My learning process

I've really enjoyed this subject, and I feel I've learnt a lot during the classes and while preparing the different posts. I only wish I could have had more time to dedicate to them, but anyways I now feel that I have more resources to integrate ICT into my lessons. 

I wasn't able to record it with my own voice, since my microphone isn't working :S

Cheers!

Eugenia

Second Case study

The case I choose to study in this post is the one that describes a project created by an Argentinian Teacher, Digital Storytelling in Argentina. The project took place at Instituto San Francisco de Asís. In 2008 the EFL department started feeling that they needed to change the way they were teaching English in order to provide their students with better tools and opportunities to learn the language. 

One of the main problems that they were experiencing is that by sticking to the coursebook and trying to finish it before the end of the year, they didn't have time to work on more interesting and empowering projects. So they decided to drop the coursebook and create a project based curriculum, where the projects were designed by teachers, taking into consideration their students interests. They opened a wiki (http://isfa.wikispaces.com/) to share the projects the different forms were working with. 

The project that I am going to analyse was created with a group of students, aged 17. During this project students were divided in groups and had to recreate a part of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream using different tools, and recording their own voices for the animations. 

According to the SAMR approach I think this project should be in the redefinition stage. While there is substitution, since they aren't writing an essay, but creating an animated presentation, I think the whole idea of the project is to re-interpret the play, and for the students to be able to show their own thoughts in an dynamic way. 

Looking at the project from a TPCK point of view, this is my analysis:

Technological Knowledge: The wide range of tools used during the project, from wikis, to movie maker, require a certain technological knowledge, from the teacher and the students. 
Pedagogical Knowledge: The pedagogical knowledge was necessary in order to organize the tasks. The teacher decided to organize groups in order to accomplish the goal, and the pre and post tasks.
Content: The content chosen for this task was the classical play Midsummer Night's Dream.

Regards, 
Eugenia

PLN

In my opinion building a Personal Learning Network is something you do naturally if you are working as a teacher, by connecting with the other teachers you are working with, but It's also really useful to develop a PLN online, since you will always have someone available to answer your questions, or help you if you are having problems. Building a PLN is not just reading twitter posts, or blog posts, but also reflecting, applying the content or starting conversations with other colleagues about what you've read. 

Some of tools you can use to develop your PLN are:

Here you can see a Mural summarizing the tools I use to build my PLN:

Hope you enjoyed my post. 

Cheers, 

Eugenia

Play to Learn

One of the things I like the most about working with young students is that they love to play games during class, although this wasn't the case when I was working with teens. Now that I've read and thought about why this could have happened, I've come to realize that perhaps the games that I was proposing were not adequate or interesting enough for them.

After watching Graham Stanley's talk about digital games, where he analyses the use of different online games that are not specifically written for education, and he describes different uses that these games could have for educational purposes. Some of the key concepts that he states are reflected on this word cloud

I entered his blog and searched for different games that I could use with my adult students. We are reviewing different tenses, so I chose the game called vortex. The game's  goal is to solve different paranormal activity mysteries. In the blog you can find the walkthrough and different pre and post game activities. Personally I think that this game is great to practice reported speech and Speaking skills. It could be played in pairs or if you only have one computer in the classroom.

I'll be playing this game with my students and I'll let you know how it goes!
Cheers!
Euge

Tools to improve speaking skills

Sometimes, if you don't have much time during your class period, It gets complicated to give your students time to practice their speaking skills. That's when you can take advantage of some technological tools, where your students can record themselves -video or voice- and you can assess their speaking skills even from your smartphone!

One of the apps that I liked the most was blabberize. My 1st form students are currently taking part of the end of year concert preparation. The play's topic is Harry Potter, so as we were working with animals, I prepared an activity where each of them had to draw and present one of the pets in the books. I now think that this could be done with blabberize too, so they could share with their families and the rest of the students. This is me presenting Hagrid's pet, Fang.




Another tool that you can use to improve your students speaking skills is http://present.me/. This tool allows you to record video presentations together with powepoint presentations. Some of the benefits of recording presentations in present.me and not doing them on the classroom is that students wouldn't feel so nervous as they do when they are in front of the rest of the class, especially shy students. On top of that, they have more opportunities to practice and correct their mistakes.

The last tool that I would recommend is http://goanimate.com/ where you can create animated stories. What I like the most about this tool is how user friendly it is. You can take advantage of the text to speech option, in order to make different voices for the different characters. I think that this tool could be used in lots of different ways, but what comes now to my mind is that if you are working with a novel, or a play students could record a conversation between some of the characters.

Comments are well received!
Cheers!
Eugenia

Content curation - Scoop.it

Content curation is, as defined by Philip Hubbard  , "the collection and organization of digital content with value added by language learning experts". He recognizes that content is a really significant element in the language learning classroom and much more important nowadays, since authentic content of different characteristics can be found on the internet.

There are different webtools that are designed to curate content. One of the most known ones is Scoop.it. This tool allows you to curate content and publish the curated content with your own comments and organization in different categories, while following topics curated by other users. So, apart from organizing  your own information and resources according to the criteria you consider more useful, you can share and take advantage of the materials that have been curated by other people.

I'm just starting with my scoop.it account, but you can see my profile here.
Cheers
Eugenia

Case study: Video conferencing

This project is an example of how It is possible to apply technology in the classroom in a successful way. It was published in the Innovations in learning technologies for English language teaching (2013), edited by Gary Motteram for the British Council. The project takes place in Taiwan by Jane Chien at the National Taipei University of education. 

The project's main goal is to provide with high-quality picture books in English to parents and teachers in order to improve the exposure to the language. It's secondary goal, as I understand, was to motivate and support the non experienced teachers, providing them with an excellent example of how proper storytelling should be done. Using a system called JoinNet she connected classes of 5th grade children with experienced primary teachers for a series of book readings. The children were able to listen and see the teacher storytelling, while watching the book page directly from their computers. 

The TPCK theory is fully applied in the project

CK: The topics chosen for the books are appropiate for the age and level. 

PK: The experienced teacher possess different resources to keep children engaged during the task.  

TK: The video messaging tool requires certain knowledge regarding how to install and manage the different options of the software. 

Analysing the project from the SAMR approach, I would say that the project is somewhere between the stages of Substitution and Augmentation . The reading of the books through video messaging software improves the quality of language exposure and at the same time it allows teachers to work with materials, such as worksheets prepared specially for them.

It'd be really interesting to read what you think about this case. 

Cheers

Eugenia

Evernote

In this post I'm going to analyse the use of Evernote as a teaching tool. I'll follow the criteria proposed by Nik Peachey in this talk. 

Evernote is mainly an application to take notes, and save them in the cloud. But it also has many other functions available. In here you will find the rest of the post.

Hope you enjoy It!

Eugenia

Puentedura on tweeter!

It seems that Ruben Puentedura was tweeting during his talk!

Cal Digest site #PCK #linguistics @CenterforImpliedLinguistics 15/9/2008 via Tweetdeck RPuentedura Ruben Puentedura

How do I integrate technology in my lessons?

I think I've always in some way or another integrated technology into my lessons. I have been teaching for two years at a primary school with 1st, 2nd and 3rd form.  Taking into consideration the stages described in the SAMR model, I consider that my use of technology in the classroom could be placed at the Augmentation stage.

I usually create worksheets in word to hand in to my students, this practice is an example of the Substitution stage. Another example of a practice where I use technology is when sometimes in order to introduce or review a topic I show my students a video on the projector, instead of working with the book, and after watching the video they usually produce some material to show to the rest of the class.

  For example, I was teaching them parts of the house, so we watched Winnie the Witch and after that, in groups of 4 they had to draw Winnie's house and write the names of the different rooms. I believe that this is and activity that could be set in the Augmentation stage, since the same thing could be achieved by just reading the book.

Let me know your thoughts on my reflections!
Cheers!

Euge

Diigouu

Hello there, 
I've been recently introduced to the website called Diigo. It is a great web based tool, where you can bookmark different websites, and upload written notes and pictures. I don't think It is something really new, since I've been working with similar tools, such as Evernote, Pocket and Google drive. But the good thing about Diigo is that you can share the websites easily by creating groups and following different users.

I've also downloaded the Android app for my phone, and after using It for some days I can say It is really user-friendly and reliable. It doesn't crash often!

Anyways, here you can see my  Diigo profile. Feel free to follow me =)

See you tomorrow!
Eugenia

My avatar

Hello there! Thanks for reading my blog again. In this post I'm going to deal with the different ways of using avatars in the classroom. Hope you like it and if you have any recommendations about the activities that I propose let me know.

First of all I want to tell you how amazed I am to see the amount of different websites where you can create an avatar. It's great that you can create from an avatar cat to a nearly human avatar. And I also think that's one of the reasons why they can be used in so many ways.

I've chosen two websites, in order to create examples of activities where I can use the avatars in the classroom.

• Monsters INC
  I present you Euge Van der Slime:
  
  
  
  This Avatar was really easy to create and I think it could work really well as part of a revision activity for parts of the body, or clothing accessories.  I can definitely see myself using this avatar for an activity with my 3rd form students. The website interface is really easy, and I can demonstrate once on the projector, and then in pairs they could create the monsters, and the descriptions. 

• Voki
  I present you Nymphadora Tonks.
  
  I created this avatar, thinking that it could be used for an activity with young adults, while reading a part of any of the Harry Potter books. The idea would be for each student to select a character and create a talking avatar. I think this kind of avatar allows you to work with pronunciation, which is great!
  
  Of course there are many other ways to introduce avatars into our classroom. This is just my humble contribution.
  Hope you liked it!
  Read you soon :)
  
  
  Euge 

Blogby steps..

What have I done to make this blog look readable?

Well, It took me a long time and patience, since I'm new in the blogspot world. But basically here is a list of the settings that I have modified in order to customize the blog environment.

The name

This part of the process was the most difficult one since I could not say no to the idea that although the blog is an assignment it should have a catchy name somehow. I started thinking about what we had talked during the class, and decided that It had to include somehow the term Geek or Geeky.

I looked up the definition of geek and I found that one of the entries in  http://www.urbandictionary.com/ said that a Geek is "Someone who has an obsession with computers and/or whose life consists of computer related tasks". I don't think every teacher needs to be a geek in order to include technology in the classroom, but you can always try and be slightly geeky, thinking about and using technology in the class.

The Blog template

I choose one of the basic watermark templates, and changed the colour scheme a little. The template is nice enough and it doesn't distract the reader. 

Advanced settings

Another important step was the configuration of the different fonts. For the title I selected a more striking font, called "chewy", and for the rest of the blog I picked the one called "Coming soon".

Gadgets

The broad range of gadgets available makes it really difficult to decide on which ones to select for your blog. I selected the Search box, the one that gives you the option to subscribe to the blog, and the one that lets you put a picture, as a decoration.


Hope you liked my post.
Comments are well received!
Thanks for reading!!