Week 10_Research and Presentation

This week we are supposed to study research and presentation tools.
One of the research tools I've chosen to share with you is iSeek Education. As we can see here, it is an engine designed for teachers and students that compiles hundreds of thousands of resources.

iSEEK allows you to narrow down your search results without having to think of your own keywords to narrow your search. When you search for something (I searched for "duality" for example), the most common topics are listed in iView that allow you to see relationships among these categories. All this might help you discover new facts you might not have known. Furthermore, iSEEK offers a bookmarking option via MySEEK (you need to register for that option). Unfortunately, iView only allows you to select one topic within each iView category. For example, underneath "Duality" I can’t select both "English Literature, Poetry" and "English Literature, Conversation Questions". I can only select one.  

Another useful tool is Google Scholar.  You need to have a password from your college/university library to read articles and/or download them. This web search engine includes academic journals, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers and other scholarly literature.  So, when I search for "duality" on iSeek I get links to lesson plans, activities, school subjects. Google Scholar leads me to academic articles. "The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions" in Durkheimian Studies is what I got first.

I also decided to try Simple English Wikipedia, just out of curiosity. And it surprised me! Searching for the word "Jekyll" I've got some results that might be interesting and useful for every 8th grade student: Robert Louis Stevenson, alter ego, 1886, dissociative identity disorder. The students may use it while preparing their own projects.

These are the tools I've chosen to write about and I'd like to know what you have chosen and why. Have fun searching!

Week 6

This week we were asked to choose at least five of the speaking/writing tools and write about them in our blogs. So, I've chosen the following tools that seem rather interesting to use in the classroom:

1) Debating. Debates are a hot issue in Tet classes now.  I see students really want to practice in debating and to be chosen to participate in the national competition. Debates allow students to become more proficient in speaking, researching, reading, and writing skills, and they promote reasoning as well as communication skills. In addition, debates are a vehicle for students to express their opinions assertively in a respectful manner on a relevant issue or topic. Classroom debates enable students to work cooperatively, brainstorm ideas, develop vocabulary and read to support an opinion. 

If we want to give our students an opportunity to practice their writing skills, it's a good idea to give them the websites that promote debating. Another option is to provide them with a database of top 100 debates. Here they can browse debates by theme, click on the topic they like, see points for and against, vote, and what is no less important - read the articles from the bibliography list beneath each topic to improve their content knowledge and literacy abilities. How could I use this in the classroom. First, I would choose an interesting topic to get my students engaged. Then I would divide them into two teams - one of which will argue for their chosen topic and the other, against it. Following a debate, other student will select a winning team by assigning points based on a checklist I'll provide. Criteria could include relevance, politeness, strength of argument, enthusiasm, and interest.

2) Spelling City is another teaching resource for this week that helps children learn new vocabulary. One of the possible uses is that teachers are able to upload their spelling lists for their students to access and study either in school lessons or at home. Once students have their lists they can either learn the words through “Teach Me” by listening to an audio track say the word, spell the word, and use it in a sentence, play games through “Play a Game” to further study each word in the list, or be tested on the words “Test Me”. The “Test Me” function allows students to be tested on their spelling words just as they would in class by hearing the word and the word used in a sentence. I think this video gives a better idea of how to use this wonderful tool:

3) WiseMapping is a great way to help either yourself or your students gather their thoughts. It is a graphical representation of the relationship among terms. Mapping gives students an opportunity to: think about the connections between the terms being learned, organize their thoughts and visualize the relationships between key concepts, and reflect on their understanding. I think it is a great tool to use during debating classes. We can also use this tool to create family trees, ask students to organize concepts they study, to map out a plotline or a story, a historical event or a step-by-step process.

4) Twitter can make a surprisingly useful educational tool, giving students and teachers an easy way to communicate that goes beyond office hours and classrooms. It's instant and to the point. We can use a unique classroom hashtag, thus creating our little virtual online classroom. Students and teachers can share ideas and information any time they want, regardless of location. It is also a good way to keep the conversation going long after the class is over. As a teacher, I can share homework and assignments, interesting articles, websites or someone worth following on Twitter with my students. Twitter could be used for brainstorming (debating!), writing book or movie reviews, writing a story and so on. Students, on their side, can give us a feedback and write what they like/dislike about our lessons, what changes they would want to make, what books they prefer to read, or what activities they would prefer more.

5) StoryJumper - I was deeply impressed by this resource. Some time ago I wrote a curriculum on Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. The goal was to develop students' critical thinking skills, so that at the close of the course they would know how to write their own detective story. StoryJumper could be incredibly useful here in creating their own mystery story. Students can add text and images to each page as they write their stories. They may prefer to either write all of the text or create all of their images first. It's worth noting that they have a detailed guidance on the site. Students can share their books online with their parents, for example. Making a long story short, StoryJumper helps students write and illustrate stories and then share them online. The resource could be used for writing a reflective journal where students write about what they did and learned after completing a school project or field trip and add pictures. With this story-writing platform, students can enrich and develop their writing skills more efficiently. 

Week 4

Week 4 has started and I can't wait to tell you about using pictures in teaching English. I've learnt some interesting things and am going to tell you about them. First, I need to mention this great idea with Linguistic Landscape -  when bloggers document the uses of English (in this particular case) and bring them to class. The idea is not new for me (I used to make such photos at every step when I studied Chinese in China, I'm still doing this here in Israel when I find something worthwhile. In fact, this is the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, public signs on government buildings and so on. From the pedagogical point of view it gets students to make connections between the content of classroom lessons and the world beyond the classroom walls. Second, it allows students to think creatively and analytically about how language is used in society and become more aware of their own sociolinguistic context. These are my photos of linguistic landscape from China and one from the Levinsky College:

Another resource is EFL Picture Sets. There are plenty of such sites (EFL or ESL), so nothing is new for me here. But I saved it to my Symbaloo webmix, because I want to print these cards from General Communication part and use them during the procedures: the cards "I need help", "I have something to say", "I don't understand" will help students to grab my attention immediately.

Third source of inspiration is PhotoFunia. How can we use this entertaining tool in teaching English?

• Edit photos for class websites and blogs.

• Have students edit photos for presentations and publications.

• Have students tell a story in photos that were edited in PhotoFunia.

• Discuss the power of the media to revise history through image manipulation and have students manipulate images to change their meaning.

• Create motivational or content posters with PhotoFunia.

• Have students create vocabulary flash cards using PhotoFunia.

• Have students create photos for a fictional story that they write about themselves.

Finding pictures. eThemes and Pixabay are great sources (I really appreciate it now when I have to be ingenious in preparing my PP presentation for the English class). 

Free comics for classroom use - I still don't know how to do comics due to the lack of time. I need to practice it. This is what my students will definitely love! Here are some links:

Funnytimes
From Now On The Educational Technology Journal
Toondoo

As far as my blogs-to-follow are concerned, blog Free Technology for Teachers provides some information (in two recent posts in a row) about teaching with video, so I'm not going to cover it and will wait for Week 7:) Two other blogs are still not updated to my deep regret.

But. I think there is enough information here to save, learn and remember to use. So, practice it and I am going to improve my MS Paint skills now.

Week 3

Here I am with some new things learned. This week we've learned how to create learning activities with new tools. I've chosen Quizlet, but other interesting links saved to my Symbaloo webmix as well just not to forget and have them at hand. For instance, the e-mail service "Word of the Day" could be a very nice reminder to learn a word a day (both for me and for my students). I remember me studying Chinese, such services would help me a lot. They remind and keep you up.

The links are: Word Think

NY Times

Wordsmith

Dictionary Reference

Merriam-Webster

Of course, for students' learning it's not enough. You need to build a context (sentences), you need to make assignments for practicing, etc. But good to know, isn't it?

FlipSnack is another activity. In fact, it's an online flipping book software that allows you to convert PDF documents into Flash page flip digital publications. They write that it's the ideal solution for those who wish to embed a book, magazine, catalog, newspaper, portfolio or any other kind of document into a website or blog. Has anyone tried? Is there any practical point?

Puzzle Makers - working with kids ten years ago I missed such services a lot) Very easy and time-consuming. Here are some links:

Crossword maker 1

Crossword maker 2

Wordsearch maker

Cloze Creator 1

Cloze Creator 2

These are the activities that draw my attention to some extent. Unfortunately, two of my three blogs are not updated yet, but the blog Free Technology for Teachers is extremely active and is constantly updated. I definitely need to check the function Whisper by Google. They write that it is a free Chrome extension that lets you send pop-up notifications to the students listed in your Google Classroom rosters. The students will not need to check their inboxes to see the notes that you send to them. It is great for sending quick notes like, "keep up the great work today" or "please get back on task."

When I have enough free time I need to practice a little bit with Google Drive Templates (Google Drawings and Google Slides), to grasp how to use them. Activities are organized by grade level. There are activities for Language Arts, math, social studies, and science. And Google Classroom, of course. Here I feel like everybody knows all that and only me not)

Another article from this resource reminds me to set up a procedure with students' blogging to give them the opportunity to have their voices heard and to connect them with other students, of course. Comparison of 7 Blogging Services for Teachers is here.

P.S. Prof. Roos asked us to update our blogs with insights from the technology blogs OR from the things we've learnt in this unit. I decided to make a combination of two for some reasons: 1) only one blog was kept updated during this week; 2) I wanted to save these resources to practice all this and not to forget (I saved it to Symbaloo as well, but there is no place for comments and explanations there).

That's all for today, stay tuned and keep yourself technologically updated!

Hi,
so I've chosen three blogs to follow. The first one, Digitally Yours, is a blog written by Adele Raemer who seems to be extremely professional in using Google tools in English classes. For example, her recent post about using the function "Copy Document" on Googledoc really impresses. She made a video with thorough explanations so that anyone could understand this tricky thing. She lives in Israel, as we can see, and it was another reason to choose her blog among others. She mentions so many new things for me, so I think I will certainly use all this in my class, but it will take some time to practice it and remember. The second blog, Technology Tailgate, is a network of technology blogs. Their recent posts are devoted to Flipgrid (never heard of this before).  It is a resource designed to promote open discussion between all students within your classroom. Teachers post topics, videos, or links for discussions and students respond to the prompt and to each other with short video reflections. I scrolled the blog and found it very attractive not only as a teacher of English but also as a mom of two kids. I wish I had enough time for all that :)The third blog, Free Technology for Teachers, written by Richard Byrne. This blog provides a treasure trove of information for teachers about free web-based applications and how to use it for enhancing the educational process. The most recent post here is devoted to the project Google Arts and Culture with the idea to make important cultural materials more available and accessible to people from around the world and to digitally preserve these materials to educate and inspire future generations. Putting it short and simple, it's a kind of virtual tour, where people could walk through museums from all over the world without visiting it. 

So, these were the most recent posts in the blogs that I am following.

Stay tuned!

Hi,
this is my first entry to this blog. A month ago I started studying at the Levinsky College of Education. Full of hopes and expectations. After 17 years of dreaming to be a teacher I am there at long last. To be honest, I enjoy it a looot. Tons of advice, help, support and encouragement. One of the courses is about using technology in education. Sounds very promising and entertaining. Especially for those who spend every single minute in the Internet like me:) and use FB, Instagram, LiveJournal and so on and so forth daily. Hope to learn something new and use it with my students. Will see :)