Russell Stannard invites you to his video site.
In this issue I would like to invite you to visit a website that I have created myself in an attempt to provide help for teachers who want to know more about how they can use technology to enhance their teaching. On this site you will find a set of videos which will show you how to use all sorts of technology. What you actually see is the screen of my computer as I use different pieces of software for the purposes of ELT and you can also hear my voice as I explain exactly what I am doing. These videos cover topics like podcasting, creating wikis, designing online quizzes and worksheets, making blogs and using Blackboard. There is also a video that will show you some of the best ELT websites on the internet. All this is free.
The videos have become popular very quickly and almost immediately I began to get requests from people working in fields other than ELT. So now if you go to the site you will see it is divided into a ‘General Teacher Training Videos’ section and then a specialised ‘ELT Teacher Training Videos’ section. I hope that both sections will be of real use to ELT teachers (even the General section tends to have an ELT slant). There is a third section on multimedia tools for those who are really interested in technology. These deal with Flash and Director and will soon include lots more subjects including using Adobe Premiere. If some of these programs are unknown to you, you will not only find out about them but discover how to use them.
How do I make the videos?
I have already had several people asking me how I actually made the videos. I use screen recorder software which simply records the screen of my computer as if I had a camera pointed at it. It also records my voice (as long as I have a microphone plugged in). The software I use is called Camtasia and you can download a free copy at www.techsmith.com. If you go to the bottom of the opening page of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, you can click on a link that will take you to some training videos about using the software.
Accessing the material
All you need to do is click on a subject that interests you on the left-hand menu, and a new window will open up and a series of videos will start playing. (You will need speakers or earphones on your computer to get the full benefits of the site.) The videos will take you right through the subject you want to know about or you can jump directly to a specific topic within that subject by choosing from the menu on the left. So, for example, you can go to the videos on PowerPoint and then jump directly to ‘How to make links’ and there you can watch me as I create a link in PowerPoint and explain to you exactly what I am doing.
The most popular series of videos so far are those on iTunes. I really recommend that you watch these as they will show you how to use iTunes and all the free podcasts you can get with it. It is really easy to use iTunes and great not only for ELT but for keeping up-todate with any other subjects or hobbies you are interested in. I regularly download podcasts for learning French as well as a couple of ELT ones and iTunes does all the work for me; I don’t actually need to do anything once the software is set up.
Also take a look at the videos that deal with Podomatic. Podomatic is a great site because you can not only find plenty of free ELT podcasts that you can recommend to your students, but you can also create and upload your own podcasts onto the site. The videos show you how to search and find podcasts and how to subscribe to them as well as how to record your own.
Future material
New material is going up all the time. I recently added a whole series of videos about using video from the internet in ELT. In the next few months there should be videos that deal with EAP, Moodle, Second Life and finding good grammar quizzes and tests on the internet. I am also rebuilding many of the videos to make them smaller and, therefore, easier and quicker for people to download. They are all streamed so they start playing pretty quickly, but you do need a fast connection.
Please let me know of any subject you would like me to deal with. It doesn’t have to be anything sophisticated. Indeed several people have mentioned the idea of doing a series of videos about using Microsoft Word as there are many features that they don’t know how to use, or make very little use of. As I have said, I have already put up a series of videos that deal with PowerPoint. I hope you find the videos interesting and it would be great to hear any comments you have about how I can improve them or what I can add.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He is currently working on the CD-ROMs and Teacher’s Books for Hello English, published by Balberry.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 53, 2008
