Russell Stannard views Vyou.
I am always looking out for ways of getting students to do more speaking work outside the classroom. So far, I have written about JING, MailVu and Vocaroo, which all offer simple ways for students to record themselves speaking and then share their recordings with their teacher or with other students. In this article I want to write about Vyou. This site is a little bit tricky, as we shall see, but its potential for speaking, listening and writing makes it really interesting and very interactive. One thing about it, though, is that you will need webcams and microphones for it to work.
With Vyou, students go online and create a profile. The idea of the profile is that other users of the site can send questions and the student with the profile answers these questions, recording their response on a webcam. This could work really well in a classroom situation: students could create their own profiles but also go to the profiles of other students in the class and write questions for them to answer. So you can see immediately how much language input there is: the students create a profile (writing), then other students send them questions (writing) and then the student with the profile answers the questions by making a video (speaking).
A good way to use the site is to ask all the students to make profiles and then to tell them that they have to go to at least five other classmates’ profiles and ask them questions. You could even get them to do it in pairs: Student A makes a profile and then goes to Student B’s profile and puts five questions for Student B to answer, and Student B makes a profile and then goes to Student A’s profile and asks five questions. In this activity lots of writing and speaking is done. As preparation, you might like to work as a class and produce a list of questions that the students can use.
There are lots of ways this site could be exploited. For example, you could choose one student each week and get the rest of the class to send questions to that student.
It can be quite interesting if the students go to the profiles of people they don’t know and find out about them. There are many people using the site, so you could get your students to go to some of the profiles that are already there, look at the questions that each person has been asked and then listen to the answers. They could then write a short piece about that particular person and what they know about them. They will find hundreds of very interesting profiles on the site, including those of artists, writers and various experts on topics such as science and technology. You might get the students to work in pairs or groups, choose an expert and then find out as much about that person or the subject they are expert in by listening to the answers they have provided to questions.
Here are some example of interesting profiles:
Artist Graeme Base: http://vyou.com/gbase
Author Mike Dooley: http://vyou.com/mikedooley
Your students can also find a famous person and then put up questions for that person to answer. Again, the students could work in groups to do this. Later they could report back on the answers they get to the questions. This can be an interesting way of getting the students to engage with well-known or famous people. You can also ‘follow’ these people and get updates when they answer new questions.
The tricky part
As I said earlier, there is a tricky side to this site. When you first create a profile, you have to make a short three- to four-second video of you waiting for questions to be asked – which is what people will see when they go to your profile. When someone sends you a question, you need to have a second video prepared that says ‘Sorry, I can’t answer your question now but I will get back to you’. This video plays immediately when a question is sent to you, as it is unlikely that you will be online at the time. So when you make your profile, at the start you need to make two quick webcam videos. My videos at the end of this article will help you through these two stages.
However, once you are through the tricky part, I think this site has loads of potential. I would use it with teenagers or adult students. I have not yet come across any inappropriate content, but of course with these sites it is always something you need to be aware of. If you stick to working with profiles of well-known people or get the students to make their own profiles, then it should be OK. You can also control who views the profiles, too, so you could limit views to people within the class.
You can find my help videos here: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/vyou/index.html If you want to post a question to me, go to: http://vyou.com/russell
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon award, all for his popular website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
This article first appeared in issue 76 of English Teaching professional, September 2011.
