Here comes the first part of my “Faves of the Week” series. In fact, this is totally Shelly Terrell’s idea. I should thank her =) She may want to write for one of the weeks. Shelly??

Here are my favourite web sites of this week:

Screenjelly is a free service that records your screen up to 3 minutes. You can record your voice as well and share it as a video with your friends on your social network. You don’t have to download anything to use it.  It is an easy way to share what is happening on your screen and share it with others. If you want to record more than 3 minutes, you’re welcome to use ScreenToaster.

TinyURL is a super friendly tool, especially if you are using Twitter. You can shorten the longest link you can find ever into a tiny one. But you can’t tell where that shortened URL goes by just looking at it. There comes LongURL. You can easily learn the source link, where the link goes by using LongURL. (Here comes a list of shortening URL services, enjoy!)

I love the third party apps. of Twitter. You can have a look at my list here. Pockets is a new application that I’ve discovered today. Using it, you can leave voice messages to your friends on Twitter and they will be notified via @. Isn’t it super cool?

StoryBird is a lovely site for digital and collaborative storytelling that connects you with others.You can easily start your very first Storybook by just dragging pictures and, writing your own texts for the pages. When you finish it, you can watch it online and share it with the world. Also, you can create a collaborative story with others. You create your story and send the story to your friend to finish it. It’s a great way to publish your books. No doubt that my kids will love using this tool!!

Tada list is one of the easiest to do lists. You can create your own list and share it with others. You can check when you finish the things on your list, you can make a list for almost anything,people to call, homework to check, favourite quotes, links, songs, shopping list and share it with the world to keep them up to you!! It’s a great organizer.

Odiogo converts webpages or blogs into high quality audio files by using text to speech technology to produce nearly human audio output. You can easily upload it to your Pc, ipod or Mp3 player, you can listen to it on your mobile phone. You don’t need to know programming to do use this service,you only need to promote the service on your site with a link to the Oidio enabled feed link.

OneLook is a word and phrase search engine. It indexes hundreds of online dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference sites. You write a word or a phrase and OneLook takes you to the definition or the translation of the word. By using this service, you can define words, find words or translate them into different languages. You can also have a look at ReverseDictionary which lets you describe a word and describe a word or a list of words that is related to it.

You can use Tagalag to tag people, friends, colleagues and to creare contextual relationships. You can promote yourself and find other people that have the same interest as you.

I hope you enjoy exploring these sites. Have a nice week everyone!

Last Saturday, I had an interview with Ana Maria Menezes. You should visit her great blog. She has already taken her place on my blogroll!!

In the interview, Ana asked me questions about my work with young learners and how I dealt with storytelling in my classes. I should confess that I got a little bit excited. It was such a great experience for me and I enjoyed it a lot!! You can watch the interview here:

“To whom were all these questions addressed to Before Google?”

Have you ever thought of your life without using Google? I feel like if Google disappears one day, my life can go with it!  Apparently, I use Google much more than I can predict a day!I don’t use Google for search reasons only because I use other apps of Google which make my life easier to organize, plan, control and share. I would like to share some of my favourite Google apps and some others as well.

GoogleDocs is an online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor that you can use on any computer collaboratively. You can create,store and share immediately and securely. You can create form scratch or you can upload already existing documents.

With Google Calendar, you can easily organize your schedules and keep track of your life’s important event in one place.

You can search and watch millions of videos on Google Video.

With Google Reader, you can keep all your favourite websites on one place.

Google Earth lets you go anywhere on Earth to view everything 3D. You can explore rich geographical content and share it with others.

With Google Talk, yo can chat with other people online and for free.

Google Quotes tells you what other people say on some popular issues.

With Google SketchUp, you can create, modify and share 3D models.

With Google Groups, you create your own group and collaborate,share and communicate securely and with others online.

Who doesn’t have a Blogger account and a Gmail?

With Google Directory, you can search the web organized by topic into categories.

Google Alerts are the email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of topic.

With Google Translate, you can view text or entire website in other languages.

Google Books lets you search full text of Google’s  growing book list. You can find the most popular ones or out of date books. You can see the available pages of the books, reviews about it, learn where to buy.

Google Custom Search is an app that displays the sites that you have indexed and specified. You can choose the best of web by creating your personalized search engine.

With Google Scholar, you can have all the access to scholarly journals, abstracts and more..

Google Archieve Search allows you to explore and search the historical archives. It can create a timeline.

You gather content all around the web and keep to see it in one lace on iGoogle.

With Google University Search, you can search specific university websites.

If you need an easy to use notepad for the web, here comes GoogleNotebook.

Google News brings all the news to you to read from all over the world. You can browse the headlines from your favourite newspapers or magazine on one page.

With Google Map, you can view maps and get driving directions.

Picasa is a software download that you can edit, organize and share your photos.

You can write and post an article on Knol and share your knowledge with others.

Google SMS will text you back in a minute when you text message a search query to Google.

You can easily see what the world is searching for on Google Trends.

With Google Sets, you can automatically create set of items from a few examples.

Google Moderator helps you to keep discussions on track by allowing users to suggest questions or to vote on others’ questions.

Google Mars is an interesting one, you see some of the detailed maps of Mars from NASA.

You can search and find sample codes on Google Code Search.

SimilarImages lets you search for images using pictures rather than words.

Google Listen brings podcasts and web audio. You can search, subscribe, download and stream.

and last but not least Google is using twitter and it’s addictive too!!! @Google Thank you =)

Little Elephant from ozge karaoglu on Vimeo.

This is the “Little Elephant” digital story that was created by my 6 year old students last year. The story is one of the stories of Mini Magic 1 book by Macmillian which my students love listening, retelling and role-playing. There are six stories on the book and they are repetitive stories which make learners retell them easily and in a very short time.

We had created other animated stories in our school, but they were difficult to carry and we needed so many people to involve in the production and it took us a lot of time to finalize the projects. You can watch those animation films on “Daisy and Drago” – “Daisy,Drago and the Magic Wand“. (The first one came in 2nd place in International Children Film Festival and was shown in cinemas during the film festival both in Turkey and abroad.)

We finalized “Little Elephant and Doctor Monkey” project in a week, because we used the very basic things that you need when you want to film something. Children drew the animal puppets,they drew the background.We recorded their voices and they played with puppets while they were making them talk and we filmed them with a camera. We didn’t rehearse it before and filming the story took us only one hour.

So your students can create their own digital stories this way and  their level of English doesn’t matter at all. They can be younger or older, I’m sure our digital native students all have their own stories that they want to tell in their own way of living and learning, it’s the 21st century way…