Appear.in – A Registration-Free Video Conferencing Webtool

Appear.in is a no registration needed video conferencing tool that doesn’t need Adobe Flash and has apps for Android and iOS devices. It also allows for screensharing and text chat. Users can lock out unwelcome guests while still allowing access to others without needing a password. It is a fantastic tool for the classroom. Here is how it works:

Go to https://appear.in/ and click on Start. [Note: appear.in will automatically create a unique URL, but you can also choose your own. Simply type in a name in the box before clicking on Start]

At this point, you can just share the link with up to 7 other people to have a video conference. There are also a number of options, some which are important for the classroom.

Lock – This is an icon you find at the top of the page that looks like a padlock. Anyone in the room can lock the room. Those who want to enter have to “knock” when they arrive and people can choose to let them in or not. This is great for the classroom in that strangers can’t just wander into the room.

Claim – While Appear.in does not need registration to use, if you want to keep a room from being used by anyone else after you leave, you can register for free. Simply click on the Claim button at the top of the page and follow the instructions. It also allows you to kick out people.

Quality – This is an icon at the top of the page that looks like a gradient box. The default quality is Good, but if you have low bandwidth or if the video is skipping a lot, choose Low.

Leave – You can leave the room at any time by clicking on the Leave button at the top of the page that looks like a door. You can always re-enter by going back to the link.

Chat – There is a text chat function available by clicking on the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen. It looks like a chat bubble. Keep in mind that the chat text can’t be deleted in that room.

Muting video or audio or both – You can turn off your webcam and microphone by clicking on the microphone or camera icons found in your video box. They only appear once you start moving your microphone over your video image. Click on them again to activate them.

Screensharing – You can share your entire screen with others or simply one of the windows that is currently open on your computer. This replaces your webcam video, so you can’t have your picture and the screen on at the same time. Simply click on the laptop icon in your video area, choose what you would like to share, and then click on Share. Click the laptop icon once again to go back to the webcam.

Stickers – You can also use a “sticker” on your video image. This is like Facebook stickers, only there are very few available. They only appear for a few seconds on your video image before going away. To access them, click on the smiley face icon in your video area and click on the icon you’d like to share.

Language classroom use:

Any time you have an online tool that students can use without having to give away private information is a win. I work with teachers who have students who are refugees and have limited access to their own computers. This gives those students access to a video conferencing tool without having to install anything on their computer such as with Skype.

There is the obvious group work usage, especially if students are working on a project from home. Students can share their screens such as with a presentation and can give it to a limited group of students instead of to the whole class. The teacher can meet with students online, especially when going over assignments.

I’m sure there are other uses which you are welcome to share in the comment section below.

Update on VideoANT: A free video annotation tool

One of my favourite video tools to use with my students is VideoANT, a free video annotation tool. I have written about it before, but just the other day they updated the interface and made a few other changes. I thought it would be good to do a new review of VideoANT and how it could be used in the classroom.

Registration

While VideoANT does require registration using either your Facebook or Google account, you can also use the Guest Account option by simply providing an email address. The difference between a full and guest account is the ‘Ant Farm’, a single page that keeps track of all of your projects. A full account gives you access to your Ant Farm, but a guest account only sends an email of a link to your project. To be honest, this isn’t a big deal since I usually keep track of my projects on my own. I encourage my students to use a fake email address, as long as it has an @ symbol and a domain extension (ex. .com). This becomes their ‘username’ for annotations as well.

Another change to registration is the removal of the Twitter account option. Supposedly this has to do with email access by VideoANT.

Adding a Video

This has been simplified and has removed the option to add your own name to the video. It simply uses the name provided by YouTube or the filename of your hosted video. I have used videos hosted on my own server before, but for most people, the YouTube option is what will be used. Simply add the URL of the video and click on ‘Load’.

The Video Player

Once you have added a video, the player window will open. You will find the title at the top of the page and the controller at the bottom of the page. This is a noticeable change from the previous player which had the player along the top of the screen. There is also a change in the button to add annotations. Once the video is playing, simply click on the button just to the right of the time display that looks like a chat symbol with a video in the middle. This will automatically pause the video and you will be able to add an annotation.

You also have the option of turning on the closed captioning of the video, something that wasn’t there before. Simply click on the CC button to toggle the captions on or off.

The Annotation and Comment Tools

Once you click on the annotation button, a box appears beside the video where you can add some text. Simply put a title in the Subject box and your longer comment in the Content box before clicking on ‘Save’. This really hasn’t changed much from the previous version.

Once you have added your annotation, the video will start up again and the annotation will appear with the content to right of the video. If you would like to skip to the section of the video where the annotation was added, simply click on the grey time button on the right side (ex. the 0:03 button on the image above). If you would like to add a comment to that annotation, your can click on the ‘Respond’ button on the bottom of the box.

Once you have clicked on the ‘Respond’ button, a comment box will appear. Simple add your comment and click on ‘Save Response’. Your message will now appear below the original annotation.

Usage

I have used VideoANT for a number of things. Here are some ideas to get your started:

• Bookmarking sections of the video: I mark the start of the section I would like my students to watch and add the questions in the ‘Content’ section of the annotation. Students then click on the time marker and watch that part of the video. They can then add their responses/answers by clicking on the ‘Respond’ button.
• Video slideshows: Students make a screencast of their slide presentation and then share it with other students who can then comment on things. I encourage students to add ‘audience participation’ questions to their presentation so students can add comments using the annotation tool.
• Mini lessons: I make a short video lesson and then post it for students to watch and add questions and even writing practice in the annotation.
• Group projects: Students in groups watch the video separately, adding their comments so they can then come together in class to discuss their findings.
• Transcripts: Some videos on YouTube have transcripts, but many don’t. You can add your own transcripts this way by adding your annotation before the text in the video.

I am sure you could find some other uses based on these ideas, so feel free to share them below.

Corpus and the Principles of Good Design

Image courtesy of With Associates

It isn’t a secret that I am not enamoured with the use of corpora in the language classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea and I do use them from time to time, but my beef is with how they are designed. It’s as if the people who created it could care less about design and are only concerned with the output. Whenever I gripe about this, there are always a few to defend it saying that they are able to make it work for them. The problem for me is that I don’t want to just ‘make it work’, I want it to be almost seamless starting from the first use. I decided to apply Dieter Rams’ ten principles of good design to the current design of corpora, and then seeing what could be done to instigate change. I am not a programmer, so these ideas are just being put out there as a request to those who are able to make change.

Good design is innovative: Innovation is not just about change. It is more about approaching something from a new angle, envisioning something in the light of things changing around it. As technology advances, we can see a product in the light of new possibilities, new users.

In the case of corpora, not much has changed in the past 15-20 years other than the access (internet) and databases (larger, more nuanced). For most, the interface looks like it hasn’t left the 90s or is so overly complicated that the average user has a difficult time figuring out what to do with it all.

I would love to see some fresh eyes and minds added to the design process here. I have some ideas of where this could go, but if we put our collective minds together, I believe we could really make some serious headway in the area of innovation. Here are some areas I think we could work on:

Data collection. Instead of relying on a static database that needs periodic updates, what about making it more organic, gathering data in real time? Better yet, collection could be done through crowdsourcing.

Input. Right now, a person needs to enter a word or phrase in a text box and then sift through all of the results. We could harness the power of voice recognition, listening for prosody clues and matching that up to audio data instead of plain text. Yes, this would require a great deal more processing power, but this is something that could overcome. Just look at Siri as an example.

Fuzzy logic. This used to be all the rage for a while. I even had a rice cooker with this function. I’m not sure what it meant in that context, but in most, it takes a wider interpretation of the input and uses logic to figure out what you may need from the clues you have given. In this case, you could enter in a partial sentence and it could produce lexical outcomes that generally match your context.

Questions. What if the interface asked you input questions instead of using radio buttons and vague descriptors. It could ask questions such as, “Do you want to find words that describe _[insert word you entered]_?” For English language learners, asking questions of purpose instead of relying on them to understand the descriptors would be much easier for them to comprehend.

Divide things up. Instead of having everything on one page, divide into modules. If you want to get more, you can ask for more information and it will move from module to module. In relation to that, have a different interface for simple entry and more advanced.

Integration with other apps. What if it could harness the power of other apps such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google Drive? You could then access the content directly from your other app instead of having to go to the corpus page to enter it.

Good design makes a product useful: When I hear the word useful, I automatically connect it to the user. In this case, corpora have been so focused on linguistics users, that the broader audience of language students has been almost completely pushed aside. We need to think like a student and what they want out of it. Some of my students have found a corpora useful, but others feel it doesn’t give the information they are looking for. We should sit down with the users and figure out what they want out of it. Dieter also mentioned in this area that nothing in the design should detract from the usefulness. I think there are a number of detractors in the corpora I have used. Let’s remove them or at least keep them out of the way from the average user.

Good design is aesthetic: There is nothing wrong with making something look nice. I believe it shows that you truly care about your product and the people that are using it. It personalizes the product and makes it more comfortable for users. In this case, I would love to see corpora take on a more modern look with a conscious effort to fit in with modern usages such as mobile devices.

Good design makes a product understandable: I don’t remember where I read this, but the mechanisms used on doors are designed in such a way that we know what is required to make it work. A horizontal bar means that we are able to push it open, where as a vertical handle is designed to be pulled. We don’t even need to think about it. As we approach the door, we know what to do and which way the door is going to open even before we reach it. The purpose of the product is self-explanatory.

 This is not the case with corpora. For the most part, we need to show people how to use it and demonstrate its usage. Most students have no idea what it is used for, even after giving them a short introduction. It isn’t until they use it a few times that it starts to make sense. If we could design the corpus to be more intuitive and make its purpose more transparent, I think we will see a major spike in usage.

 It also should borrow design elements from other products that we are familiar with. I use the example of the online classroom app, Edmodo. When a student goes there for the first time, they immediately see it as familiar as it looks and works very much like Facebook. In no time at all, students are able to get done to work focusing on the content instead of the usage. This is where we need to be with corpora.

Good design should be unobtrusive: There should be some room in the design for users to make it their own. They should be able to make it fit their usage instead of the other way around. The interface should be simple, not dominating. It is about the results, not the tool. This sounds contradictory to what I have said earlier, but it isn’t. If you are fighting to work with the interface, your energy is poured into making it work, instead of being a seamless transition from input to result.

Good design is honest: We need to be careful not to oversell the corpora and what is can do. In the end, it still requires a bit of understanding in how to get to the results you need. We need to make sure to strip down the corpus into discrete objectives, making it more honest in what it is able to accomplish.

Good design is long-lasting: The best products stand the test of time. A comparable product to the corpus is the dictionary. The dictionary hasn’t made major changes throughout its life. Any changes have build off of the core product by adapting to the needs of the users and the changes in technology.

 In the case of a corpus, we need to consider the architecture. Building a corpus on a structure that is heavily dependent on one technology is dangerous. An example of that is Adobe Flash. Who could have foreseen the original growth and the subsequent fall in usage? By being platform agnostic, a database can be moved from one architecture to another with relative ease. Flexibility is the key here. Even the database itself needs to allow for a natural evolution in usage and language.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail: Dieter goes on to say that nothing should be left to chance. Don’t assume users will be familiar with the interface. It should provide plenty of assistance and give samples, usage ideas, and possibly testimonials.

Good design is environmentally friendly: While a corpus is not a physical object, there are some ways that it can be eco-friendly through the limit on bandwidth (server energy costs) such as by limiting graphic use and not using power hungry interfaces such as Adobe Flash. Also, if we think about environment in the more general sense of where something is, a corpus should be situated within the network in such as way that it doesn’t impose on others. Tight integration with other programs help situate it within the network as opposed to fighting against it.

Good design is as little design as possible: Once again, a corpus shouldn’t try to do too much. It should divide itself up into focused segments or modules that can be connected or pulled apart depending on the usage.

What do you think? What could be done to make a corpus more user-friendly and practical? How could a corpus be re-envisioned for the modern age? These are just some of my thoughts, it is now your turn.

Awwapp: A registration-free collaborative whiteboard

One of the best, free online collaborative whiteboards that doesn’t need registration has always been Awwapp, but that site has added some new features making it even better. This site works on basically every device making it perfect for the classroom. Here is how it works:

• Go to Awwapp and click on ‘Start Drawing’.

• Click-and-drag anywhere on the screen to draw.

• To change colour, click on the top-left button and click on the new colour.

• To change pen thickness, click on the button with a dot on it and choose a new thickness.

• To erase anything, click on the third-button and click on the eraser icon (second option). Click-and-drag anywhere on the screen to erase.

• To add text, click on the third-button and click on the ‘A’ icon (third option). Click anywhere on the screen and a text box appears at the bottom of the screen. Type in your message and then hit enter.
• To add an image to the board, click on the third-button and click on the image icon (fourth option).
  • Choose an image from your computer.
  • Resize the image by clicking-and-dragging any of the double-arrow buttons.
  • Rotate the image by clicking-and-dragging any round rotate-arrow buttons.
  • Once you are done, click on the checkmark button to add the image or click on the red X button to delete it.

• To undo anything you have just done, click on the third-button and click on the circle-arrow button (fifth option). You can click on this button as many times as necessary.
• To delete everything and start fresh, click on the third-button and click on the trashcan button (sixth option).
• To create a paid account or log in, click on the fourth button from the top and click on ‘Create new account’. An account isn’t needed to create a shareable online whiteboard, but there are options for voice chat, saved boards, and view-only guests for a price.

• To invite others to draw together, click on the bottom button and click on ‘Invite to board’. Copy the URL and click on close. Share the URL with anyone you would like to draw together with. Be careful, anyone with the link can enter.

• To save your board as an image, click on the bottom button an then click on ‘Download image’. A PNG image will be saved to your computer.
• To share the image online at a certain stage, click on the bottom button and then ‘Share image’. A new window will open. Copy the URL and share with anyone. Any changes after that point will not show up. You will need to create a new URL for any new changes.

• To chat with online users, click on the bottom button and then ‘Show chat’. A chat box will appear in the bottom-right corner. Anyone can type in a message and hit the enter key to send the text.

Corpora and Collocations

At the last BCTEAL Conference in May, a colleague of mine gave an interesting talk on collocations and made mention of the use of some websites to help students understand what words normally go together. After the session, I was talking with another teacher about the lack of really easy to use corpus tools for students. It appears to me that most corpora are designed for researchers and are way too complex for the average teacher or student to use. There are a few tools that are not too bad, but for the most part, they are a mess visually and in their usage. Maybe corpus designers feel they need to add as many options as possible to satisfy the academic community who typically use it.

I did a little research after the fact and was either directed to or managed to find a few tools that may be useful for students and teachers who are interested in locating collocates of English words. In case you are not sure what any of this means, I thought a little primer on corpora might be in order. For those who understand them better than I do, my apologies for possibly oversimplifying what they are and how they work. My goal here is to provide a simple overview.

What is a corpus?

Simply put, a corpus is a text database. There is no size limit on a corpus, but the larger the corpus, the chances of a more accurate result increases. Large corpora (plural for corpus) usually have millions of words which have been added from hundreds of thousands of documents and transcripts. For example, the British National Corpus (BNC) is made of a incredible amount of documents resulting in a 100 million word database.

What kind of corpora are there?

There are corpora based on spoken speech taken from things such as television, interviews, radio, and other recordings. There are also academic, news, and literature databases just to name a few. It is also possible to create your own using texts, although the sample size is fairly small.

How are they used?

The original corpora were used by publishers and researchers to determine common language usage in publications and language studies. Dictionaries, textbooks, and other coursebooks make heavy use of corpora to determine their content. Researchers have used corpora for cross-cultural language use studies such as comparing essays written by students in one country versus another. This helps in understanding language usage in various contexts to assist others such as teachers in the classroom.

Currently, corpora usage has been extended to the average person such as the teacher in the classroom or even the language student directly. Tools like those listed below help students and teachers to better understand how English is put together in various genres and situations, such as word collocates (words that normally go together) and position in the sentence.

Collocation Tools

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COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English): This is an excellent corpus, but not the easiest to navigate for collocations. Being that it uses current American English, this database sets it apart from most of the others listed here. Here is a simple way to get collocations:

• Go to Coca and type your word in ‘Word(s)’ box.

• Click on the ‘Collocates’ link just below the ‘Word(s)’ box.
• Click on the ‘Search’ button.
• A list will appear on the right in order of collocation frequency (the number of collocates with your keyword is listed to the right under ‘Freq’). Click on any of the words and a list of sentences will appear below.

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Lextutor Concordance: This is not one of the prettiest sites you will ever find, nor is it that easy to navigate, but it is pretty powerful. The collocation function is somewhat limited, but still useful. Here is a simply way to get a list of collocations:

• Go to Lextutor Concordances and type your word in the box next to ‘Keywords’ and ‘equals’.

• Click on ‘Get concordance’.

• You will get a short list of sentences listed in alphabetical order of the words directly to the left of your keyword. You can change that at the top of the page in the ‘sort’ drop-down menus.

• Scroll to the bottom of the page to get your short list of collocates.

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Just the Word (JTW): This is a popular tool with language teachers and students and for good reason. Out of the most used collocation tools, this is one of the easiest to navigate, although it is a bit limiting. It is based on the BNC, so the results are decidedly British (i.e. the collocations may be different than in North American English). Here is how it works:

• Go to JTW and type your word in the ‘Enter a word or short phrase’ box and click on ‘Combinations’.

• You will get a list of collocations divided by ‘clusters’. These clusters are related to the meaning of the word and the word type. You will also see a green line showing how often these word combinations are found together.

• Click on any of the word combinations and you will get a list of the sentences with that combination.

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Corpora Collection: This is a collection of some of the open corpora including the BNC, Brown, and Reuters. You can change which corpus you use and can get a list of words that collocate with your keyword in that database. Here is a simple use of this site:

• Go to the Corpora Collection site and type your keyword into the box at the top of the page.

• Click on the button next to ‘Collocations’ about halfway down the page.

• Click on ‘Submit’ at the top of the page.

• You will get a list of collocations in order by score from most to least.

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Word and Phrase: This site has a number of tools, but I just wanted to focus on collocation tools for students and teachers. This site is another of those that has lots of functions, but the tools are complex or not necessary for students. Here is how you can create a simple collocations list:

• Go to Word and Phrase and click on ‘Frequency list’.

• Type your word in the ‘Word’ box and click on ‘Search’

• You will get a list on the right-hand side listed by parts of speech (PoS). Click on the PoS that you would like to see and a list of sentences will be displayed below.

• The collocations are listed alphabetically by those to the right of the word.

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SkELL: This site is based on the Sketch Engine which is used by a number of other sites. It uses a cross-section of texts. It is also very simple to use and offers something a little different. Here is how it works:

• Go to SkELL and type your word in the box at the top of the page.

• Click on ‘Word Sketch’ and a list of words under word type categories appears below. Click on one of the words listed below to get a list of sentences using that word combination.

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Flax Learning Collocation: This is easily one of the simplest and also nicest of all of the collocation sites. Thanks to Mura Nava who kindly pointed me in the direction of this site during one of my corpus rants on Twitter, I now have a site I can comfortably send my students to knowing they won’t need a lot of hand holding through the process. Here is how it works:

• Go to Flax Learning Collocations and type your word into the box at the top of the page and click on ‘go  (you can also choose a different corpus from the drop-down menu to the left of ‘go’ for clicking on it).

• You find a nice list of collocation broken down by usage and a number beside each collocation. This is how often it is found in the database.

• Click on any of the collocation and you will get a new list showing the variations of that collocation. Click on any of those and you will get a list of sample sentences using that combination.

Let me know what you think. Do you have any to add? How do you use corpora in your classroom? Share you ideas, thoughts, and comments below. Thank you!

Frequency Level Checker: Easily check the lexical level of a text

As an English language instructor, I am always on the hunt for reading and listening material that I can use in my classroom. As simple as that sounds, it is always a tricky endeavor simply because most of the material created is meant for someone fluent in the language and makes use of a larger lexicon than language learners have.

While there are a number of tools that provide reading level scores such as Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid, these are designed for native speakers and are connected to student grade levels. They take into account sentence complexity and paragraph length along with vocabulary density, but don’t give an indication of what words, phrases, or idioms that increase the difficulty.

A few years ago, I came across a rather simplistic looking tool that has really helped me out over the years to find and edit text for my students that fits within their vocabulary level. Here is how it works:

• Go to the Frequency Level Checker main page and click on ‘Try it!’. You can also go directly to the tool by clicking here.

• Find a text you would like to check and paste it into the box at the top of the page.

• You will find five options below the text box.
  • Level 1 = the main 1000 words we use in general English.
  • Level 2 = the next 1000 words we use in general English.
  • Level 3 = the 800 most used words in academic English.
  • Outside Levels = words not in the above three levels. Proper names fall under this category since they are not in the vocabulary lists.
  • Symbols = anything that is not a letter (eg. punctuation, numbers).
• There are a few options on using the colour coding system:
  • Select the colour of the text for each of the levels by clicking on appropriate radio button. I tend to leave everything black that is not what I want to find and make the one or two levels in colour that I want to highlight. For example, if I am trying to find words for my intermediate level class that may be difficult for them, I select black for Level 1 and for Symbols, but make Level 2 red, Level 3 green, and Outside Levels blue.
  • If you want to only see words from a specific level or levels, you can hide everything else by choosing ‘Invisible’ for those levels you want to hide. This is helpful when you are building a glossary or are looking for lower level synonyms for simplifying/altering the text.
• Once you have chosen your colour options, click on ‘Enter’ and a new window or tab opens up with three areas.
  • The main area in the top-left has the text in the colours you have chosen.
  • Along the bottom, you have the totals and percentages for each category, including word families. This is helpful for seeing what percentage of the text your students should know. Keep in mind you want the percentage to be pretty high (~95%) for fluency and for figuring out words from context.

I hope that helps. Let me know what you think!

Divii: A searchable video dictionary

A really useful tool for students to see vocabulary in context is the corpus. One of the difficulties of corpus results as well as dictionaries is explaining something that is very visual in nature such as movement. Also, since it is text based, you are unable to hear the pronunciation as well as any nuances to the language such as stress. An interesting online tool that searches transcripts from videos in a semi-corpus way is Divii. It is free and doesn’t require registration to use. One caveat is that it uses a number of video sources, so it may not always be appropriate for younger students. It should be fine for older students who probably will appreciate the various contexts instead of everything being so academic. Here is how it is works:

• Go to divii.org and type a search term in the ‘Search words here for video examples’ box. You can type in a single word or a phrase. Click on the search button or hit the ‘Enter’ key.

• You will be taken to your search results with a thumbnail of the video on the left and the text from a section of that video with the word or phrase in it. Click on the video you would like to watch and it will start to play, showing the transcript with the counter time.

• It will continue to move through the transcript in sections as it plays. Click on a section of the transcript to play that section or click on the video to pause it. Click anywhere outside of the video to get back to the search results.

As you can see, it is fairly easy to use. Once again, it is something I would only use with adult learners based on some of the content I encountered along the way. There isn’t anything there that would persuade me away from using it altogether, but it is something to consider before using in class.