Group items tagged

"What do you think? If you train teachers to use IWB… how do you make the difference in how the board is used for learning apparent for them? What activities are truly interactive and contribute to learning in a new way while others are merely"fun" to use your fingers with?" A thoughtful article on how to use a Smart Whiteboard effectively--and interactively

"How I use Twitter, search, Diigo Delicious, DEVONthink, Scrivener to find, refine, organize information -->knowledge" A nice illustration in a Screenr screencast of how a Stanford professor uses various online tools to organize Internet information.

"What you see here are candid submissions from people who have engaged in a little exercise. Here's how it works. Think about the word Race. How would you distill your thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words?" This National Public Radio blog makes the perfect starting point for a multicultural lesson for ESL/EFL students. The entries are sheer poetry and give a great deal of content to think about the issue of race and one's place in society, for better or worse. Each 6-word "poem" makes us, as one contributor said, "Look past race to underlying humanity."

Describes LinoIt and how to use it--a nice brainstorming and student collaboration tool, but it's great to see examples and how it can be used with students. Free.

Jing is used to make screen casts, and Stannard uses it for his own teachrtrainingvideos.com. Where to get it, how to use it, and so on. Screencasting is a great way to show students how to use a program by making a video (with audio) of its operation on your own desktop. With a small fee you can also make MPEG-4 videos, post on YouTube, etc. Or have students make screencasts of new tools for each other.

A video on how to use Keek to make and share short video messages. Although limited to only 36 secs, this might be a good application for beginning learners, or for a quick pronunciation quiz (you will see who is taking that quiz!) You can also embed a finished recording in your blog or wiki, as well as sending it by email. A good way to have students create a short, practiced conversation. Also has smartphone apps for mobile recordings, RSS feed to follow, and links to Facebook and Twitter.

This video shows how to use Feed Marklet to create a button on your browser toolbar to add an RSS feed. Takes about 1 minute. You can use an RSS feed to keep track of student Webpages, and have them use it to keep track of each other's work. For instance, they might add all the pages they are making, or their blogs, and so be able to read them quickly when new content is added.

Very Good!!! The Super Sentence Machine helps kids develop sentence writing abilities and improve their voice and writing expression. This would be a good site to use as a whole-class activity to show students how to write more grammatically complex sentences.

Very Good!!! The Super Sentence Machine helps kids develop sentence writing abilities and improve their voice and writing expression. This would be a good site to use as a whole-class activity to show students how to write more grammatically complex sentences.

A great example of a clearly defined lesson in guided reading and thinking in an historical context (Ghandi v. Ho Chi Minh as protest leaders). Ms. Duvoor models how to think like a historian as you read original documents.

This is a great site to teach adult and high school learners more about how to use the web and sift false info from true. Something like a WebQuest, but with varied levels of understanding implicit in the lesson plans and activities.

Update your KWHL Chart to KWHLAQ: What do I know? What do I want to know? How do I find out? What have I learned? What action will I take? What new questions do I have? Includes two sample charts.

Mailvu is a free video messaging system that looks simple and easy to use. R. Stannard's video helps you get started quickly, and he also discusses how he uses the tools with his students for language learning: you can have students send you video recordings and then comment on them, have students do interviews of each other, describe something, talk about a holiday or their weekend, etc. Mailvu also has apps for Android and iPhone.

"Drawing and recording your voice is not an easy task. What I've discovered is that once you start drawing, and your focus shifts to the image, there are few barriers to speaking. "The tool I'd like to share today is EDUCREATIONS (http://www.educreastions.com). I haven't explored it to its full potential but what I've seen so far is good enough. The free tool allows you use your mouse or your finger (ipad) to draw stick figures while you record your voice. You can also upload an image and draw and record your voice at the same time. Once finished, look at the right side below the twitter and facebook buttons for the URL and the embed code which allows you publish the recording." This tutorial shows how to sign up and use the tool, and there is an example from an EVO participant.

"How- to... get the best shots, explore styles, pick the best camera, editing and photo manipulation, and whatever else I think will help you and I learn more about creating photography that speaks volumes!! " Great tips for the budding student artist. I would recommend this to any student who shows artistic promise with photography. Let the creative juices flow. You can send your direct learners directly to this page for a visual feast, plus good advice from professional photographers.

This page has videos about a wide variety of PBL projects across the U.S. This is a great place to start in planning how to institute PB and content-based projectes in your school.

"City College of San Francisco ESL students explore the Living Roof at the California Academy of Sciences with its 1.7 million native plants and exciting green technology which controls the building's temperature. Instructor: Cora Chen (visit Cora's ESL Page)" This is a nice example of how a day-trip can be combined into a media and reading-writing project for adult students.

Stannard's training video on how to use Windows Movie Maker (Windows 7) is very detailed and complete. Subsequent parts give directions for XP and Vista. He first suggests downloading the free classic version, which has more features than WMM for Win 7.

Shows how you can use Xtranormal to make 3-D characters. Your students can create a movie scenario, write the script, make the characters, select camera angles, add voices (in several languages) in quite long dialogues, and share the movie by email. Stannard takes you through the entire process (about 10 min.) using a Camtasia screencast.

"ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys. Our newest tool, TCast, allows teachers to record and place audio or video files anywhere in a lesson--in 3 easy steps. Each of these tools really opens up the scope and sequence of lessons centered around spoken language tasks." Jeff Magoto has done a great presentation on how to use ANVILL, which is a wonderful, free, A/V tool available now internationally.