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.
Scribblar is a great addition to the range of online whiteboards that are now available. Online whiteboards allow a student and teacher to simultaneously work together on the same surface and it means that each can see what the other is doing.
I would embed a video here to explain how Scribblar works, but amazingly there isn’t one! So I’ve included a screenshot of my Scribblar whiteboard and you can access it using the button at the bottom of this post.
I’m really exited to see another online whiteboard – and better still to see that it is browser based. You can have a go at using Dabbleboard online (www.dabbleboard.com) or watch their video below.
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