ECO II Exam coming soon...

We are back and getting ready for the final exam... 
Now  it's our turn. Ale and I are sitting for the final exam together next month. Now we have to  prepare our pecha-kucha, what means that we have to revise all the projects we carried out in this subject during the year. Pecha-kucha is not a new thing for me since I have already experienced it in Diccion last year but  I must admit that I was really nervous : /. This pecha kucha is going to be more demanding since each of us will have to say 10 slides. However, I'm confident that it's going to be OK ; ). It needs a lot of preparation but with practice and rehearsal  it can be a really enjoyable experience. 
We can do it Ale! :D

Hot Potatoes and others...

Last week,  we designed  a lesson for ECOII in the virtual platform Edmodo and included an authoring tool called Hot Potatoes. At the very begining I didn't like any of the tools proposed for the task because I believed that they didn't give us many opportunities to be creative. However, we chose to work with Hot Potatoes and made the effort to adapt an activity from a book to the tool. But what I found quite interesting is another tool that one of classmates came across with: ProProfs.  We decided to include it in our lesson because it fulfilled the purpose of the activity we had though of.
Here you can create quizzes, flashcards, polls and surveys. Have a look at it! It's easy to use and practical.
 http://www.proprofs.com/.

Linoit in the English lesson

  Linoit is an application where you can store and organize sticky notes, collaborate with the notes of somebody else, design task among other things. Those sticky notes are stored in a special noteboard called canvas. You can create as many canvases and sticky notes as you want and for different purposes, keeping them private or sharing them with others. You can also create group canvases and invite people to be members of the group. By sending them an invitation, all the members of the group can edit the canvases and the sticky notes and add new ones. Besides, you can customize the canvas and the sticky notes as you wish, changing colours, adding images, videos,etc.
 We found this tool quite useful and decided to applied in our pw for ECOII last monday. We implemented Linoit to a whole project. The project was the one I carried out during my teaching practice this year at a primary school and consisted on sending and receiving letters from a pen-friend, something similar to the "invisible friend". The school didn't have the resources necessary, but if it had had them, it would have been an exellent opportunity to replace the traditional way of sending letter for this new tool that is really appealing to the eye of students. 

  Go to http://en.linoit.com/ sign up, log in and give it a shot!

Popplet

  During the last two weeks, we learned about some new tools in ECO I and how to use them in our lessons. Today I was exploring one of them called Popplet. Popplet is an application that allows you to create graphic organizers. At the very beginning I was a bit lost because I couldn't try it. But today I tried again and made my own popplet of what we learned about web 2.0. Popplet is a good tool for teachers to use as a collaborative brainstorming,since you can invite each of your students and ask them to edit the popplet and add new ideas to a given topic. The interesting thing is that you can include not only text but also images, videos, photos , etc.
Here is my first popplet. It's simple but I'm still learning...

http://popplet.com/app/index.php#/437488

 

Web 2.0 resources in the EFL classroom.

We have learned in ECO I  what web 2.0 resources are, and I think it is worth  including them in the EFL classroom when it's possible. The main reason for doing that is motivation. Since some sources like VOKI or WORDLE  are highly appealing to the eyes of students it is important that teachers can exploit the benefits they offer. Nowdays, technology plays an important role in almost all aspects of our students lives, so teachers should profit from this, making use of  some new resources like the ones I mentioned before to make the teaching and learning process more enjoyable and motivating. One of my classmates, Aldana Viano included Voki in one of her lessons. I saw it and it seemed that her students were really interested in this tool.They learned and had fun at the same time sharing their works with the whole group. This is an advantage that web 2.0 tools offer us to make teaching and learning more effective.
All we need is to learn how to exploit these advantages to profit from them.

Reflection time.

    I have admitted that I am a digital immigrant : / but now I have to say that technology should be integrated in all the classrooms. Since we are immersed in the information age and technology is present in almost every part of our lives, we, as teachers of the digital natives, need to be updated with all this new things. As Piaget says in the quotation, we must teach the new generation in a different way, so as to help them to move on, to innovate, to be original. I accept that it's difficult to me to adapt to the new technologies I´m not used to, but I´m willing to learn. This year in ECO II, I learned many things. Little things that might sound unimportant for a digital native but for me they mean a step ahead in my learning process.

Prezi . . . or Powerpoint? that is the question

   I always considered that prezi was an original tool. However, I always chose Powerpoint  because I was used to it and I thought that prezi might confuse people sometimes. But now that I´ve been trying to use prezi, experimenting with it , I realized that it gives you other opportunities in the classroom. If you decide to use a prezi presentation in your lesson take advantage of its benefits: the zooming ,for instance, let you incorporate big images. Since it is not linear, your students can play with it, making it more interesting. You can also add videos and music, as two of my classmates did for a pw, and it was really amazing! They did an excellent job exploring this new tool.
  So, it is worth giving it a try.

Finally,I would like to share an article that I found interesting:

http://prezi.com/rfsnedhqmhqa/thoughts-on-using-prezi-as-a-teaching-tool