DESIGNING A WEB 2.0 TOOL

In the current world, there is a notorious advantage for all type of students and education field in general in comparison with some decades ago, and it’s the tools that everybody can use online called web tools 2.0. There is a huge list of these tools, all them offering different uses and characteristics to their users, but in the language learning process all of these tools help students to practice and improve their language skills in different ways and support the teachers in their effort to make the process of language acquisition more effective and interesting for the students, because the web tool 2.0 in addition of being useful, they are also an innovated and attractive way to learn. This is why, in this blog, you can find some tools introduced by the members from the group 20, that explain the importance of using them for teaching and some of the features of each tool.

VOICE THREAD Presentation:  Voice Thread is a very interactive cloud application, used to create, comments and share all kind of features and information with a community of viewers. It allows people to post media artifacts for community feedback. This application, developed at the University of North Carolina, makes it easy for users to add voice annotation to an artifact, which could be a document, a slide presentation, a video, or a collection of photos. Commentators can add remarks by different means such as, microphone, webcam, keyboard, or telephone. What sets Voice Thread apart from other similar web sites is the ease with which voice commentary can be added. This gives a significantly different critical dimension when it comes to lengthy and detailed explanations, in a way than would be suitable only for text. It’s definitively a very interesting and multitask tool for all kinds of aims (Business for example), but especially for academic and educational purposes. Impl...

Vimeo as an alternative to Youtube Vimeo has been one of the most underrating video services on the internet, this due to the high popularity of Youtube, even with its popular stars called “Youtubers”. Vimeo is just like Youtube but without publicity. Despite of its similar characteristics to Youtube, vimeo has less followers and viewers than Youtube, but it is still a good virtual platform to upload videos. Vimeo could be perfectly used for academic purposes like teaching a foreign language. Vimeo as a tool for Teaching Vimeo is a wonderful tool that can be used to improve the listening and speaking skills in the acquisition of a foreign language, as it is the case of English. As this is a video platform, we can ask our students to make several kind of activities involving the speaking skill. Speaking a foreign language in front of a camera requires a high level in this foreign language, even more when the student are asked to sound natural in front of the camer...

Powtoon is a very interactive tool since it allows users from templates already prescheduled and according to your needs, work very versatile supported in images of almost all kinds of themes allows import of files with an image; allows you to add text, add effects, change color, font rotation text style, backgrounds and textures. You can add movements, sounds and effects making presentations in all areas and tasks required; fits both for students and for teachers, likewise for professional people and business. A presentation of the tool designed. This is a useful tool for the student as well as for the teacher, because it allows you to dynamically manage concrete, creative and pleasant information, as it finds ways to insert audio, objects, insert texts, graphics, sounds, predetermined slides and images In a very dynamic way, which allows to organize the information in a more significant way. ILLUSTRATION OF THE TOOL: link:   POWTOON EXAMPLE

Description: Slide Share is a web tool 2.0, which allows to users share different kind of documents, for example presentations from power point, documents in word, pdf, open office, among others formats, even with multimedia files like audios of videos, in a public or private way, just having a count and uploading the document to the page. The viewers can find a big list of documents and see them without a count, also the readers can comment the documents. To know more information about how to include this tool in teaching process of a second language in presencial and virtual environments, please watch the next presentation: The presentation is saved in Slide Share in this Link: Slide Share Web Tool 2.0 for teaching.

Description: Educaplay is a platform that allows you to create multimedia educational activities with an attractive and professional result, such as maps, puzzles, crossword puzzles, dictation dialogues, letters and words to sort, relate, soup cards and tests. In addition they allow us to integrate activities in our blogs or web pages, a good alternative for students to learn by playing. The most important thing when it comes to using educaplay is that the teacher activates his imagination and according to the contents he wants to work with the students can create multiple activities that allow children and young people to learn in a fun way . Importance: This is a useful tool for the student as well as for the teacher, because it allows you to dynamically manage concrete, creative and pleasant information, as it finds ways to insert audio, objects, insert texts, graphics, sounds, predetermined slides and images In a very dynamic way, which allows to organize the inf...