A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.

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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.

Because the photos were taken with a camera fitted in a Google car, there are set routes along which you can “walk” along the city. The white arrows and line (marked with red circle in the picture below) show where you can walk along. In most cities this is almost any street you can get a car down. The arrow keys take you along these lines and allow you to spin around on the spot. There is also a zoom function to get a closer look.

At Avatar Languages we are making more use of this in lessons – there are a lot of ways it can be used and it makes an interesting alternative to a 3D virtual world such as Second Life. There are no avatars, so you can’t actually meet anyone using Google Maps Street View, but you can share your exact location and even your exact view using the link function (as marked with a red rectangle in the above image).

In other lessons the students have done matching tasks using information from real websites (such as matching restaurant descriptions from Lonely Planet’s site and pictures from Google Image searches) and then done some analytical work with the short texts. The below screenshot shows this matching exercise using the online whiteboard Dabbleboard.

Students then go and visit the locations using Google Maps Street View and are able to describe the surroundings of the restaurant. A similar task is to use property descriptions and photos from online property agents and then visit the neighborhoods to discuss the location and talk about what the student thinks about it.

Street View is very easy to use – go to the map of a city in the countries with Street View (not all country maps have this function – currently it’s USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, France; UK to follow soon). Then drag the yellow avatar (see top left corner of map above) to where you want to visit on the map. Alternatively the balloons offer Street View by clicking on the little photo. The map then shrinks to the bottom right corner.

Although it seems right to say that it’s “almost as good as being there”, from a language lesson’s perspective it is better! We can now “visit” places while taking lots of supporting resources (namely, the internet!) – all from the comfort of your home, office or wherever you are.

Btw, Google has created an explanatory video…

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.

Of course, the changes to the website (scribbles, drawings, adding shapes, even erasing it) are only seen by those using Twiddla – and of course, only those sharing the exact “Twiddla room” (shared surface).

This tools is very useful when one person wants to highlight a part of a website (perhaps a part of text or to be able to draw over a map – see example below).

It also has a text and audio chat system built in (which we don’t use as we are anyhow using Skype at Avatar Languages), but this will be very useful for some. There is an embed function that allows you to add videos to the surface.

It certainly doesn’t replace Dabbleboard or Google Docs, but it is useful for certain situations in the language class.

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.

Scribblar is very similar to Dabbleboard, because it is browser-based (no download / installation needed) and independent of any other program (such as Skype).  There is also no need for an account – you are given your own room automatically when you start.

I don’t want to repeat a previous blog post, as you can see more about using online whiteboards for language teaching on this blog, where I have compared Dabbleboard and Whiteboard Meeting.  Suffice to say that Scribblar has the following differences with respect to Dabbleboard…

• Dabbleboard allows you to use a URL to upload an image, whereas with Scribblar you need to save it to your harddrive and then upload.
• Scribblar is more intuitive with moving images or objects around.  This is difficult to describe, so I suggest you play around with both and you’ll see what I mean.
• Scribblar allows you to embed the room in your blog, but as far as I can see this is just a hyperlink to your particular whiteboard (see button below) and I guess you can do this with Dabbleboard because Dabbleboard also gives you a specific URL to your whiteboard.

I am sure that some of our teachers and students will start to use this one along with Dabbleboard, so it will be interesting to see which is preferred over the next few months.

Dabbleboard is basically the same as WhiteBoard Meeting, but with two significant differences…

• Browser Based – Dabbleboard doesn’t require any download or installation of a separate program. You simply access it in your browser, just like Google Docs. This is a major advantage because it allows it to be accessed from any computer connected to the internet and is independent of the operating system (WhiteBoard Meeting doesn’t work on Mac or Linux).
• Slight Time Lag – Dabbleboard has a very slight time lag with showing changes, which means that you can’t wiggle an item so that the other user(s) see it moving. This is a wonderful quality of WhiteBoard Meeting that allows one user to catch the attention of other users. However, the time lag itself is very slight (just a second).
• Independent - Dabbleboard is independent of Skype or any other program or service. In fact you don’t even need to sign up to use it, instead you can use it as a “guest”.

Dabbleboard makes a great alternative to WhiteBoard Meeting – it will be interesting to see what our students and teachers prefer to use in class.