Powerful Tool for the Classroom - Qwiki

Imagine a more dynamic, visually-appealing Wikipedia with audio and video.

Mind-blowing Qwiki is exactly this!
Great visuals, narration, subtitles. An impressive tool with great potential for any classroom.

Take a look, for example, this video I got after searching about Pelé:

View Pelé and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Control X Emergence

I was just listening to this wonderful online presentation by Nancy White

Marching into the Future with Heads, Hearts and Hand

Nancy, as always brilliant and inspiring, talked about the connective possibilities that the Net has enabled us, but the point that really caught my attention was when she talked about emergence x control. This is an issue we are always struggling with, trying to find the balance, trying to find the best way to motivate the groups we work with to tap into their creativity, but facing the challenges of the institutional boundaries.

Barbara Dieu mentioned that,

"Control happens in the curriculum, in the rules, in the teachers'room - emergence happens in the classroom and we must be aware of it when it happens and ride the wave."

Emergence will only arise if we are sensible and can perceive what's around us. Having the control part doesn't mean we can just follow rules and plans and not let inspiration, innovation, perspiration, creativity emerge from our personal bonds and experiences. We need to stop with the excuses of control to let our students' creative minds blossom.

By the end of the presentation Nancy poked the audience with a question:

"We are influencers, the tight rope walkers. What should we start doing? What should we stop doing?"

What´s next for you as an educator, professional, human being? What should you start and stop doing?

Here's one resource shared by Nancy worth checking. It all about openness and emergence.
 http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/etug11/

The Power of Digital Storytelling

We are all a collection of stories. Stories that come from our ancestors, the ones that we built throughout our lives, those who surround us.

Storytelling is ancient, yet totally contemporary. Our lives make sense because of our own stories and the weaving of our stories with the ones who are part of them.

It is undeniable the power of storytelling, which can be taken to another level with digital tools. Not only are we able to tell and re-tell our stories, but we can also archive, remix, multiply them in different multimedia layers.

Educators are, by nature, wonderful storytellers, and we need to keep exploring stories in the classroom to build our own stories with our learners. Going further. We need to help our learners find their own voice through storytelling. We need to help them have this feeling of belonging, of being part of a community, of being an important part of it. With digital storytelling, there are simply limitless ways of doing that. How have you been exploring it in your classroom?
Digital Storytelling Presentation at 2011 WLA

View more presentations from Matt Gullett

CALICO Conference - A Wealth of Information for Language Educators

CALICO, The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, has had its Conference in Victoria, Canada. Though I'd love to have attended it, there's no way we can be omnipresent when we have our professional commitments, time and budget constraints. However, all of this doesn't seem to be plausible excuses anymore when the Conferences can be at the tip of your fingers.

I'm truly delighted to see the recording efforts of the CALICO organizers to keep the audio/video archive of presentations, special thanks to Marc Siskin, who has done an incredible job of putting all together for us who, at first sight, could be seen as a far-reaching audience.

All the resources are available at https://calico.org/page.php?id=567

I've just spent some time now exploring some of the sessions. Don't miss this opportunity to keep yourself updated in the latest trends and discussions on language learning, SLA, research, elearning, and beyond.

Featured Blog - If the Ship Sinks, We Have the Survival Kit!

I've known these creative minds for some time now, and they are just pure inspiration. Vinicius, Marina and Vânia are very talented teachers whom I'm lucky enough to have been working with for a number of years. They are tireless, fearless educators who inspire others and keep their students engaged through activities that enhance students' creativity, critical skills and willingness to speak English in a light-hearted, warm learning environment.

After having presented their brilliant ideas in International Conference, they've become bloggers with simple, but very effective activities for the classroom.

Take a snapshot of this balloon activity, for example:
http://iftheshipsinks.blogspot.com/2011/04/baloons-sentences.html

or the Name Six activity.

Simple and brilliant, isn't it?

Every week, a new activity for you to test in your classroom.
Thanks, Marina, Vini and Vânia, for being so generous with our educational community.

http://iftheshipsinks.blogspot.com

Exploring Videos Series - EnglishCentral

I've used EnglishCentral with my online group, English4Travel.
The feedback was very positive, for students can watch videos in English related to topics of interest, they can decide for the level - easy, medium, hard - and they can record themselves to evaluate their oral production. They can watch the videos with transcripts and without them for a more challenging activity. Fantastic tool for the classroom and beyond.

On the teacher's side, you have the option to create a student group and check your students' progress, which videos they've watched and their scores, plus I just love the feature in which you aggregate the videos by topic and suggest them to the group.

EnglishCentral has also been interested in updating the system with new features for the users. Really worth giving it a try with your students.

DailyLit - The Excitement of Literature in your Inbox

With DailyLit, you decide how (via email, RSS), when and where you want to receive your daily literature snippet. It can be every single day, or you can set it up for every other day, any time of the day. It´s up to you!

Now, imagine asking your students to subscribe to a certain short story to be delivered at an agreed day and time. It means that literature comes to everyone in the group very democratically, according to each one´s preferences.

DailyLit is not only a pleasant finding for reading, but a potential platform for wonderful pedagogical explorations. What would you choose to read with your students?

Audio Delivery Made Super Simple

Want an easy way for your students to record their voices and send it to you? Do you need one single place to receive all their audio files?

Audio drop box is what you are looking for. I just tested and it is worth giving it a try. you have to create an account at CLEAR, from Michigan State University, create your audio drop box. Voilà! You are ready to go! You can even create different audio drop boxes for different groups.

http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/audioDropbox2/ 

"an Audio Dropbox is a virtual dropbox for audio recordings. Using this new tool, you can put a dropbox for speaking assignments on any web page.From within that web page, students record themselves, and their audio files are automatically put into your dropbox.You can access your dropbox from anywhere and listen to the recordings. Put a dropbox on your home page, mashup, wiki, or blog. Using this tool is as easy as copying and pasting. You don't have to upload or download anything, and it works on any computer from anywhere."

I recommend it!

IATEFL Recording - Collaboration: Going Beyond the Teacher's Room

Knowledge management. This is an essential topic when we consider an educational system. I work for a language school with around 200 educators.

Here's the recording of my presentation in IATEFL 2011, in Brighton, which is my account of failures and successes in helping our teachers make the move to a collaborative endeavor beyond the teacher's room through a wiki. The road has been bumpy, but full of nice surprises and mind-blowing results.

I'd like to publicly thank International House for making this presentation possible through the IH Training and Development Scholarship





You can check some of our teachers' testimonials at http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/w/page/38894742/iatefl2011

Superlame for the Classroom

Students as creators. We still duel over the institutional, syllabus demands and our willingness to test new approaches to our classrooms. Nothing better than starting really small, baby steps, micro-projects. So, here's a very, very simple one. It can be used on a computer lab or even in class with a single computer. It works with any topic, any subject-area.

Grab a photo from the computer, download a Creative Commons one, or take the photo with your group.

Upload it to http://www.superlame.com/ . Add speech bubbles to practice grammar, to explore vocabulary, to practice a dialogue. No logins required!

Then, just send it to an email or save it to a computer. Easy, practical, simple, doable. That's what it takes to start giving control to students, to let become producers of content and to make them owners of the language they are learning.

I'd love to see some examples of classroom production using superlame!