Yesterday, when I was planning my lesson for a group of children (8 years old) I thought what can I do to make this lesson more interesting for them? These children are digital natives. Although, they enjoy playing games outside, they love playing online games and technology in general. So, I always try to include MIMIO on my lessons but sometimes I don't have enough time to do it (I need time to do it because it's new for me and I'm still learning. I'm not very creative but I try to do my best).
Since yesterday I didn't have enough time to prepare some games and activities on Mimio  I prepared a short game on Power point, just to revise vocavulary and a simple introduction of the grammar point of the unit. The outcome was great :) .These children are so into visual things that even the simplest activity (on a well-known tool) engaged them.
Here is the game. It  was very simple and maybe silly (just answering questions to revise the vocabulary we saw the previous lesson+ find someone who...) but they turned it into a competition and had fun doing it. That was the most rewarding part.

I'm back...

Learners' diaries.

Today, while I was  studying for ECO I Assessment , I realized how difficult is for students to keep a learner  diary where to register what they've learned.  According to Baxter, a learner diary may consist on pages at the back part of the file, I mean, it's easy to create. When reading that, I thought I could do it more appealing for students if we create a diary online.  It would imply an awareness raising process  because they need to reflect about what they think they have learned, but it would be easy, I thought , because they are digital natives. They are familiarized with technology.

 Then,  I remembered how difficult it was for me to start writing in this blog. In addition, I am a digital immigrant. But the real difficulty was to sit down and reflect upon the learning process, not the tool I would use to write my reflections. 

So...It doesn't matter if the learner diary is a white sheet of paper or an online site with a  colorful layout. What really matters is the content. Something that I'm still reflecting upon. 

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