Sunday, June 14, 2009

Images4Education in Classroom2.0 Live

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Yesterday I had the big pleasure to be with the girls, Peggy George, Lorna Constantini, Kim Caise and Steven Hargadon in a live session of Classroom2.0. A nice crowd probably hungry at lunch time wanted to know more about the Electronic Village Online and the session we moderated in Jan/Feb 2009, Images4Education. Incredibly exciting to see how more and more educators are understanding the power and need for sustainable professional development. Not one that starts and finishes, but an ongoing effort, non-linear with thrilling connective opportunities. Technology provides us with the power of linking to educators, ideas, cultures around the world with a search of international best practices for our classrooms. Tempting even for very busy educational professionals!

Note: I just learned about http://gl.am with the girls and loved it! It shares our links in a more visual way.



I'd like to thank to all who could be there with us, asking and sharing. I always learn from that.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Web 2.0 Cool Tools Presentation

On June 5th, I was gladly to surprise to see a nice little crowd in the Auditorium of the Binational Center I work for. I presented a Potpourri of cool tools for the classroom for the Braz-TESOL regional chapter. A very motivated audience of friends and new faces who are willing to take that step further, get started. My advice was just set one single small tech goal for next semester. Chances are that if they succeed in their microstrategy, they will succeed in bigger, more daring endeavors. That's exactly what I still do every semester, setting a tech goal. For this semester I decided to take a different blogging approach, making the bridge between parents and my juvenile class with a blog called Crescer Digital. I must say that I'm very pleased with the feedback of parents, their engagement in their kids' learning and the sense of accomplishment we are all feeling!

Small steps take us far...

How about choosing one tool to explore next semester with your students?

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Cool Tool of the Week - My Studiyo - Creating Online Activities

Just tested My Studyio because a tweet from @GrahamStanley and @NikPeachey. What a great surprise as tomorrow I´ll be presenting about cool tools for the classroom for a group of Brazilian educators. I liked My Studyio because it´s user-friendly and very easy to register. You can have multiple choice questions with an attractive layout adding images, youtube videos and texts. The final result is an embeddable quiz that you can put anywhere on the Net, or even send to students.

Also, I can picture my students creating quizzes and posting them to the others to take the quizzes. By doing that, they will learn a new skill and practice the language structures they are focusing on. Oh, by the way, the fact that you can embed the quiz in Orkut is a plus for Brazilian students who are totally hooked to this social network.