Fotobabble's talking photos can be our trump card!

Fotobabble allows its users to add voice to photos very easily and quickly. How amazing can this be? I got excited about it from the very first moment and I knew that I would send lots of Fotobabble's talking pictures to my friends and family. If you tell me that you are not tempted at all, I will not believe you! So we can imagine that if we like Fotobabble so much, our students will love it! Most of our students, especially secondary ones have already a Facebook account, Instagram account, twitter and others of which I might not have heard. They are used to uploading photos and they love it. Fotobabble takes pictures to the next step. Instead of writing comments under them we can actually record ourselves talking about them. The possibilities of what we can do with talking pictures in the classroom are countless but first I think it is important to understand how Fotobabble works.

How does Fotobabble work?

Fotobabble is free but we need to create an account. First, we visit Fotobabble's site http://www.fotobabble.com and then we click on the "sign up" button, we fill in the required details and our account is ready to use!

Image 1

Once we have made an account we can create Fotobabbles very easily and quickly following three main steps.

1.Upload a picture.
If we look at the image above, we can see that there are 3 ways to upload a picture. We can upload a picture from our computer. Secondly, we can sign into our Facebook and use one of our pictures there and finally, we can paste in the URLof an image that we have found on the Internet (we should be careful with copyright issues).

2.Record ourselves.
Once we have uploaded a picture we have to wait a few seconds because we need the Adobe Flash player to connect with our browser so that we can start recording. Then we click on the "Allow" button and we can click on "record" (Image 2). When we are done we can click on "Play" and check if we like our recording. If we are satisfied we can choose to make it private and then click on "Save'.

Image 2

3.Share the fotobabble.

We have got all the options for sharing on the right part of the site (look at Image 2). The easiest way is to copy the link of our fotobabble and send it via email. Of course, we can share it on Facebook, Twitter etc finally we can embed it on websites by copying its embed code. Keep in mind that when we embed into a blog we can change the size of our fotobabble from the width and height.

One more detail about Fotobabble

If we go onto the "My fotobabble section" we can see all the fotobabbles that we have created which we can edit or delete. For more details check Russell Stannard's teacher training video Fotobabble-get your students speaking .

What activities or tasks can we do with Fotobabble?

Fotobabble is definitely one of my favourites web tools. We can use it to make our students speak either in classroom or at their home about whatever we want. Below are some of the ideas which I hope you find useful.

Speaking

• Students can use their own photos to talk about themselves, their best friends, families, pets, their houses, their village, their town etc.
• We can ask them to take photos while being on holidays or during weekends and ask them to talk about these.
• Students can talk about educational excursions, visits to museums, zoos etc
• We can choose a topic (robots, sports, their favourite singer, athlete, country, city, myth etc) and ask them to use relevant pictures from the Internet. There are tens of billions of photos out there so why not to use them? 
• Students can comment on topics they have heard in the news or talk about books, comics and movies.
• Our students can choose a photo they would like to talk about or they can invent a story pretending to be someone famous, a foreigner, eyewitness of a burglary, someone applying for a job or talk about other imaginary situations.
• They can choose a photo and sing an appropriate song for it.
• They can try to guess what their classmates are doing in their pictures.

I am sure that our students will be something more than willing to talk about their own photos or photos they have found on their own. Speaking will become more meaningful and personal. A good idea is to ask our students to create a blog where they can embed all the fotobabbles they create. In this way they will have a personal collection of fotobabbles which will remind them of what they have achieved. In addition, they will have the chance to show these to their family not only to their teacher and I hope this will motivate them to work even harder. At the same time listening to themselves speaking will boost their confidence.

Vocabulary

• We can make our own fotobabbles to talk about the topic of our next unit.
• Our students can find pictures which describe the meaning of the new vocabulary and make a story trying to use these words as many times as they can.They can do the same with idioms.

Colourful pictures and our students effort to make the recordings can make our vocabulary activities more memorable.

Miscellaneous

• There are many schools in Greece who have pen pal relationship with schools in Europe or America. So it would be great for our students to exchange fotobabbles with them.
• If this is not possible, students in the same school but in different classes can exchange fotobabbles.

Limitations to think about

The main limitation is our students security. We can teach them how to make their photos private but still on the homepage of Fotobabble we can not predict what the content will be. The same danger runs when our students will be searching for pictures on the Internet. However, we can deal with these if we and their parents guide and monitor them through the whole process. We can also make a class account if our students are under 13, therefore, not allowed to open an account. Another issue is the lack of interaction because fotobabbles are monologues. Of course, we can not have everything! Other kinds of speaking activities can promote dialogues and real interaction. Furthermore, if we have many learners we will need much time to give feedback to all of them and we will not be able to listen to every fotobabble during classroom time. We can have them work in pairs and correct each other but still we will have to address each of our students individually. Thus, we should manage our time carefully!

Why I say yes to Fotobabble

• Our students will be creative and make something which they will own.
• They can develop their own interests which can help them become more autonomous learners.
• It is fun and can make students willing and more confident to speak.
• It can help them to practice pronunciation and develop fluency.
• It is free, easy to use and time saving.

One last thought 

 Most of our students will practice and record themselves many times before actually saving their fotobabble. This can help them develop accuracy while speaking, however, we should be sure that they do not have unrealistic expectations. It is important to let them know that in oral speech people tend to make pauses to think, they do mistakes and they produce incomplete sentences or even words sometimes. So, no one expect them to talk like robots. For a change we can ask them to brainstorm or talk about a topic just for half a minute and save their first try. There are lots of different activities that we can do using Fotobabble, I am sure that you will also have come up with quite a few by now! 

I wish you happy fotobabbles!

Printscreens from Fotobabble