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May 20th, pronounced in Chinese as “wǔ èr líng” 五二零 is supposed to sound like “wǒ ài nǐ” 我爱你 (“I love you”).

May 20th, pronounced in Chinese as “wǔ èr líng” 五二零 is supposed to sound like “wǒ ài nǐ” 我爱你 (“I love you”).

I made sure that they understood why I felt using a translator for work that the students were supposed to do is plagiarism. This has to be the first step.

On one of the very first days, I take the lyrics of a popular song that most students would know and paste it into a translator.

Used wrongly, computers could even damage learning. "Technology can be a distraction," says Warschauer. "I remember observing a beginners' French class a number of years ago, the teacher bragged about how engaged the learners were in creating multimedia in French. However, the students were spending most of their time and energy talking with each other in English about how to make PowerPoints, when, as beginning learners, they really needed to be spending time hearing as much French as possible."

 Still, the students liked it and I was able to get a good sense of where student mastery of the material was and I gleaned which students need to focus where in terms of pronunciation and basic grammar.  I will do this again.

It is good for me to see that even when there is no grade riding on it, students still watch one another’s videos: in other words, they want to watch each other.  I can’t speculate as to what drives that, but as an instructor, I am pleased simply that they do it.

How to use VoiceThread 25 Interesting Ways* to use VoiceThread in the Classroom (*and tips) is a VoiceThread offering ideas for lessons on problem solving, collaboration on artwork, video discussions, revision/review, playwriting, poetry, and more.

The truth is, every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. My argument here is pretty simple–there is no perfect platform for student blogging because everything that does exactly what a teacher wants sucks for students, and anything that is exactly what a student wants will probably get a teacher fired.

seven quick reasons why Tumblr may be perfect for the writing / blogging / posting / literacy piece in your room: Students can post by email. There’s an “ask” system. It’s social-by-design. Hashtags, sharing, reblogging, tweeting–it operates both as social media and a blogging system. It’s flexible. It can be visual or textual; video or gifs; audio or links; conversational or one-sided. It’s already on their phones. Well, most of them. Though they may delete it when they found out that you know. It’s dead simple to use. Reblogging is an interesting way to share thinking–and simple too. Maybe too simple to be considered cognitive heavy lifting, but that’s all in how you use it. Liking posts, using hashtags, posting new blogs–all simple to do from a tablet, phone, laptop, or desktop. It’s platform-agnostic. It works (almost) equally well across operating systems, much like Evernote. In fact, it can be thought of as the Evernote of blogging platforms.

Skype in the classroom Skype in the classroom, launched in March 2011, is a website especially designed for educational purposes. It is a platform where teachers and students can disseminate information about their classes, share educational resources, and find partners to start classroom projects.

Language teachers and learners may find the “Languages” category especially useful because they can search for Skype language lessons that meet their needs (see Figure 4 for some examples of Skype language lessons). These lessons provide opportunities for learning another language or practicing language via language exchanges.

Language teachers and learners can enroll in any language lesson according to their needs and interests

My absolute essential for “real life” teaching is a whiteboard. Obviously, this is tricky to use via Skype. Thankfully, I discovered Twiddla! It’s an online whiteboard tool that you and anyone who you share the link with can see and edit at the same time. Perfect for awkward explanations you just can’t do with words and emoticons!

Findings emerging from a constant comparison method analysis indicate that the CMC-embedded webquests played a significant role in advancing the online students' knowledge and understanding of German culture.

students appreciated and enjoyed learning about the target culture in way that they retained the information even two months after they were completed

Ideas for K-12 Classrooms

Gamic’. A gamic is a combination of a Comic and a Gam

ransfer it to a computer

viewers click around a large "mind-map," which can feature text, images, and videos,

equates Prezi to an "infinite whiteboard" wherein the audience can see an overview of a topic, or zoom in to see the relations between topics.