Ixchell Reyes 0:00
Tired of the all-in-one platforms that claim to do everything but tend to do none of them? Today we’re talking about simple, single use tools you can use today.

Brent Warner 0:10
You welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on Developing Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL, and… I always have a bad time setting myself up on this Ixchell, but I’m also here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator, and all the fun things Ixchell. I hope that’s a good enough introduction. Good

Ixchell Reyes 0:46
enough for me. Alright, as long as you get my name right.

Brent Warner 0:51
Well, the AI still is not getting your name right all the time. There’s a few occasion exciting times when

Ixchell Reyes 0:56
it gets you, but humans are still not getting my name right. Yeah, fair enough. So,

Brent Warner 1:02
so there we go. I hope, well, how are we doing? The question should no longer be, how are we doing, right? It’s, what are you making, yeah, what are you making? Yeah. I think that is a good one, right? Because, based on the last last episode, so what are you making? Ixchell, have you made anything recently? I

Ixchell Reyes 1:23
haven’t made anything, but I’ve made more time to spend at the gym. Does that count?

Brent Warner 1:27
Okay, yeah, sure. And we’re making this episode. So we’re working on it. We got little little bits here and there. So Ixchell, today we kind of had a bit of a conversation around, you know, there’s so many of these tools that are multi purpose. You know, they kind of, they’re set up to do everything, and I don’t want to talk too much trash on them, because a lot of them are really useful, right? I mean, we love Canvas, yeah. I mean, we’ve got Canva, we’ve got Adobe Express, we’ve got magic school, we’ve got all the Google things, right? They’re nice, yeah? Well, all the Google

Ixchell Reyes 2:12
things with all the things, with all

Brent Warner 2:14
the things, yeah? Like, you know, I mean, I think it’s safe to say that some of these do, in some places, suffer from bloatware, right? There’s just kind of too much stuff inside of all of them. I don’t know. Do you get that feeling?

Ixchell Reyes 2:27
Yeah, I think you know I’m, I’m I train teachers, and so I’ve started with the new cohort and my usual go tos that I share with them. I just find them busy. And it’s like they again, they tried to include everything when I just needed five things, I don’t want 25 things that really happened to one recently. And it was such a shame, because if it’s again, if it’s a messy closet, you’re not it’s going to be a headache trying to retrieve things that you’re going to use, right? So that’s how I look at it. And I guess today is when we we whittle it down to the bare minimum, but that do things well, well. And I

Brent Warner 3:11
think what we’re trying to do is, you know, I love a single use tool. It’s just like it does one thing. It does it well, I don’t need to worry, hopefully, if I don’t even have to log in for it or to use it, if I can just access it and use it to help my students, or use it to help me in my workflow, that’s kind of what I wish we would go back to. Like it feels like early days of the apps conversations, right? But anyways, we are getting started on this, so I think we should jump in.

Ixchell Reyes 3:47
All right. Well, one of my go to tools before was bit the because it was just easy to make my my custom links and students could access right away. But we recently found out. I found out through you, but then I got the email last week, and they’re going to start running ads, I believe, right?

Brent Warner 4:10
An ad? Yeah, they’re basically redirecting you to their site to watch an advertisement before you can go to the link that it sends you that it’s meant to send you to, right? So, so it’s not redirecting, it’s re redirecting, and you have to pay you as the visitor to and whatever site. Have to pay to watch or to follow that link, right? So, if it’s, if it’s Bitly bit.ly/diesel it’s not just going to send us right over to diesel.org it’s going to send you to a commercial of some sort, and then over to diesel, which is just frustrating, right? We don’t need the at least as teachers. I mean, I get it on some business levels and, of course, but like, we don’t need that

Ixchell Reyes 4:53
so, so you made us something.

Brent Warner 4:56
Yes, I shared this out on. Line recently, and it’s got a lot of traction. A lot of people seem pretty happy about it. I made a my own URL shortener using open source resources, so anybody can do this, but it’s edu share, Ed, U, S, H, A, R, E, dot i n g, right. Edu share, dot i n g, and it is just a redirector, and all you do is you can go in, put in, create your own link, and it will just take you right there. It’s not tracking you, it’s not sending you to advertisements. It’s not, you know, stealing the traffic and moving it somewhere else. So made by me with this open source software. I’m just paying for it, and hopefully whoever wants it can use it. But from the reactions online, it seems like a lot of people want that, especially now that Bitly is going to be charging so built by a teacher for teachers, go for it if you need something, and you can customize the end URL as well.

Ixchell Reyes 6:00
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that, Brent. It’s pretty cool. So that’s edu sharing. Edu, share, dot ing, Edu, share,

Brent Warner 6:06
dot ing, yeah. Okay, so my first one here is revision history. So Ixchell I know we’ve talked about draft back in the past, right? So there’s many workshops on draft back. I mean, I’ve loved it over all the years, and I totally get it. So I this is not a direct complaint, but they are now charging $40 a year to use draft back. And I was just like, oh my god, another subscription. Do I need another subscription? And the answer is no, I just don’t need another subscription. Honestly, if, if, if he had said, Hey, I’m going to charge a one time fee of $40 or $50 and then you can get access to it forever. I would have paid right there. But every year to pay that, I’m just like, you know, it’s just everything. Is that subscription fatigue and so, so, unfortunately, I’m going to be moving away from draft back. But there are a few other tools out there that do the same thing, and the one that I like the best, I think, at least for today, is revision history. So kind of does the same thing, right? You can kind of see a little bit, I don’t know if it does the full video walk through. I think it does a few of those things. But if you’re trying to see the history of your students writing, you can’t. It’s pretty nice because it shows you, hey, there was a big cut and paste at this section, right? Okay, like, and it gives you the time, how much time the students spent writing on the document, information about, you know, what or where they cut and pasted some of those things. So if you’re just kind of trying to keep track of your students writing again, a lot of this is great for the AI conversation. If you’re saying, Hey, I don’t want you know my students writing AI, and I want to see if there are things being chopped right into this that can be really useful. So anyways, revision history is a plugin that you can get and it goes right into your Google Docs and it is still free,

Ixchell Reyes 8:07
excellent. So I’ve done a new tool recently. I’d been looking for websites that had dictations for my students, seeing as I have, usually, I have lower level students that need to have that listening comprehension. And of course, there’s a lot of websites that will have a portion of their material is dictations, but this one is called lingu, no, l, I N, G, ion, O, linguno. And all it does is it gives you different different texts. It’ll read you different texts and different voices. And it’s adaptive. And so when I saw that it was adaptive and that you could just scroll down to a different topic, and then the student could simply listen to the dictation and either say it back to someone, or write it down or type it in if they’re studying on their own, I thought it was done well, because most, I have a lot of resources that I’ve used, you know, for my, my beginning learners. And there may they, there may be like, 50 dialogs that are there, but they’re so old and they’re not updated. And so, yeah, and so this is a good tool to have, you know, on hand. Cool.

Brent Warner 9:24
Uh, yeah, those dictation, I mean, dictations have always been a little bit tricky with the tech stuff, right? It never been quite as good as what you’re looking for. So, right? So, so this is great. Um, I’m going to take a look at this a little bit more in depth. It looks pretty useful, and it says to be right now in beta, the beta

Ixchell Reyes 9:40
is the new it’s a new layout, okay, that they’ve got, they’re trying, and I think it’s the adaptive that’s the beta, but it’s pretty cool. I’m assuming Wendy, it’s going to be an app, and I hope that they’re not, that there’s not a subscription, but there’s a pay for lifetime subscription, I guess.

Brent Warner 9:40
Yeah, I mean, that’s all they’re looking but for now, yeah, for now, it’s free. Okay, so mine, I’m taking it back old school, Ixchell vocaroo.com

Ixchell Reyes 10:13
Oh, good old Vocaroo together.

Brent Warner 10:16
Remember back at USC when we were

Ixchell Reyes 10:18
Oh, my gosh, yes, Vocaroo

Brent Warner 10:21
Vocaroo is still great, V, O, C, A, R, O, o.com, so if that sounds new to you, go check it out. If you’re if you’re kind of an old school tech player, you’ll go, Oh my gosh, I remember that one is still there. It’s still exactly the same, the same kind of crummy layout, just a very simple record button on the page, and then it gives you a link to it, or you can download the audio that you make. And it’s really, really wonderful. And so having your students do recordings –

Ixchell Reyes 10:52
So user friendly. So fun fact – and I remember this, Vocaroo has been around since 2007

Brent Warner 11:01
Okay,

Ixchell Reyes 11:02
Which means it’s 18 years old.

Brent Warner 11:04
Hey, it is able to vote!

Ixchell Reyes 11:06
18 years it has survived, okay? And it’s not a – it doesn’t charge you anything. And again, does this one thing and does it really well,

Brent Warner 11:16
Really well. So if you just need students to record something, Vocaroo it works on the phone, works on their computer. Get the audio file, get the link, and you’re good to go. Love it!

Ixchell Reyes 11:29
Alright. So my next one is word wall.net, and this is a site that it started with. It’s about a 10 year old site, but it started with making vocabulary tiles that students could use as a game, kind of like if you if you’ve used Quizlet, sort of like that. It’s for vocabulary. But then eventually they figured out that the same board tiles could be made into different games, and so they created templates, so all a teacher has to do is go in and plug in different things. And now you instead of having just flipping tiles or matching tiles, you could have a card shuffling game, or you could have a whack a mole type of game, or you could have a find a sorting like a categorizing game. And it’s actually pretty cool, because I guess if you’re if you don’t have a smart board, and you don’t have smart board software that can actually do that for you, this is the version that’s out there, and I believe it started in London. So if you do a search for word wall and then whatever exercise you want, like, let’s say you want word wall transitions, paragraph transitions, you’ll see everything that teachers have created, and you can just reuse and the same, the same set of vocabulary or whatever content the teacher put in there. You can make a different game by using the template.

Brent Warner 13:00
Awesome, yeah. I think word wall has come up a couple of times over the years on the show too. Yeah, pretty, pretty clean, intuitive, not exactly free. I mean, there’s a free version you can go into, but there’s also paid stuff in there, so look out for what you’re looking for, but –

Ixchell Reyes 13:16
But! if you paid for the one, for the yearly fee, whatever you make, is free for the rest of your life. Oh, okay, so you don’t have to keep paying to access that’s nice. So that’s actually it’s and it’s affordable. At least pay for

Brent Warner 13:32
So pay for one year and then

Ixchell Reyes 13:35
make everything (laughter)

Brent Warner 13:36
and then make everything plan for the rest of your life that’s easy, yeah, but word wall is great and really good for vocabulary stuff, so go check that out for sure.

Ixchell Reyes 13:53
All right, we are coming to TESOL together. We’re coming from different places of of the of the United States, but we’ll be there together. Finally, it’s been a while.

Brent Warner 14:03
Yeah, it has been a while. The same room and

Ixchell Reyes 14:07
presenting in the same room at the same time. Yeah, co presenters,

Brent Warner 14:13
that does okay? Yeah, we’ve got a couple presentations, because most

Ixchell Reyes 14:16
of us, we’ve presented, I mean, virtually before, in different places, or I was somewhere else. But anyway,

Brent Warner 14:22
yeah, yeah. So please come join us at TESOL in Long Beach, coming up in March, if you’re if you’re planning on being there, come look for us. We’re going to be doing a couple sessions and panels, panels, a few things that here and there. So do come find us. Come say hello to us. I think we’ll have stickers for people, if anybody wants them. I imagine we’ll have little things like that. And and we’re talking Ixchell, maybe this is more properly if we, if we can think about a little bit more and in person drinks with diesel live. So one of these, one of the evenings, maybe go out and say. Have a meet up somewhere. Yeah, there’s, like these, lot of restaurants around the area and everything. So if we can just find a place that you know can hold a few people that want to come hang out together. Yeah, listen in for the next episode where we maybe talk about a little bit more.

And if anyone out there is flying in from another area of the world that listens to us – Please come find us.

Yes, yeah, 100% we will. Ixchell has offered to pay for your plane ticket if you’re flying in. (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes 15:26
With monopoly money? With eggs? (laughter)

Brent Warner 15:36
That’s more expensive, all right, so come to TESOL. Come find us. We’re gonna have a good time.

Alright, so got a few more of these, Ixchell, my next one is word type highlighter. So when I when I shared Edushare.ing, I was kind of excited. Sethi De Clerq, who you’ve probably seen his YouTube videos. He’s got a YouTube series which is very popular called flipped classroom training, I think is what it’s called. Anyways, you’ve almost definitely seen his videos at some point over the years, but he commented on it, and he also said, “Hey, I make a bunch of tools that are kind of the same thing, these single use tools.” And so one of them I found on there was this one called a word type highlighter, where, essentially, you can just go type in a sentence into it and then click a button that says, split the sentence, and it isolates all of the words, right? And then what students can do is they can click on those words and choose a, you know, basically, whether it’s an noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, whatever part of speech it is, and it’ll highlight them in different colors. So super, super simple, but you can have that as an interactive activity for students to show that they understand how the structure of a sentence works. For example, it’s not exactly the same as like, yeah, yeah, Hemingway, because Hemingway will do that for you and tell you, Hey, these are what these words are. And also the Microsoft reader does that too, but, but this is the other way around, where it’s like, here’s the sentence. You figure out which ones are the words. And so as an in class activity, or with the teacher, that could be a really just, especially for beginning level students who are trying to get a grasp on the fundamental structures of English. It’s a cool little tool and really quick and easy to use,

Ixchell Reyes 17:29
Awesome. So the next one is also kind of an oldie, a Goldie. Can I say that?

Brent Warner 17:37
Gold Oldie?

Ixchell Reyes 17:38
Goldie Oldie, and that’s Answer Garden. And I know we’ve talked about Answer Garden many times. We’ve used it in our presentations, and Answer Garden is like, kind of like Vocaroo is, where it’s a clean thing that does one thing for free, and it’s been doing it for years. So Answer Garden is to create instant word clouds from your well, live work clouds from your audience, but you don’t need to log in. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to have any kind of account. And that’s what I love about it. Sometimes I just get bogged down by logging in, and then you have, like, the security pass code sent to your device, and then you have to allow your device, and then, you know, all that stuff. Nope, this one, you just type in the prompt. And students can log in with their not login, access the website with your with the code, and that’s it. Yes, and you can, of course, save it. So answer gardens, really, I wonder how old it is. Is it older than Vocaroo?

Brent Warner 18:36
It might be 18 years old. Yeah. So I love it. Yes, all these ones again, so many just log in. Give me this, send us your firstborn child, right? Like, it’s like you’re asking too much just for a simple tool. So love it. Anything with no login I love Okay, So following up with a no login option is excalidraw. So Ixchell, have you seen this before?

Ixchell Reyes 19:01
I saw it today, and I thought it was so cool, because I, like, I’ve used, oh my gosh, call a note. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s just a collaborative note, but you have to you, you can only use it on a device. You can only use it on an iPad or, like, a, like a mobile device, okay, but!

Brent Warner 19:23
Yeah, so this one is, and it’s a shared whiteboard. There’s lots of these whiteboard apps out there. And so if you have another one, it’s totally fine. Of course, there’s wonderful choices out there. You and I both used to, like, I think it’s classroom screen. Is that, right? Which is, which is also wonderful, right? And, and also, now it’s like, okay, there’s a little bit of a login. There’s a little bit of incentive to start paying for all these things. And so if you just want a simple whiteboard to pop up, and Ixchell, I loved your idea about setting it up for to open a tab when you open your browser. You know, yeah, just have a homepage. Page, yeah. So set it as your home page. You can set up your browser to open, you know, three or four very commonly used pages. And so it could be one of your pages that’s open every time you open work with your students or show your projector. But basically just simple whiteboard, you can draw pictures on it, whatever else you need to do, move things around, delete them,

Ixchell Reyes 20:20
Make a chart. Yeah, it’s actually Venn diagram, that kind of stuff. It’s actually pretty cool.

Brent Warner 20:25
Yeah, it was. It’s quite impressive for a free there is a paid version with this one too. But if you’re just saying, Hey, I basically just want a digital whiteboard, something that I can have on there. Because the nice thing about the digital whiteboards is that if you if you save that, you can download it and send it to your students later, depending on how well you’ve got everything planned. So there are other choices for this, but I liked this one. Ixchella Draw is quite nice, awesome.

Ixchell Reyes 20:53
So another, no login, no account needed app or it’s not an app, it’s a website. Is mini poll.co okay? And as the name says, it’s just a simple poll creator. You type in your question and people can access so I know there’s plenty of software, and there’s like slido, and there’s all those other ones, but with that, you need an account, and then there’s, there’s just too many buttons to push this is just a very clean and simple, fuss free I would, I would call it foolproof for like, a, I’m thinking of the teacher overseas that doesn’t have have a lot of access to items or to resources. This would be an easy tool to use.

Brent Warner 21:38
It’s perfect. I mean, this is exactly what we’re talking about. Is it’s like, it’s kind of that just in time teaching. So you’re like, Hey, I just thought I need to do this. I don’t have the time. I mean, if you go into, for example, Kahoot to try and make something quick and on the fly, it’s like, Okay, how many seconds does each one need to be okay? What are you you know, do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? Do you want to just like, right? There’s so many decisions to make, and so this is really nice to just be able to go, boom, I have a question. I a couple of answers I possibly want, and I’m going to get it up in, you know, 15 seconds, and it’s good to go. So that is very useful for a lot of us.

Ixchell Reyes 22:17
Yeah, and accessible, I think.

Brent Warner 22:20
Yes, 100%. So last one here Ixchell, I don’t know if you have any secret ones coming up. The last one we have prepared is PDF newspaper. So this is from an organization called five filters. But basically what it does is you can go in and put in either like a, I think you could put an RSS feed or a single web page URL, and it turns it into a really nice looking newspaper style layout, right? So it strips out all the extra junk that might be on the website, all the side banners, whatever, and it turns it into a simple PDF that you could then print out and give to your students. But it’s nicely done in, you know, looking like a two column newspaper, traditional look. And so if you’ve got your students-

Ixchell Reyes 23:07
And newspapers are now traditional, (laughter)

Brent Warner 23:09
Yeah, right, yeah. But I like the idea that you could kind of print it out, right? And so if you, if you had, like, Hey, I’ve got access to the tech. I’ve got access to these websites, but maybe my students don’t. I could still print these things out, have an article that I want them to read, make it in a nice format that’s, you know, they could annotate on if they needed to, whatever else it is. And so a simple way to clarify and and strip the paper into just just that content, and there’s a couple little customizations, but there’s nothing special you need to do. It’s just plug in the link, you know, make a couple of options if you need to. I skipped them all, and I’ll put a link to, you know, one of my articles from TESOL in the PDF version of it in the show notes, so people can see what it looks like, too.

Ixchell Reyes 24:00
Very cool.

Brent Warner 24:01
Yeah, so that is PDF newspaper, alright, Ixchell, I think that’s all we got for right now. So let’s jump out.

Ixchell Reyes 24:17
All right, it is time for our fun pines and this time around, I have food, yay. And there are the Quest Protein Chips. Have you had the quest cookies? Brent, like, there’s Quest bars? Quest Yes, cookies. Okay, so they have a whole line, whole product line, of protein items that are actually pretty low in sodium and low in, like, added stuff, like bloated like, I guess, sugars and all preservatives. But since I’m trying to be healthier and trying to balance the amount of snacks that I take if I’m feeling snack ish, of all the different types of Protein Chips. Or, quote, unquote, keto chips. These are actually pretty good, so the Quest Protein Chips, but I really, really, really like the chili lime ones. They are so good.

Brent Warner 25:09
Okay, nice. So you’re gonna bring some of those to TESOL to share and see what we all of course. Yeah, nice. Mine is also food related, but my YouTube channel, so I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Kenji Lopez, but he has a popular YouTube channel. He also has a second one called Kenji Lopez Alt, and that’s the one that I tend to subscribe to. I think his main one’s more for like restaurant tours kind of and this one’s more like cook at home type of stuff. But he does all these cool you know,

Ixchell Reyes 25:41
Is he half Japanese, half something?

Brent Warner 25:43
I believe so, yeah,

Ixchell Reyes 25:44
That’s cool.

Brent Warner 25:45
And he, and so his, he does all this cool cooking stuff, you know, it’s covers the variety from, like, healthy to less healthy. Is, is not really the point. It’s just kind of like, Hey, here’s something you can cook. And he talks clearly about how, like, how the food interacts with each other, right? So he’ll talk about, like, okay, so if you’re frying eggs, this is what, this is when you would put salt in while you’re frying it, or, versus, if you took it out at the end, did it at the end? Because if you put salt in while you’re in the middle of frying it, it might make it the emulsification would change so, but simple and accessible things, he kind of just clarifies a little bit on, like, better choices for simple cooking. But anyways, great channel and a lot of fun. And, man, he’s just a, you know, easy to watch and follow along with what he’s getting to so…

Ixchell Reyes 26:36
And we need that yes these days.

Brent Warner 26:38
Yes.

Ixchell Reyes 26:42
Alright, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/ 116, for Episode 116 you can find us on YouTube or Instagram at @DIESOLpod. We’re also on threads and on Facebook. Same handle.

Brent Warner 26:58
Yes, you can find me on the socials at @BrentGWarner,

Ixchell Reyes 27:04
and you can find me on some socials at @Ixy_Pixy, that’s I X Y, underscore P I X Y

Brent Warner 27:11
Alright, everybody, we hope this helped you out a little bit, and we’ll see you in a few weeks.

Ixchell Reyes 27:16
TESOL – Woo hoo!

Brent Warner 27:17
We’ll definitely see you at TESOL and DIESOL at TESOL. It’s gonna be a party

Ixchell Reyes 27:22
DIESOL at TESOL, all right! Thank you!

Brent Warner 27:26
Bye.