About it:
- A great site that allows teachers and students to upload pictures, power point presentations, videos and documents and add sound to them.
- You just have to sign up (for free!!), start uploading and add your voice to them.
Significance:
- A great tool that allows students to practice their speaking skills.
- Helps students while being at home to communicate their thoughts and ideas without feeling stressed from a competitive classroom atmosphere.
- By having the chance to edit their recordings, students can record, listen, edit and perfect their speaking and pronunciation skills with feeling anxious or frustrated.
- Brainshark allows students to work autonomously or even to work in groups at home, this would make the whole process fun and would definitely motivate and increase students self-confidence.
- In addition, brainshark and similar tools allow students to be creative and encourage reflective thinking.
- Similar, to what Constructivism suggests, that students are more independent, decision-makers and can collaborate effectively with their peers through activities.
Suggestions:
In Classroom:
- A great tool that could allow teachers to prepare presentations, commentaries etc. and present them to students in class.
- A fun activity would be to assign pairs with a certain picture/pictures which would be related to the lessons context.
- Ask students to brainstorm what they would like to say about the pictures and then they could add their voice and present to the class and discuss the ideas raised.
Outside Classroom:
- I think that such a tool would work best for students at home.
- Students as i said can get the chance to practice the target language.
- Teachers can assign "speaking" homework instead of the traditional "writing" homework. For example, students enjoy projects and i always ask my students to prepare reports and posters about a certain topic.
- By using brainshark, life gets easier!!
- Students can prepare power point presentations and add sound to them.
- After being done, students can send the homework to the teacher and the teacher could provide "audio" feedback (great for teachers!!).
- TEACHERS!! No more writing progress reports...everything could be sent orally with a few comments on a word document.
Shortcomings:
- I believe that if both teachers and students depend on it, then this might lead to the development of speaking skills on the account of writing skills.
- I also believe that it allows more autonomous work and it might not allow shy, low self-esteemed students to feel more confident about communicating in front of the class, since they know that they can go home and practice their speaking.
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