The final exam is coming!

Hi everyone!

Next week, I'm going to sit for ECO II final exam, together with one of my classmates, Melisa.
I feel rather nervous because we have to make a presentation called Pecha Kucha (20 slides in 20 seconds) including images.

This short video will help you clear your ideas about Pecha Kucha!

I'm already feeling nervous with any final exam, but I can't cope with nerves thinking about this ECO II exam, I need to manage time to say everything in 20 slides and avoid overlapping my voice to that of my mate. Also, memory is a key factor to be coherent when saying the texts of the slides, That's why we have been rehearsing together with Melisa so as to feel more relaxed, anyway, I will try to enjoy this experience!

Goodbye!

The importance of Blended Learning.

Hi everyone! 

Nowadays, we are getting used to hear about this new term in the field of learning and teaching... but What is Blended Learning? Let's just say it's the mixture between online and in-person learning experiences when teaching students. Students might attend a class taught by a teacher in a traditional classroom setting or independently completing online tasks and working at home, both experiences would parallel and complememt each other. 

Here I attach a short video showing some important aspects of Blended Learning, of course, there are many others, always taking into account the context in which we are teaching. 

During this year, we have learnt a lot about including technology in the classroom, and the benefits we can find for our students' learning. Blended Learning goes beyond all we have seen and a key factor of this kind of learning is 'collaborative work', since teachers can ask students to do some research about a certain topic at home and then share it online or during the lesson, promoting interaction among peers to accomplish specific purposes. 

I strongly recommend teachers to do some research on this new field of teaching and generate online activities for students to complete at home. You can post your opinions about B-learning below. 

See you!! 

WEB 2.0 - Didactic Sequences

Hello!

Some time ago, our ECO II teacher asked us to create an imaginary didactic sequence including one or more web 2.0 tools. We organized the sequence around a central task and then we presented the outcomes to our classmates during a lesson, showing what we would ask our students to do. The grammatical contents to revise were Simple Present, there is/there are and has/have. The vocabulary was 'places in a city' and the functions to teach were describing a city, convincing, inviting.

My mates and I thought about including videos in the lessons, so we came up with the idea that students, in groups of 3, would have to create a video showing their imaginary favourite city. The aim of the video would be to convince their mates to go to that city by describing it. 
After researching into some web 2.0 resources, we found 'Stupeflix', an interesting tool to create videos using photos and adding special musical effects or songs. 

We started the lesson by showing students images of Santa 

Fe city and  describing some places, so as to activate 

squemata, they had a worksheet to match the corresponding 

pictures to the names of the places as they listened to us 

describing those places. We checked comprehension by 

asking questions, for example, Is there any bakery in Santa 

Fe?.
Then, we presented posters of places that are and are 

not present in Santa Fe and in pairs, students had to write 

sentences telling what places there are and there aren't in 

the city. The pair who wrote more sentences in 5 minutes 

was the winner of the competition. We checked by having 

the pairs reading their productions and asking their mates to 

say whether those sentences were correct in terms of grammar and meaning.

To finish the lesson and introduce the final task, we showed students a video about our own favourite city; a city we have created with all the places we like.We showed them our production on stupeflix while telling them about the city. Then, we asked them comprehension questions, for example: how many churches are there in our city?.We also asked them if they would go to our city, what they like/don’t like about our city. After that, we told them they would have to make a similar presentation but with their own imaginary favourite city. We asked them to make their city interesting so as to convince their partners to visit it since once presentations were over we would vote for the best city to go to.

Our city was called PARACITY, a city to spend our holidays, and this amazing resource allowed us to create a video using text and photos... you can try this tool www.stupeflix.com and tell me what do you think...

See you!

Let's play Word Clouds!

Hi everyone!

In ECO II, we have been trying 'Wordle' (http://www.wordle.net/) and making our owm Word Clouds! I already posted some word clouds in previous posts, but this time I would like you to try this tool.
It's a fantastic way to teach vocabulary and topics, specially to children and teens.

You can create and play guessing games by providing all the related names from a category and your mates have to guess what the category is, for example: the picture of the eco car is made of words related to ecology.

You only need to enter www.wordle.net and go to 'Create your own', then you paste your own bunch of words and press 'Go'. You can choose colour and designs, it's really fun!
Also, for word clouds' shapes like the pictures shown, you can visit Tagxedo word cloud creator.

Although if you want to play a guessing game, try not to use so many words...

See you!

Web 2.0 Tools: Tech tools and trends for teachers.

Hi again!

This week in ECO II we talked about Web 2.0 Resources and the new tools in technology that can be applied in teaching a language.

Today, I came across this website called DISCOVERY EDUCATION and I could expand my knowledge on today's new technological tools for Communication and Education. (http://web2014.discoveryeducation.com/)

I would like to quote this paragraph from the website that is really interesting for teachers: "As our students become more entreched in technology, we need tools that can help us keep up with the ever-changing online landscape. Simple new tools make it easier than ever to plug in. From blogs and wikis to incredible presentation and video integration tools, nothing is too cool for school. This collection of Web 2.0 toold and online apps will have you talking and teaching tech in no time".

Then, within the same website, you can explore 20.14 tools online, from 'Presentation tools' to 'Related links'. You can also learn about different Tech tips and Intenet safety, so it is a well-designed and complete website to visit.

Now, going back to Web 2.0 Resources, you have to know that a Web 2.0 tool or app allows people to interact, communicate or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators in a virtual community. We can use different applications and resources, from social networking sites, to blogs, wikis, video sharing and web apps.  Here you can see images of web apps. I am sure that most of you are acquainted and use some of these apps.

I hope you can try these new apps if you still haven't try them, you only need to create an account and it is very easy to learn how to use them.

See you soon!

SAMR and TPACK models for Education Technology

Hi everyone!

In this opportunity, I would like to intruduce two important models SAMR and TPACK to include technology in the classroom. We learnt about these models in ECO II when we created presentations and I have to confess it was a bit confussing at first. But you can find a lot of information on websites or watch many videos on youtube to have a clear idea of what these models are used for.
For example, here you have two of the videos I selected for SAMR and TPACK explanations. The first video is made of by students and the second is uploaded by Candence M.

As you have seen, the videos are easy to follow and they give you a general idea of what these models are created for.
As I said before, SAMR and TPACK models can be hard to understand at first, but I consider these models to be valuable because they can help us introduce technology in our lessons without forgetting that we are teaching a language, and therefore, we must take into account the way in which we should teach and how technology will help or collaborate in learning a language.
If you want to learn more, visit these articles

http://www.ipadbootcampforteachers.com/samrtpack.html
http://www.edtechcoaching.org/2013/11/ed-tech-frameworks-why-i-dont-use-tpack.html

See you!

What to take into account when preparing a presentation?

Hello again, I will take this opportunity to expand on a previous post about including Presentations in the classroom, but this time I would like to add some tips for creating and delivering an effective presentation.

After preparing and delivering a presentation for ECO II pw, my mates and I with the help of our teacher could reflect upon some things that went well, and some other things that did not go that well. So this is a nice opportunity to share those reflections with you.

One of the things that you must consider when preparing a presentation is how much are you going to include. For example, if you choose to work with Power Point, it is better not to present whole texts in slides, because your audience may get bored and switch off your presentation, also you may get nervous or get confused when reading from the slides. Sometimes, they pay more attention to reading the texts before you switch slides than listening to you presenting. It would be better if you include only the main ideas.

You also need to take into account the design of your presentation, the colours of the slides and the size of your titles and words. For example, if you are presenting a new topic to children, it is good to have a colourful and cheerful presentation, with cartoons or multimedia content, but working with teens or adults is different, and they may think your presentation is not serious enough or pay more attention to the colours of the presentation instead of listening to you.

Moreover, when planning the presentation, it is good to rehearse a bit, because it will help you with time management and you will avoid overlapping with the other members of the group you are presenting.
And last though not least, using some tech support like videos or soundfiles will also require a bit of rehearsal, especially if these take an important role in your presentation. You need to check whether these work well before you start to present.

That's all for presentations, See you!

SELFIES in the classroom. Really?

Hi everyone!

Last monday, my mates from ECO II and I attended an interesting workshop developed by Mathilde Verillaud. She's from the United States and she's staying in Rosario for a year, attending different conferences and giving talks about an important aspect teachers and students teachers must take into consideration when entering the English Classroom. I am using one of the titles of her presentation because it really called my attention.

She talked about how to use a newly teen fashion action (Selfie) as a fast track to boost students' motivation, using students' contexts to help them learn English.  She taught this workshop in China and told us what the project was about.

First, as she did, I will introduce the definition of 'Selfie' to all of you who may not know the term.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, a Selfie is: a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.  
In 2013, 'Selfie' was chosen as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionary, and The Guardian and The New Yorker agreed with this.

Just in case you still have doubts, this is a selfie!

You may take a selfie only of you, with a camera, smartphone, etc, or using the mirror.
You can also take a selfie of your shadow using the sun or water.
And you can take 'Selfies' together with your friends of family.
Here are two of the most famous funny 'Selfies' we know...

Monalisa posing for a 'Selfie'.

 'Selfie' of famous Hollywood stars taken at the Oscars 2014 ceremony.








According to Mathilde, this tool of the Y generation will help students learn about themselves and will help teachers connect to their students by facilitating this self-discovery process and speaking their visual language.
As a teacher, you can start by introducing some photography vocabulary and show famous selfies to your students to discuss their impression of the photographers from their self-portraits.
You can also brainstorm with your students the infinite possibilities of taking a 'Selfie', for instance, the different contexts that they can show and what would make the 'Selfie' unique and reflect their personalities. And now, you can ask them to take their own 'Selfies' for this project, including objects that show something about themselves.

Then, you can practice acitivities with the 'Selfies', but first, you MUST set some general rules if you intent to play a game with students or if you ask them to describe their mates' selfies. If not, some could use negative words or comments to describe some mates' selfies and it can be a bad experience for them. Remember we are dealing with teenagers, it's a difficult age and their inhibitions are high so as to protect their ego, you have to be careful and encourage them to show some aspects of their personalities by taking selfies and create a cheerful environment. You MUST also talk to students about the use of social media and posting their selfies on the web.

Some of the activities proposed by Mathilde are:
1) Higher order ranking questions: describe what they see, what is going on, what is the person thinking or feeling, etc.

2)Gallery walk: exhibition in the classroom. 10 minutes to go from photo to photo and write descriptive sentences. The group with the most correct descriptive sentences wins.

3) Description games: one students orally describes a picture to his/her partner. The other students says the same thing in a different tense, or in the negative.

4) Every photo tells a story: pick one photo and write a quote about the person in the photo. Pass the photo to your left and repeat the action.

5) Let's draw: two students leave the classroom. The rest of the class is divided in two groups and is given the same photograph. Each team has to orally describe the photograph to the student who was outside the classrom in order for he/she to draw. Both students who left must draw following oral descriptions. The student who draws more similar features to the photograph wins.

6) Writing activities: a descriptive text, dialogue or poem about the photo.

I wanted to share some details of this very interesting and useful workshop of Mathilde with you! I hope you have the chance to attend some of her workshops.
Thank you very much,
See you soon.

What we MUST consider when including... Presentations in the classroom.

Hello everyone!

This time I want to introduce a useful way to deal with a topic in the classroom. I will talk about including Presentations in the lesson and what we must take into consideration when using tools to present a new topic or ask our students to create presentations to share what they have learnt. Before I start, I will show you pictures of two of the tools we use to present nowadays: POWER POINT and PREZI.

                            

The first thing you need to analyse is the topic or theme you have to teach or ask your students to present, considering linguistic contents like grammar and vocabulary and what aspects of the topic per se would you like to show them or your aims for this project. For example, when planning ECO II presentations, my mates and I chose to talk about CINEMA and helped students to create a PREZI presentation about their favourite movie or actor/actress. The presentation included a mini-biography of the actor/actress and sentences about why they chose this actor or movie. As our main aim, we expected students to talk about their favourite actor/actress and their favourite movies. As contents, we had to teach past simple with regular and irregular verbs and adjectives; and we needed to include vocabulary related to films and adjectives to describe movies. Once we analysed all the content we chose to introduce the topic using a PREZI presentation, showing some details of a new movie 'MALEFICENT'.  

Click to see PREZI of Maleficent.     

Then, if you are introducing a new topic, you need to make your presentation appealing to students' interests, and you can also include something about you in the presentation. For example, for ECO II presentations, some mates decided to record their own materials or share their likes/dislikes/routines and photos; it creates a positive reaction from students and they can be encouraged to tell you something about them. Also, it is better to work with authentic contexts and authentic materials, encouraging students to think about the target language by focusing on cultural components or think about their own culture. 

You also need to take into account ways of providing support to students, by showing them a video about how to use a resource, presenting guiding questions, monitoring, suggest websites, etc. 

Finally, some considerations that you MUST NOT forget are... 

How the use of technology will help or affect your presentation? You definitely need to consider what each application will allow you to do, and analyse the resources you will use in a deep way. You can choose to use different applications, but they may not correspond with what you need to teach and in the end, your students switch off because they are not appealing enough. 

Consider the time each activity takes and the time of your presentation, also take into account the level of the students to design your presentation. Or if your students are the presenters, the presentations should not last more than 10 minutes considering the amount of people. 

And as I said before, KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE INTERESTED! 

That is the most important aim! 

Thank you very much and comments are welcome. 

Bye!

Evaluating websites...

Hi again! We have been working in our first practical work and we had to learn how to evaluate different websites according to certain characteristics. I would like to present you with some elements, which must be taken into account when choosing the best website to work with, or just check some basic details that will tell you whether the website you often visit is reliable or not... I also add some pictures from Google.com.

First of all when you enter a website...  you must take into account that the website provides you with the information you´re looking for or if it applies to your purpose...

You also must analize whether this website belongs to a certain organization or is the property of some independent author.
Another thing you can check is the title, specially, if the title corresponds to the same website adress. Check this picture... the name doesn't correspond... maybe some people have created a completely different site and are using this particular name for other purposes, or maybe it is just wrongly written.

Another element you must keep in mind is the reliability of the website... you must look for database, names, address, email, contacts, and the sources of information.
As teachers and students, we must be careful not to rely completely on one single website when we need information, we should not forget books are also useful. Something like this can happen to us as students and in the future, as teachers.

And last, but not least, we have to check whether the website is updated or not, we can find sites being under construction, so we must analize the information before using it...

I hope you are now acquainted with some important details to check as soon as you enter a web page or any site in the internet. Of course, there are other elements... you can contribute now if you want!

See you soon!

Should we teach Digital Literacies? What are they?

Hi everyone!

This time I would like to write about a new term for me I must say, DIGITAL LITERACIES...

Honestly, I haven't heard those words "together" before... so I would like to quote a description of the term taken from a published article in British Council website.

"(...) digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal. We are not just talking about a checklist of technical skills, but also about the social practices that surround the use of new media. So not just knowing how to create a blog entry, but knowing how to use this to connect with a wider community of readers and writers, and what sort of online persona one projects though one's post."

Now, the purpose of this entry is to talk about the question: Should we or should we not teach Digital Literacies to our students?

In my opinion, Digital Literacies SHOULD and MUST be included in the teaching of English Language.
Nowadays, we teach students that form part of a new communicative world. Most of the communication is digital... We, teachers, and our students, must be ready to face it. One way is to teach and learn Digital literacies... I said "learn" because we are going to learn together with students.
The advantages are many... students can profit from this to get job opportunities, communicate with people from different parts of the world, and many more...
And we, teachers, can make our lessons more engaging, more interesting to them, be able to develop more project ideas, different teaching proposals, etc.
If you want, you can contribute with more advantages or disadvantages depending on your position.

I leave you with this picture I have found in google, it's really interesting, in a rather humorous way. I hope you can start comprehending, like I'm doing, what this term means and what these new tools can bring to students and teachers' lives.

See you soon!

Antonela

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

Hello!!

I would like you to watch this video on Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants. It was published in YouTube. The director is Christopher Shapiro and the information was taken from Marc Prensky's lecture, the author we read to start discussing about this topic.

I'm sharing this video to create awareness about the existence of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, the differences between them are a fact and we, as teachers, must bear them in mind. Most of us are Digital Immigrants, and we have to learn to cope with this when we wish to include technology in our lessons. These differences showed in the video are also part of today's situations in classrooms, cafes, meetings, etc. Most of us have heard older people complaining because of mobile phone use during dinner... and not having long conversations like it was before...

As we talked about in ECO II, teachers need to know that they are part of a new generation that grew up with technology but still, students need to benefit more from these new technologies to create other things... so I find it really useful to learn how to apply these new means during our teaching programme...

I hope you can watch the video and you are invited to share your opinion...

Have a nice week!
Bye!

MY LEARNING JOURNAL

WELCOME...

My name is Antonela Magliano. I am a 4th year student at the Teaching Education Programme at ISP N° 8 "Alte. G. Brown".

This blog is part of my porfolio for ECO II Teaching Training Programme: Materials Design. 

The purpose of this blog is to keep a learning journal as regards the new technologies and digital resources that we can include into the ELT classroom.