Sometimes, if you don't have much time during your class period, It gets complicated to give your students time to practice their speaking skills. That's when you can take advantage of some technological tools, where your students can record themselves -video or voice- and you can assess their speaking skills even from your smartphone!
One of the apps that I liked the most was blabberize. My 1st form students are currently taking part of the end of year concert preparation. The play's topic is Harry Potter, so as we were working with animals, I prepared an activity where each of them had to draw and present one of the pets in the books. I now think that this could be done with blabberize too, so they could share with their families and the rest of the students. This is me presenting Hagrid's pet, Fang.
Another tool that you can use to improve your students speaking skills is http://present.me/. This tool allows you to record video presentations together with powepoint presentations. Some of the benefits of recording presentations in present.me and not doing them on the classroom is that students wouldn't feel so nervous as they do when they are in front of the rest of the class, especially shy students. On top of that, they have more opportunities to practice and correct their mistakes.
The last tool that I would recommend is http://goanimate.com/ where you can create animated stories. What I like the most about this tool is how user friendly it is. You can take advantage of the text to speech option, in order to make different voices for the different characters. I think that this tool could be used in lots of different ways, but what comes now to my mind is that if you are working with a novel, or a play students could record a conversation between some of the characters.
Comments are well received!
Cheers!
Eugenia
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