Brainshark: The Power of Voice

Have you ever experienced: 1) limited time to finish all the lessons? 2) difficulty to give feedback to each and every students' works? 3) lacking of activity that could assess students' speaking skills? If you have these problems, or at least one of it, let's come with me and I will share with you a website that could solve your worries.

Brainshark, a new innovation of slides presentations, is a website that allows people to insert their voices into a static content slideshow of PowerPoint Presentation, video clips, documents files and collection of photos. Create, share and track online and mobile video presentation are the important elements that serve as the basis for Brainshark's formation. It is a free website but a registration is required to get you started.         

Website URL: http://www.brainshark.com/ 

How it operates?

• Since Brainshark has various functions, it is thus better to hear an aural and visual presentation on how to use it rather than reading all lengthy instruction. So, here is Brainshark tutorial with Russel Stannard. 

Have an idea on how it operates? Just in case you want to see an example of it, below is my own version of Brainshark presentation. Enjoy!

How can teacher use it?

Presenting the lesson

It is sometimes difficult to finish all the lesson due to time factor. So, by using Brainshark, you could cover any extra items and make a presentation that includes slides, pictures as well as audio explanation to students. Moreover, some aspects of lessons that have been taught in class would be very important for students' future challenges like examination and interview for higher education. You could then present these language aspects through Brainshark and this could give students opportunity to refer back to the lesson and learn it more intensively. 

Practicing and assessing speaking skill through presentation 

Students' speaking skills could also be fostered through Brainshark. Assign your students to create a presentation of any topic of interest by using this website. Plus, you should encourage students to imagine that they are presenting their works in front of the audience and insert any conversation items that portray a possibility of two ways communication. For example, ask students to post questions or use some word chunks like "are you with me?" and "do you guys feel excited?". Although this depends on students' imagination ability, but still by making them use the language, the familiarity towards the language structure would be enhanced and indirectly helps them improving their speaking skills.

At the same time, this presentation could also be a record to assess students' speaking skills. You could check students pronunciation, sentence making, creativity in relating slides with audio record and so on. Note down any mistakes that students made and try to improve it in the next lesson.   

A medium for giving feedback

Feedback on students' works is important to enhance learning. You might be so used to written feedback, so, how about changing it a little bit and give an oral feedback instead. Therefore, through Brainshark, this type of feedback could be presented. Similar like the written one, you should highlight good qualities as well as errors that students have made in their works. Suggested solutions and explanations on how the works could be improved should be given too. Students, hence, would take note on which aspects that should be improved and which one should be retained.

What do I say about this website?

Thumbs up points :)

1) A new way of presenting information that could be useful for many language activities. 

2) Enhance students' speaking skill.
3) Allows room for assessing students' speaking ability. 

4) Develop confidence on using language to speak.

Thumbs down points :(

1) Practice speaking with no real audience might affect the real feeling of talking in front of people.

I hope you use it and ENJOY!