Group items tagged

ISSU can create an ezine, here a student zine published by Aiden Yeh's students in Taiwan. Colorful and with the look and feel of a real magazine.

"Resize 2 mail is an online resize website utility developed for digital camera owners, webmasters, people travelling or anybody who quickly wants to resize a digital image for email or publishing on a web site." This would be very useful if you don't have Graphic Converter or Photoshop.

"A range of ELT publications available in pdf to download. These include Milestones - a series of classic ELT texts published online as part of the British Council's 75th anniversary celebrations." A real bargain if you have ink and printer--free books in pdf.

"English Attack! is the first English-language learning service specifically designed for the digital generation. Our approach features a worldwide community of learners of English; and uses short-session online entertainment to encourage frequent digital immersion in real everyday English, with fresh content published daily." An interesting approach particularly suited for extra, differentiated practice with young adults.

"Using Moodle - Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster is published by O'Reilly as part of the Community Press series. "The first edition of the book, written by Jason Cole and released in July 2005, is based on Moodle 1.4. The second edition, released in November 2007, has been updated to cover all the features in Moodle 1.8, such as the new roles and permissions system, blogs, messaging and the database module. " This is a free download!

"Intervue is a quick and easy tool for publishers who are looking to gather short video responses online from anyone with a webcam. " This might be a good way to get students using their cell phone cams, and get to know each other at the start of class while practicing English. MP4 video can be shared or downloaded, and responses can be kept private.

"As various means of computer mediated communication (CMC) have been incorporated within language classrooms over the past two decades, it has become important to critically understand whether, to which extent, and under what contextual factors, a particular type of CMC is more effective than other modes of communication. This study examined the magnitude of the effect of text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) on second language acquisition (SLA). By searching the studies published between 1990 and 2012, this meta-analysis explored 10 experimental and quasi-experimental journal articles and doctoral dissertations and reports their overall effect on SLA, and the contextual factors that influence the between-study variation. A small but positive overall effect (m = .33) indicates that text-based SCMC could make a larger difference on SLA than other means of communication. Findings further suggested that intermediate learners may benefit more from SCMC tasks if they are grouped into pairs or small groups and participate in SCMC interactions on a weekly basis. In terms of suggestions for future research, authors should provide more description about the SCMC task in order to confirm or disconfirm the factors that are associated with effectiveness of second language (L2) learning in technology-mediated language learning contexts."

"There is great need - and increasing willingness - to understand the world as children with autism experience it." EllenNotbohm published a books on this topic, and synposizes the best parts in this blog article. The tips are also good for "normal" children who may misbehave in class for reasons they don't understand themselves.

Though I don't usually recommend lists, this is an excellent collaboration and is at least partially organized into categories by academic subject, and in some cases types of work, e.g., publish your own writing, create books and posters, use a whiteboard, connect with other classes, etc. EdTechTeachers are a group of prominent teacher educators that consult with and train teachers on a paid basis.

This might be a very useful tool, especially as you could get students to fill in their own vocabulary or content to be studied. The application creates flashcards that look like index cards (red line at the top, lined content section. Paste your published Googe spreadsheet link into the box at the website and it will generate a link to a set of online cards to share. Free

3. Google Tour Creator "A lot of teachers are already familiar with Google Expeditions, a virtual reality platform that lets users experience hundreds of places in the world in 3D. But what you might not know is that you can now create your own tours using Tour Creator. This tool enables us to create our own tours, using imagery from Google Street View or our own 360 photos, then publish them right into Poly, Google's library of free VR and AR objects. "Students can create tours as part of a research project, use them as a way to reflect after a field trip, or even as a supplement to a creative writing project. They can be used to create tours of your school, your classroom, or your town. If your school doesn't currently have much VR technology, start with an affordable Google Cardboard-just pop a smartphone into one of these and you now have one VR headset that can be used by a small group of students." T/h to Jennifer Gonzalez

"dive into this admittedly overwhelming list and pick the questions that most inspire you to tell an interesting story, describe a memorable event, observe the details in your world, imagine a possibility, or reflect on who you are and what you believe." Prompts are organized loosely by topic, and relate to a published NY Times story.

"Bookcase for Young Writers is a free web companion to our book Kids Have All the Write Stuff: Revised and Updated for a Digital Age to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in Fall 2019. "This online bookcase features virtual shelves filled with literature, apps, and interactive digital tools to inspire children from preschool and kindergarten through the upper elementary grades to become confident, expressive, creative young writers. "It includes fiction, nonfiction and poetry as well as picture books, chapter books, and e-books. It has links to child-engaging information and topics related to the all writing ideas in the Bookcase. "This bookcase is intended as a starting point for children, teachers, families, librarians and other adults who want to read books that will inspire writing. T/h B. Maloy

"Relevant real-world content Each lesson is based in authentic content-the world-class news and information on CNN-and organized in sections that match the needs and interests of learners. This makes the learning experience personalized and relevant. No nonsensical sentences or made-up stories. New lessons every day Today's news becomes today's lessons on en.news, with new lessons published on a daily basis. That's like giving the world a new English textbook every day. For free. Unlimited learning for free Learning a language is a lifelong journey and on en.news, learners can return as often as they want to take as many lessons as they want. There's no "end of a book" or "end of a course" which means the learning never ends. Part of a daily routine en.news combines the habit of consuming news, checking sports scores and staying on top of the world of entertainment with the utility of learning English."

"Students classed as less able are being hindered by being grouped into ability-based sets, according to new research published today in the Cambridge Journal of Education." This is something I have always suspected -- good to see some research out there. Project-based learning (with careful supervision and formative assessments along the way) is a much better idea. While the study is based on secondary students, I think it applies equally across all grade levels.

"If you've ever sat through a teaching seminar, you've probably heard a lecture about "learning styles." Perhaps you were told that some students are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and others are kinesthetic learners. Or maybe you were given one of the dozens of other learning-style taxonomies that scholars and consultants have developed. "Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. For example, kinesthetic learners-students who learn best through hands-on activities-are said to do better in classes that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners are said to do worse. "Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is no strong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom." Be wary of any teaching/learning fad, and look for experimental design in research. However, it does make sense to use a variety of stimuli, "styles," and approaches to spark curiosity and give variety. Kids do get bored if it's all "by the book."

A set of G-slides that can be used for writing a novel. This approach really works with short stories and poetry, and over the course of a semester or year term would work for a longer effort. Makes a great project for group effort as well. My niece wrote a novel in 2nd year of secondary school, and self-published on Amazon. Great idea for teaching writing, critical thinking, and long-range planning.

"The process of creating and publishing videos can be a great way to get students excited about researching, storytelling, and sharing their work with an audience. For teachers who have never facilitated video creation projects in their classrooms, choosing the right style of video and the right tools can be a bit confusing at first. To help bring clarity to the styles and tools, I have a rather simple outline that I use in my video creation workshops. That outline with suggested tools for creating videos in each style is included in the PDF embedded below. You can download the PDF here."

This app is like Evernote on steroids. Free from Microsoft, you can organize a whole class using the apps built into the interface for all devices, both computers and mobile. Organize and publish lesson plans and assignments, create quizzes and make hand-written notes on them, send emails, add photos from other devices, create video and audio messages, clip any webpage to view later on or offline. Works with a large number of other apps, such as fax/scanner tools, Feedly for archiving information, smart pens, ModNotebooks, which digitizes paper and pencil documents. Or create your own app with onenote appi (dev.onenote.com). T/H A. Burns

"How we read online. By Michael Agger "You're probably going to read this. "It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type. "To really get your attention, I should write like this: Bulleted list Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming Short sentence fragments Explanatory subheads No puns Did I mention lists? "What Is This Article About? "For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?"" This is a topic I've written and published on, so it's interesting to see another person trying to grapple with the same problem. It's worth exploring repeatedly.