The new Skype (4.1) has a screen sharing facility that allows one of the participants to show his/her screen to the other.
So far it is limited to just one user (not both sharing at the same time). However, it is a very simple way to show the other what is happening – especially useful for using Google Street View.
In a recent lesson with Pierre we read some tweets together by the CNN correspondent Nicole Lapin. It was Pierre’s suggestion that we look at her twitter page because he was having some difficulty understanding the tweets.
Google have just presented a preview of their forthcoming Google Wave – a communication tool that combines email, IM and collaborative work-spaces. Effectively it is a mash up of Google Docs, Google Talk and Gmail.
The above YouTube video is worth watching, even though it is over one hour long. It very nicely sets out both what the tool can do and starts to look at how it will change how we work in the future. Of course, there is always the question of whether it will catch on, but given that it is an open source, there is a good chance that this or something similar will become the norm in the forthcoming years.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Screen-sharing lets other people see your screen – so they can see exactly what you can see on your computer.This could be really useful for using Google Maps Street View or other applications in online lessons.
Twiddla already allows you to surf websites together with others online, so depending on what you want to do, it may be better to use Twiddla (quicker and easier).However, there are certain times when Twiddla won’t work and Mikogo fills this gap nicely.
At Avatar Languages we are using many web 2.0 tools in online language lessons.This “teaching 2.0” approach leads to very different kinds of lessons from normal textbook based ones.When looking for some guidance on how to use the internet in place of a textbook, the Dogme ELT movement has been a real inspiration.But perhaps using 2.0 applications can take the Dogme ELT principles further than technology free teaching does.
Google Maps must surely be changing the way we use maps – especially now that it offers “Street View” for several countries. Street View allows you to see what the streets actually look like, thanks to a Google car driving around lots of cities and photographing almost every street at intervals of every few yards. It also offers language learning new immersive opportunities.
A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.
In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.
How about drawing all over a website in class – web 2.0 style?
Twiddla is an odd concept, but one that is proving useful in language lessons. It is a free website that combines a whiteboard with other webpages. The result is that the teacher and student can look at a live website and then joinlty draw all over the site at the same time.
The Forbidden Palace in Beijing has been rebuilt as a 3D mini-virtual world by IBM and could be used not just for virtual tourism, but for language learning too.
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