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!
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
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.
