MIND42, YOUTHINK, BRAINSHARK, and MAILVU

There are always ways to improve in everything so that we get better results of everything, and at the time of preparing and giving some classes as teachers we have many ways to improve everything. When we talk about giving an online class or making classes more interactive or in a different way we have 5 more tools that we are going to be telling today so that you can have more ideas at the moment of preparing some clases. The first tool we are going to talk about is Mind42, this is an online mind mapping application that allows users to visualize their thinking using the proven mind mapping method. The name refers to the collaborative features of the product, and is intended to be pronounced like "mind for two." It has been recommended by Freelance Weekly as one of their favorite time-management and organization tools. Then we have youthink that is a community moderated site where you can make quizzes and personality tests, ask and answer questions, create profiles, journals, forums and more. After that, we have Brainshark, this provides clients with a cloud-based software for creating, sharing and tracking online and mobile video presentations. Brainshark provides the ability to transform static content into voice-enriched video presentations that can be accessed anytime. The creater of the presentation gets viewing detail reports that will allow analytic evaluation of usage to determine the overall effectiveness of the presentation. It has been a great time till now becase we are learning that there is complete world of tools that we can use to improve our teaching style, but we haven't finished. Now we have another tool called mailVU; mailVU is an easy to use video messaging service developed by A2Stream Inc., a software company based in Charlotte, NC. mailVU has been named to the Top 101 Most Useful Websites on the Internet, and has been used by over one million people in 200+ countries and territories around the globe. You have many services with this tool, you can private video messaging service for individuals, subscriptions plans with branding, incoming testimonial recorder, and other advanced features, video contest service that you can run from your website, video API for developers to add our video messaging service to their app, and private label service for companies wanting to offer service under their own brand. As we have seen there are many ways in which you can make a class different using an infinite number of tools to get the results you want.

Prons and Cons of using Youtube

If there is one website that is known by almost all the people around the world that is Youtube. YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video content, including video clips, TV clips, and music videos, and amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos. This is a huge website that as everything, it has come advantages and disadvantages and we are going to see some of them. First of all, it is important to say that Youtube has some advantages, the first one is that to reach the media is cheap and easy, we can also say the the service is clear and clean, then we have that Youtube has a wide variety of videos and you can express your creativity through this website. Besides that you can even meet people using Youtube, you can learn many things by using it, and the amount of information in short time is amazing, you can become a member in easy way and use the website is very easy too, and the last one but not less important is that it saves money on marketing if you want to announce something.

We have talked about the advantages and now we are going to see the disadvantages, the first one is that the website is public so anyone can see you there, you do not know who posted a video, sometimes there is violence in the videos and also there is explicit content in the videos, sometimes we find animal abuse, and there could be copyright issues there. Despite all the good and bad things this website can have it is very important to say that the popularity of Youtube has grown with the years and it seems that it will continue in that path for some long time.

How can we use Hot Potatoe with children, teenagers and adults?

One of the biggest concerns of a teacher is how to make a quiz, and with this I mean a variety of things that can contribute to make a quiz good or bad, but beyond if the test or quiz is good is this way to see this kind of activities because almost every body is tired of the same monotonous way to make a quiz, so for all the people who have thought like that there is Hot Potatoe! Firts of all we have to be clear in what is this; the Hot Potatoe is a set of Computer- Assisted Language Learning tools that lets teachers easily create interactive web-based exercises. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for non-profit educational users who make their pages available on the web. The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises and make them available on a web page.

We can develop many things with this program, Include an optional reading text in one frame and the quizzes in the other. Data for creating the reading text may be directly entered into the software, or imported from external text or HTML files; besides that you can control the appearance of the Web Pages.I believe as the program is basically a test maker the advantages it has can applied for all the people whom which we are using it, not mattering the age, but it is also important to say that some kind of activities are more appropiate for some levels of education talking about kids, teenagers and adults, such as JCross for example that is something better for kids because it is more fun but it is also something good that some adults like to try. With this program progressive feedback is given to the student either as hints or allowing checking of their answers in phases. This allows the student to be involved in a more cognitive process and to figure out the correct answer in a constructive manner. I have to say that in my experience using this program I could prove myself making the tests and also designing the tests because let me tell you that both were really fun because you can add as many things as you can so that learning is more significant to the one who is making the quiz you choose.