a smart screenshot and screencast software produced by TechSmith. It can

• capture the image of your computer screen
• video what you do on your computer screen and record your voice at the same time
• the captured video can be edited by other softwares produced by TechSmith

The reasons for choosing Jing for ELT

• Users-friendly: it is very important for teachers!!

          Jing has two versions: one is pro version, anther is free version. If you are not too ambitious, the free version is already powerful enough.
        
          Jing is very easy to use: after you download it, there will be a yellow icon in your screen. By a simple click on the 'Capture' button, select the area you want to capture, then you can start making your own  'masterpiece'. More interestingly, when you finished your video, click the share button, your piece of work will immediately uploaded to you profolio in Screencast, and automatically the link for this video is copied and ready for paste. 

           Jing offers various tutorial vedios for the beginners.  And they are also free for download. Here is an example downloaded from this web address:  http://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-jing-record-video.html

• Teachers can personalise their teaching materials

By screencasting, the teacher can create many different kinds of teaching materials (such as vocabulary instruction, giving feedback, online learning resources recommendation, listening materials, etc.) and send the video links to the students.

• Time and energy efficient for teachers

Make a vedio, you can use it for as many times as you want!

Thinking about giving individual feedback to many students, it takes ages typing, editing or hand-writing the feedback. However, with Jing screencast, you can simply talk about it. It saves lots of time and energy.

Limitations?

• The recording time limit for the free version of Jing is only 5 min.
• For the teachers who have already has their own fixed teaching preference, it may difficult to promote them to use a completely different teaching tools.
• The free version Jing can only record the speakers' voice, the image of the speakers is missed. It may difficult for some students, especially the students of lower language proficiency, to understand the teachers' instruction without seeing their face and mouth.
• It may be weird for some teachers to do the monologue to the computer in stead of standing in front of students and having interactive commuication with them.

Suggestions for Teachers

• Teachers are suggested to use Jing to give feedback to students' written work.                           (More information cencerning giving feedback by Jing, visit Russell Stannard's website: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/) 
• Teachers can also personalise their own teaching materials, making the teaching materials specially targeted to their students.
• Teachers can ask the students to do the reading-aloud practice with Jing. In this way, the students can send their reading practice to teathers, so that the teachers can comment and correct them. Meanwhile, the students can keep the reading recordings by themselves, so that after a period of speaking, pronunciation and reading practice, they can monitor their process of progress!
• The teachers' Jing vedios can also serve as the authentic listening materials for the students.

Love Chocolate Love Learning Vocabulary !

Learning Chocolate is a free vocabulary learning platform which makes learning vocabulary as enjoyable as eating a bar of chocolate! 

• How does it work?

Firstly, when you open the web page of Learning Chocolate, the vocabulary learning journey can be started by choosing the language you prefer to use when learning the target language.

 Learning Chocolate categorises the vocabulay into different groups according to the word meaning. You can choose any of them by a simple click, and then there will appear the list of new words with picture demonstration and the pronunciation aids. They are just working as online word cards.

 

    

In addition, the website provides the learners with various learning activites for practice and review, such as match up (matching up the pronunciation and the spelling; matching up the spelling and the picture; matching up the pronunciation and the picture), fill in (spelling activities with picture cues), and dictation.

• The reasons for choosing Learning Chocolate

1)  Choosing language:
     The learners are provided the opportunities to choose their instrumental language (either their mother tongue or the target language itself) when learning the vocabulary. It is obviously rather practical and effective for the beginners to use the language they have acquired to learn a new language. On the other hand, for the learners who have already get some knowledge of the target language, it is very beneficial to expose them to the target language and get the input as much as possible.

2)  Learning the vocabulary in groups
     From the cognitive perspective, categorising the vocabulary in certain groups can improve the efficiency of the memorisation and acquisition. To be specific, the words within a group are associated with each other in terms of the lexical  meaning as well as the using context, thus the words put together are sensible enough to the learners and easier to memorise.

     Also, by grouping the vocabuary, Learning Chocolate is showing a possible example of 'word cards' for the learners themselves to make their own word cards or word notebooks  .

3)  Easy access to the word pronunciation
     The learners can constanctly check the pronunciation of the word, if they like, by simply clicking the speaker button. It is efficient and good for the accuracy of learning.

4)  Visual aids
     Generally, the whole website of Learning Chocolate is colorful and attractive. It boosts the learners' motivation of using this website and learning the vocabulary with it, especially for those young learners.

      More importantly, the vocabulary is demonstrated with nice pictures, which is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to explain the meaning of a word.

5) Various follow-up activities for practice and revision
    It is far from enough of just showing and illustrating the vocabulary to learners to achieve the final acquisition. Learning Chocolate's learning activities involve the learners to practise the new words frequently with aspects of spelling, pronunciation and word meaning. By this means, the learners' understanding and memorisation of the words are reinforced.

    In terms of learning autonomy, the follow-up activities can serve as the self-test materials for the learners, which is also a good way to monitor their own learning of new words.

• Limitations ?

    Despite that the website is free for use, it has some advertisement on the pages, which could be confusing and distractive sometimes.

      The rang of the listed vocabulary is limited. To be clear, the vocabuary that suitable for visual demanstration tend to me concrete things in the world rather than those conveying abstract meanings, since they hardly have physical referents in real world.

• Suggestions for Teachers

      The teachers are advised to use Learning Chocolate  as a suplement when teaching vocabulary.

      In the class, the teacher can use it as a warming-up activity to review the vocabulary that has been covered in the previous class. Also, it is brilliant to use it to introduce the new vocabulary.

      In addition, the teacher can recommend the students to use this website as voluntary homework in case some students want to learn and practise more after the class.

An Amusing Language Learning Tool -- Lyrics Learning

Pop music is one of the most commonly used media to reveal all aspects of people's life, such as emotion, routine life, history, people's thought. Thus it integrates into the culture of a given culture.

That could be a big part of the reason for many people recommending learning language through songs, apart from the amusement of music.

Learners may feel bothered to stop and replay the piece of songs while listening to and learning the lyrics. Here we get an incredible tool for lyrics learning -- Lyrics Training.



Using this website, the learners can search for any song they are interested in, or select a random song. Just a quick clicks, they can play the lyrics training game with the music video played in the middle of the screen -- filling the blanks within the lyrics. What makes it cater for all the level of the language learners is that there are three proficiency levels for the learners to choose, namely the beginner, intermediate, and expert. They are categorised  by the proportion of the missing words.

Besides, there will be presented the user-friendly tips of the game tutorial if you click the Help button.

By using this web tool of language learning, the learners' interest will be boost especially for teenages, since the pop music is a part of their life. They can combine the pastime and language learning together, thus turning language learning an enjoyable thing.

However, the application of this website can be hard to be implemented in a real class, especially hard for large size class, since it involves the easy access to the computer and internet, and it is also very practical in terms of time limitation. Therefore, it is recommened to be a complementary learning resouce after the class.

Another danger of using this website is that the lyrics and the vedio of some songs includes the elements of sex, drugs, violence, etc., which can cause problems for young learners. It can be a possible way to avoid this danger that the teacher select the appropriate songs and send the links to them.

Here is the link for a song called What Makes You Beautiful from an UK pop group, One direction.
Click here to try it now!

A Wonderful Online Discussion Platform -- TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet is a wonderful online communication tool. A public meeting room can be created easily at any time, making online group discussion effortlessly accessible.

Teachers can use TodaysMeet to

•       organise the students to brainstorm on certain topics as a warming-up activity in the class
•       collect the students' feedbacks of the previous classes, and prepare for the following classes
•       open a Q-A session outside the classroom
•      disscuss the outline, syllubus, teaching aids, etc. with other colleagues within the school or far away

Students can  use TodaysMeet to

•       discuss and negotiate with their partners converning their cooperative work
•       ask and answer the Qs their fellow students post
•       comment on the class immediately after the class

The reasons for teachers to choose TodaysMeet:

•      More room for the Ss: when applying the tool to the second language teaching and learning, the teacher's role is pulling back. In other words, students are given more room to express their ideas, thus rather student-centred.
•      Motivation: many students of shy personality or lower target language proficiency level tend to be reluctant to speak in the public, especially facing an authoritative role as a teacher. Without the concrete appearance of the teacher, the students can be motivated and more actively involved in the group work and the discussion.
•      Effectiveness: the creating of the meeting room is not limited to the time and place. Besides, it aslo cost-effective.
•      Recorder of the discussion: with an easy click on the "transcript" button in lower right side of the disscussion box, the the lines of every participants can be automatically recorded for future use. 

Limitation:

          This online communication tool does not allow the users to share any images, audio or visual files. It may bring about difficulty for the illustration of some discussion, the sharing of the resouce between the Ts and Ss, and so forth.

Wordle -- More than a beautiful word cloud

Wordle -- Beautiful word clouds, and MORE than beautiful word cloud!

It has many educational potential!

What is a Wordle ?

Wordle is a Web 2.0 tool to make word clouds. Generally, the users put in the text, and the more frequently a word is used, the bigger it becomes in the word clould.

The following is a word cloud I did when I put in the fairy tale -- Snow White.

You may want to start doing your own wordle after you watch a brief tutorial. :)

The reasons for choosing Wordle for ELT

Colorful and interesting, thus motivating for students, expecially the young learners.

Limitations?

• It requires for Java plugin for a computer.
• When embeded to the blogger, the word cloud image is too small to be clear enough. Therefore, if you want a bigger image of the word cloud, you should do a screencast.

An example of an embeded version: very small and not clear enough

Suggestions for teachers:

•  Use it as a pre-reading/ listening activity, ask the students to see the word cloud and predict the content of the reading/listening materials.

• In writing class:

1) Using Wordle to check out the most friequently used words and expressions in certain types/genres of articles, so that the students can learn some fixed word choice in a specific type of writing.

2) Put the students’ writing task into wordle, and check out the most frequent adjective, content verbs, adverbs, linking words, ect., so that the students can think about/ look into the dictionary for other words and expressions to replace them, thus making the choice of expression more diversified.

WebQuest -- A task design assistant

WebQuest: a practice of task-based learning theory !

What is WebQuest ?

''A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most of  the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to used learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.'' --Bernie Dodge

Here is a short tutorial vedio for you to have a quick overview of creating a Webquest. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyht-ehlAWY)
Try to create one by yourself at QuestGarden (http://questgarden.com/)

The reasons for choosing WebQuest for ELT

• WebQuest is a practice and materialisation of task-based learning approach.

The students can learn English when using it as a communication and negotiation language. When they are engaged in the task in WebQuest, there would not a teacher judging the accuracy of their speaking, and they can forget about the the embarrassment and anxiety of using a foreign language.

Further, to feel that their English language can express their thoughts and points of view in the group can be encouraging and motivating!

• WebQuest offers a chance for the students to practise their higher level of thinking skills: analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

To complete a WebQuest task, the students are required to analyse the research question, evaluate and critically pick up the useful information from the massive information 'reservior' in the internet, and synthesis them into a logical and coherent piece of work! These are all the basic thinking skills they need to equip with.

• The WebQuest making websites (e.g. QuestGarden) offer the templete for the teachers when creating a WebQuset task, thus making the creation process easier and quicker.

An example of WebQest template

• Filter the information

In a WebQuest task, the teachers can provide the students with many concerning resources, which not only saves the learners' time, but also in some way, filters the information. It is specially important for young learners, since they are not intelligently mature enough to keep themselve from the wrong and bad information in the internet.

Limitations?

• Time-consuming

Although there's templates provided for the ease of creation, it still takes at least 2-4 hours to make a good WebQuest. Therefore, the busy teacher may not want to spent so much time on it.

• Prevent the students becoming a fully independent thinker and 'researcher'

It is mentioned that the information can be filterd in some way, because many web resources are provided by the teachers. However, from another perspective, the students can be too dependent on the resources offered by teachers, thus lose the opportunity of searching for the useful websites and information by themselves.

Further, it may reduce the creativity and diversity of the students' work, since they are using the same sources.

Suggestions for teachers

• The teachers are suggested to use WebQuest in a task-based class as a goup work. 
• The contents of WebQuest can cover speaking, listening, writing, and reading, etc. It's all up to the teachers' design.
• The target students of WebQuest task should be digitally literate, and the language proficiency should be intermediate or above.
• While doing a WebQuest task, other ICT tools such as Wallwisher, MyBrainshark, ect. can be combined together.

The following are some examples of WebQuests:

http://questgarden.com/123/99/4/110413094633/index.htm

http://questgarden.com/100/12/9/100405105301/index.htm

http://questgarden.com/126/41/7/110512074451/process.htm

This is a link to the breif WebQuest design I did with my university colleage:

http://questgarden.com/138/10/5/120127053741/

Wallwisher

Wallwisher? Wish to stick a note on the wall?

What is Wallwisher?

Wallwisher (http://www.wallwisher.com/) is a free Web 2.0 tool. As indicated by its name, it allows users to build a colorful 'wall' of a given topic, and anyone who get access to the wall can 'stick notes' on it. You can share a text, website, an image and even a vedio with Wallwisher notes!

Here is a tutorial vedio to help you quickly learn how to use Wallwisher.

The reasons for choosing Wallwisher for ELT?

• Wallwisher is free and easy to use.
• The wall built is colorful, eye-catching and can be edited, thus motivating for students, the young learners in particular.
• The employment of Wallwisher in ELT classroom is a practical materialisation of the learning theory of constructivism, since every learner has an opportunity to contribute to the knowledge, share the learning resources with peer students and teachers, etc. 
• The sharing function is powerful and cater well for the users' needs.

                           A demo wall (http://www.wallwisher.com/demo)

• It can be used both in and outside of the class, making e-collaboration and e-learning more easily.

Limitations?

• To use Wallwisher as the sharing and discussion platform in the class requires a well-equipped modern classroom with internet access and one computer for each student, or at least one computer for each group.
• To show the name of the notes' owner,  Wallwisher requires the users to regester with a valid email address, which may annoy some people who are conservative to reveal personal information.
• The wall can possibly be completely messed up when too many people post their notes, and it is really hard to orgnise the messy notes again.

Suggestions for teachers

• Using Wallwisher in a speaking class-- A story telling activity

The teacher can randomly post different story elements (such as the people, place, event, time, etc. ) on the wall, and ask the students to create their own interesting story with these elements as a group.

• Using Wallwisher in a reading class -- Put the disorganised reading materials in the right order

The teacher is suggested to disorganise a reading material, stick different parts randomly, and ask the students to put them in the right order -- it is a very good reading activity aimed at training the studentst the capability of activating their own schemata and making prediction as well as the logical thinking style when doing the reading activity.

• Using Wallwisher in the writing class -- An ice-breaking or brainstorm tool

As a warming-up activity in the writing class, the teacher can organise the students to brainstorm the ideas for their topic of writing task.

•  Using Wallwisher as the discussion board in and outside of the class

When doing a group task, it is a very smart choice to use Wallwisher as the disscussion platform. The students can follow each other's working progress, share the ideas and resources, and contribute to each other's work.