Screenr:Screencast

Need to record your screen?

Want to cast an activity on the internet?

You really need to have a look at Screenr!

 What is Screenr?

 Screenr is a free for public usage.

It is a web-based tool that lets you record your activity on the computer without using any program.






<<<<You just click the record button and your <<<<screen activity is recorded along with narration <<<<from your microphone.

Screenr then publishes your screencast in high-definition Flash format.
Screenr makes it easy to share your screencast on Twitter, YouTube or anywhere else on the web.
Even iPhone users can view your screencast.

You can easily sign in Screenr with your Facebook, Twitter and many, many others.

Record button and multiple signing options :)

"The clear directions for recording"

<<< There is an important point that all users need to have 

appropriate java tool for screenr to record their activities.>>>

The Importance of Using Screenr for

 !English LanguageTeaching!

  

• Students can see their faulty or incorrect pronounciation of the common English words after recording their activity along with their voice.  And this provides an opportunity for them to lead to a self correction through hearing their own voice, without their teacher's feedback or correction.

  Teachers can also reduce their heavy workload on their shoulders through preparing a simple grammar lesson through the offerings of screencasting and voice recording, in one package the screenr grants.  They can find the colorful and meaningful explanations of grammar points from internet and to clearify the expected misunderstandings can add their voice.

  ~~Potential Problems Screenr May Have~~

  Through my exploration I found that one technical lacking the screenr may cause is that the applicable version of the Java programme.  Without having the exact Java version requirement you cannot by any means start this beneficial screencasting programme.
  
  
  Another difficulty, as it is most of the unknown technological devices's problem, is that the new learners whom are introduced this simple and clear tool may have some confusion in comprehending the qualities of this tool of screencasting. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  !! http://www.screenr.com/!!

   

   

Do you think that at a random era of our life human beings show symptoms of insanity along with remaining traces of reason?

What can be the possible reasons that could be a trigger for madness?

Do people use  insanity to remain cautious against evil deeds happening in their environment? Or can their madness be genuine, caused by all kinds of pressure from their environment that we can think about?

Last question for arousing the interest is, how can we possibly differ actual madness inside one's own soul from a well-acted, feigned, insanity? Does a human being bear both reason and bits of madness in his or her mind?



You might have noticed that from the various shapes that I used to show the issue I wanted to explore in this blog post that I wanted my readers to develop a curiosity and an interest when they see ,in their blogger dasboard, edmodo posts page or in twitter, my interest area which is  Reason and Insanity.  I particulary want my readers to enjoy the content of this post as well as make them think as they have, hopefully,  a pleasent time when reading through this post.

As you can see that I produced three questions for my peers to ponder about before they engage in my blog post and state their opinions about these questions after reading my post.  Let's start with scientific explanations and definitons of reason and insanity.

What is reasoning? The world does not give us every information we need so our intellectual capacity, in other words our reason, grants us a set of process that enables us go beyond information that is given to us. For example we can see balloons that are being set and we can assume that it would either be a wedding party or a birthday party. If you are interested to read more about reasoning you can consult this link

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Markman/PSY305/PDF/Reasoning1.pdf

What is insanity? Dictionaries around the world define insanity as “the condition of someone who is senseless and extremely foolish.” However, The men have untypical but intelligent reasons as to why they are the way they are. All the reasons to the men’s problems however were brought on due to their distinctive ways and beliefs. It is unfortunate that mankind can label certain people as not good enough or too abnormal for society.  For more information about insanity look at:

http://healthmad.com/mental-health/what-is-insanity/

The definitions that I posed here are mere explanations that draw a distnictive line between reason, which is our intellectual capacity to understand our world beyond the knowledge we gained from environment, and insanity, as the source I found above states, is different ways of belief and understanding of our world that is unfortunately labeled as ''abnormal, extremely foolish'' by society.

***I wanted to show my readers that video clips from films and literary works as well as our childhood cartoons and animes to examplify the notions of reason and insanity and how they are portrayed in those works.  I thought it would be fun to watch and as well as consider the questions I provided above.***

Here is our first guest!

Our favourite bunny from all times-

Bugs Bunny, this highly intelligent rabbit became one of the cartoon heros along with his jealous and quiet comical friend Daffy Duck and the poor hunter that wants a 'wabbit' but fails miserably everytime in catching Bugs, Elmer Fudd. To illustrate how Bugs Bunny outsmarts both Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd through his high intellectual capacity(reasoning) I want to show you two scenes: 

Here, we can see that Elmer's desperate desire to kill Bugs Bunny
however, our favourite rabbit's clever tactics mocks the stupidity
of the hunter.  Bugs Bunny here uses his reasonable thinking
ability to outsmart Elmer who only has 'wabbit, wabbit' in his mind.



Here is another video that shows the keen mind of Bugs Bunny
against Daffy Duck who is jealous of the fame the bunny has.
We can clearly say that by staying calm and playing around with words
(pointing the gun to himself and saying 'rabbit season' and causing Daffy
to point the gun at himself and say 'duck season')
Bugs Bunny benefits from the temper that the duck shows through
his actions





Let us now explore the notion of insanity from a play

that 3rd year students of EFL read in their Drama Analysis course

Death of a Salesman

Most of us are familiar with the play and the themes that are mainly explored through the tragedy. American dream and a critization of its illusion. 

However, I want to explore Willy, the salesman, from the aspect of insanity.



From my own understanding as a student whom read this play I want
to state that Willy always lived in a world of dreams and hopes, constantly
thinking that despite the misfortunes that he faced with( being fired from
his job where he worked for 60 years, the problematic relationship he
had with his son Biff..)he continued to think that he could become a successful
salesman and bring his family an economical relief. Where do his insanity comes
from then? The way he began to see his dead brother's, Ben, presence and
hear his voice brought an insanity through which he could not differentiate
reality from his past anymore.

Let us continue with another play that is centered around

the notion of feigned madness and genuine insanity

William Shekspeare longest revenge tragedy

Hamlet

All of us know that Hamlet acted as though he was insane to find an evidence

that could give him signal for murdering his uncle, who became the new king of Denmark.

However, Ophelia, the woman Hamlet loves, shows the genuine madness when his father was accidentaly killed by Hamlet and the way Hamlet rejected her love.





The fact that the young prince educated in a way of reasonable thinking can be shown
through his speeches(his thinking process),
in this case soliloquies, even though he feigned madness. However, here is a
question for you all, was Hamlet only acting as though he was insane or did he in course
of the play actually became mad?



Here, is the scene where we can see Ophelia's behaviors and maddened actions. When compared
to Hamlet's intellectual speeches, Ophelia words seemed to sang through an appearant
insanity she was suffering from.

Let us now leave the tragic plays and

return to the world of anime characters-

And especially see how insanity is portrayed
in animes.

I have  one favourite anime, which is roughly Japanese cartoon,
that is adapted from a popular manga called Naruto Shippuden.
The stroy main components are unique fights of ninjas and ''bonds'' that are
created between friends and students/teachers.

 I want your attention to be on the black haired boy in the picture I posted
who is named Sasuke and show how his insanity is depicted in the anime.



In order to understand Sasuke's madness we need to look at the reasons that caused
such a violent outburst from him. The basic plot for his character is shaped like this:
He has a brother named Itachi who murdered whole clan, sparing only Sasuke. 
Sasuke grew up with a hatred towards his brother,
when he actually killed he was given the truth that shedded
a light on why Itachi murdered whole clan, it was for the future of the village(Konoha) as the
the family were trying to take over Konoha, with the pain of killing his own brother( he
shared a mutual brotherly love between Itachi) and learning the truth, he became bloodthirsty
for the ones(village elders) who ordered Itachi for the massacre of his family.

1.I would definitely recommend this type of conversation activity because it is enjoyable to record an imaginary conversation with a early-recorded computer voice and also I can see the benefit of using this type of conversing activity for training of pronounciation as when students listen their speech after recording it they can spot their mistakes in pronounciate and can try to learn how to say a specific word correctly

3. Although the immediate correct pronounciation that computer generated language can give we cannot act as if the computer generated language gives the native like(authentic) prnounciation..sadly, the spoken language of computer still has to undergo development as most of time it can't give the correct pronounciation. Although, the idea of computer generated language brings an excitement in behalf of making teacher's job easier in my opinion it still needs development to achieve authentic pronounciation of a native speaker

To be honest I don't know anything specific about the teacher's pet programme, from the introduction slides though I understood it can create activities the teacher wants to use for a lesson with only a few clickings, and what is fascinated is that the teacher's pet programme bears so many different types of exercises for any teacher to use, I think I am going to love this teacher friendly programme

I may want to learn about the mechanics to use the programme for its practicality.

I enjoyed doing activity and experience of meddling around some options to create activities as though I am a teacher right now however I think before I can get more deeper into the teacher's pet programme I need more time to learn how to use each presented option deliberately. I don't quiet think experienced teachers would use this programmed however in my case, since I would be a beginner teacher, I would create activities from this programme to lower my stress level from the whole excitement and responsibilities being teacher brings.

I think , I don't know much about interactive webpages especially in perspective of educational domain, but from the example interactive webpage that I explored I found some adjectives(keywords) that explain interactive webpages, at least that is what I think from my experience such as they are informative, time-saver, practical and have various activities, short quizzes to taste your knowledge through true/false, short answered and multiple choice questions.

I may want to know the practical knowledge to use this type of nifty device in my teaching career since I thought I would have a fun time while creating testing activities for my students via internet and I thought since the program give correct answers whether you answered correctly or not, I thought the students can expand their knowledge and review their already learned knowledge.

Access to correct answer in a question immediately for the students
Practicality of the preparation of activities and quizzes for the teacher
The relatively easiness of online material preparation for the teacher

From the activity I learned that teachers can always, always rely on this material preparation tool in terms of publishing the quizzes with help of internet or even create a hardcopy to disturibute those quizzes in class with export feature of the tool. It defintely saves time for the teacher and is beneficial for the students in terms of information giving

When the phrase 'readability of texts' comes to my mind, I think about the chosen words in that reading material, are they suitable for the proficiency level of students of English, are they too complex for a beginner student or too easy for an advanced student? These questions come to my mind I always consider the usage of many, many English words that we know and the comprehension of different levelled of English language studying students.  I know that the teachers should pay extra attention when it comes to choosing a reading material that could be sufficent for a particular proficiency group-they should not be too ridiculously hard for beginner, intemediate groups or simply easy for upper-intermediate, advanced groups.

Computers have always been by the side of the teachers in purpose of better education and there are some nice tools for teachers to check the readability of the reading materials.  What I would love to know is, what are these aiding tools and how teachers integrate them in their profession?

From the readability testing activity I understood that this tool would be a time saver for teachers that try to find the perfect reading text for the proficienct group that they are teaching, I think, the statistic numbers that give the level of the reading text is pretty easy to comprehend.

When I was looking through the concordances of the wikipedia text about Africa I tried to look for a word that was used as an adjective in one sentence, noun in another.  After trials and errors I came across the word Green that served both purpose in that given reading. ''BC, the Sahara had again become a GREEN fertile valley'' ''suspended states highlighted in light GREEN'' where the examples I could find.  Green in the first sentence is an adjective that defines noun, valley, in second sentence green is in form of noun that is defined by light.  As a teacher after my students see these two formations of green in the text I would provide simple examples that feature both in adjective form and noun form.  For example, to definte green as an adjective-
The green dress my friend bought was very eye-catchy

To define green as noun, I would give-
The toad was colored in darker tone of green

As my examples.

From what I could gather, all of these tools such as text document readability have commonground such as all of them were designed to aid the teachers in choosing which reading material they would use in a short amount of time.
I would when I become a teacher use these tools mainly to double check my choice of reading material, although I would be aware of my classroom's English language proficiency level, I would be cautious of my own thinking, asking questions such as-what if my students know these words? What if this text is too hard for them to understand? I would use text document readability to make sure what vocabulary items my students may need and the level of the reading material

Maybe relying on too much in computer based aidance may prevent my creativity as a teacher.  Since in our contemporary period the artificial intelligence became more and more beneficial in every part of human life, I would not want to be lazy by copying/pasting the reading I choose for the lesson and find its readability level and concordances.  In tight times though when I have more than one businesses to attend to and I want to double check my choice I would use these tools

integrating blogs

To be honest, I have never heard there is a contract for the blogger to take into consideration before starting a blog for educational purposes under the light of a teacher. I think that in order to have a problem free time when I use blogging with my students, I should first and foremost ask for their honesty as their honest replies and posts to the sent assignments and to the blog posts of other students in the classroom. Although I would never doubt my students friendly behavior to other bloggers that follow their account, I would remind them to be respectful since internet world can be full of hating people