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

How technology has changed the life of our digital natives...

I recently saw it when my seven-years old nephew asked his father to buy him a computer for his birthday to play some videogames and chat with his classmates.

pecha-kucha

             

Useful for our future pecha-kucha presentations for Phonetics IV.
It seems rather difficult because it demands a lot of time of rehearsal but it is good to make interesting and engaging presentations. The timing helps you decide what information to include, which must be concrete and clear. I think it will help me a lot to improve my fluency. So, let´s do it!

Make a Presentation Like Steve Jobs

                                           

Useful tips to take into account when making any kind of presentations =)

More on Google Docs...

      I thought face to face interaction was the only way to work succesfully in groups. But now that I have started my teaching practice and I don't have too much time to do groupwork, I realized that if it hadn't been for Google Docs, I don't know how we could have done all the works we had to do for this week.
We were very busy these days, that's why we used this new tool for everything: ECO I, ECO II, Literatura and Phonetics!  And it worked quite well...!  =)

"The times are changing"

Reflection: This video shows us how education changed as the time went by. When I saw it I remembered Workshop I, when the teacher asked us to say the qualities a teacher should have. The first words that came into my mind were: patient, flexible, creative...but most important of all a good teacher should go on studying, updating their knowledge so as to be able to adapt to any classroom. Now I understand that no matter if I like or not using technology in my lessons, if I find it difficult because I´m a digital immigrant; I must adapt to it. If I don´t want to be like my English teacher at secondary school, I  have to cope with these new technological developments to improve and adapt my teaching practice to the digital natives.
So...there we go...

Google Docs.

Working on Google Docs for the PW...

I had always thought that face to face interaction was the best way of doing group assignements, but when we had to do our first PW for ECO II the restrictions of time were a major problem, specially because the members of the group were from different locations. We got together once to do the pw, but it was not enough. Although we worked on Google Docs, I only discovered how useful it was when we had to finish the practical at home. At home I had several doubts regarding some instruction and grammatical expressions, but it gave me the chance to be more confident as regards my knowledge . Working on Google Docs let us edit the work as many times as possible taking into account the opinion of all the participant that had edited it.
Good for saving time we spent travelling from town to town!

On digital natives, digital immigrants...

Definetely, I´m the second one...=/

  

= )