Voki

Voki is a great tool that allows users to create their own speaking avatar. Introducing a speaking avatar as your teaching assistant can make your English class fun and exciting!

Here is the website of Voki:

http://www.voki.com/

• you can create your own speaking avatar.  
• you can create a Voki classroom where students can view and do their Voki assignment, and teachers can review students' assignments.
• you can create presentation and add speaking avatar to each slide

Here are some ways Voki can be used for students to promote better learning outcome:

• students can use Voki to record themselves reading a passage or saying dialogue, and listen to their recordings to check their pronunciation and fluency.
• students can use Voki to give presentation to the whole class in English, especially for those who feel uncomfortable speaking publicly, so other students can give comments to the presentation without the fear of embarrassing the speaker.

Voki offers a lot of useful and creative lesson plans. Here is a lesson plan I found from the website:

Quizlet

Quizlet is an online tool to aid users in memorization.

below is the link of Quizlet:

http://quizlet.com/

You can create study sets according to your needs. Once you create a set of terms, you can choose your study mode. Quizlet offers users five study modes.

Here I would like to show you how each mode can be used in your English class to promote better learning outcome.

• Flashcards

By using Flashcards, teachers can show students pictures and ask students to speak out the correspondent vocabularies. 

• Learn

Teachers can use this mode to check students' comprehension of abstract concepts, they can show the definition of the concept and ask students to fill the blank.Here is a set of terms I create in order to check my students' understandings about some jargon in psychology.

• speller

Teachers can use this mode to check students' spelling of the vocabulary they have learned.

• scatter

This mode allows teachers to check students understanding of certain word or concept.Teachers can ask students to match the definition with the corresponding vocabulary or match the explanation with the abstract concept.

• space race

 This mode is like a game which not only can be used to check students' understanding but also can be used to train their response speed, processing speed and working memory. Teachers can create a set of terms introduced in the class and ask students to practice after class on their own.

As an English teacher, I would like to use Quizlet in my class for the following reasons:

• teachers can create their own sets of terms according to their pedagogical goal.
• teachers can present content in varied form, which caters for auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners. 
• teachers can create sets of terms and ask students to practice on their own, which allows students to learn at their own pace.
• teachers can present language knowledge with image and sound, which can consolidate students' memory of the knowledge.

vialogues

Vialogue is an online tool allows users to upload video and invite people to comment on the video.it is basically a video discussion platform.

Here is the link of Vialogue:

https://vialogues.com/

you can ask your students to go to the website. if you have a class blog, you can embed Vialogues on your blog.

Here I create a sample Vialogue that gets my students to give their opinion about gender equality:

• Vialogue allows teachers to use authentic material in language teaching, asking students to watch and discuss an interesting English movie or advertising video can increase students' interest in English, 
• Vialogue encourages interaction between students.students can leave comments after watching the video and they can see each other's comments at the same time.students are encouraged to think critically about one topic and comment on each other's opinion, as the best way to master a language is by communicating with people in that language.
• Vialogue allows teachers to give instructions in a systematic way, teachers can scaffold the discussion by adding comments, surveys and open-ended questions. 

Screen-o-mastic

Basically, Screencast-o-matic is a screen casting tool.

As an English teacher in China, my students are secondary school students, I would like to use screen-o-matic to create my own video lesson, and ask my students to watch before and after the class, so the class time can be used for more active learning activities, like discussing about the video they watched or practicing what they learned from the video.

Below is the link of the website:

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

You can either click the “start recording” button to record or you can download it on your computer.

Here is a vedio teach you how to use Screencast-o-matic to create a Powerpoint presentation for flipped classroom:

Personally, I appreciate using the video lesson in English teaching for two main reasons.

• Students can watch the video lesson before and after the class. When students watch the video alone, they can think about the concepts or memorize the vocabulary on their own and studying at their own pace. The video lesson enables students to go over the lesson over and over, they can stop it where confused them. In addition, the video lesson provides both vivid image and sound at the same time. By associating the picture with the sound, students can better remember the vocabulary and understand the concept.

• Students can make the most of the limited class time for active learning activities.The length of a typical English class in secondary high school in China is only 45 minutes, by moving the information-transmission teaching out of class, teachers can set aside more class time for student to engage in active learning activities. In active learning activities, students are required to analyze, synthesize or evaluate the knowledge they learned from the video, which result in deeper understanding and better learning outcome.

However, although screencast-o-matics is easy to use for screen recording, making a high-quality video lesson is still a time-consuming task for many teachers. Despite the time used for searching and choosing suitable materials for the video,teachers need to spend a lot of time on editing, which will definitely increase their workload.