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HCC Conjugations Back Our goal at TeacherTube.com is to provide an online community for sharing instructional teacher videos. Upload your lesson plan videos or watch student video lessons at our website.

Abstract: This case study is based on an investigation into the use that a group of language learners made of Livemocha.com, a Social Networking Site through which language exchange is enabled via social media applications. The learners created profiles in the website and proceeded to interact with speakers of their target languages, reporting back on their experiences over a 10-week period. As communication between language partners can take place through several different channels, and can be asynchronous or synchronous, written or spoken, it was considered that the preferences of learners with different personality types (as indicated by responses to a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire) might be accommodated. Several studies have suggested that the anxiety that some language learners feel when communicating in L2, especially when speaking, is reduced in online environments. Under the premise that a reduction in anxiety may lead to an increased "willingness to communicate" (MacIntyre et al., 1998), the principal objective of this project was to examine the type and frequency of online interactions that the participants engaged in with other speakers of their target languages in the Livemocha language learning community.

I think this Blog is rich with possibility for utilizing social media for the teaching of a second language. Students so much into social media and they also get motivated by change in ideas and activities. The variety of possibilities that this blog offers provides a teacher with a good resource that would work for various language levels.

move fast! they are - or will be - offering ad-free Vokis to educators to start the new school year. Sign-up here if you're interested - they'll notify you when it's ready. Ooohhhh, just found out that "ad-free" means you have to pay a "small" fee - don't know how much it is yet. I'll report back.

Monthly webinars on one web 2.0 tool each month. You may want to watch them live, or come back later for the archived recordings. QR codes was done, Flickr in Dec. Ideas for future topics are Audacity, Google Earth, Glogster, Animoto, Prezi, Webspiration, Voicethread, Xtranormal, Jing, and Evernote

Helen Barrett is the "portfolio" guru from many years back. This is an interesting view and comparison of various Google docs - to think about ways you might use these apps for a portfolio system for your students.

Article on using "back channels" in class via Twitter-like apps

I have just glanced at the information here and plan to come back to explore some of the activities. I wonder if the conversations become disjointed and become difficult to follow?

I noticed that I was only getting about 3 days' worth of tweets in Seesimic and then they didn't show any more - especially in the group hashtags for the "storytweeting" activity - so this interested me. You may also be interested in how to keep student tweets for classroom purposes.

What do you do if you need to go back to find an old tweet or want to assess a student based on a series of tweets-archive the tweets. here are 10 ways to archive the tweets.

I used to use Evernote a while ago for a staff writer/communications job I held in grad school. It helped a great deal with keeping my boss informed on my progress on news stories and for making suggestions. After reading this, I want to go back to it. I remember how organized it made me feel-- I'm sure I could use a lot more of that as a teacher! Thanks for sharing. Glad that Evernote is back on my radar-- with so much more to it than I remember!

If you are seeing this with the Chrome Extension - I'm discovering that there is no way to share your highlights and post-it notes with the group. Go back and install the Diigolet - instructions in Week 2!

"What do highly effective teachers do in online classrooms? We combed through dozens of studies to find the best research-backed ideas."

Thank you for sharing this. An interesting course to take.

A collection of articles with eLearning best practices

After bookmarking many of these sites, I started to wonder if I would actually go back and read any of them beyond the brief overviews I've already done. If I am spending time bookmarking, I would hope I would use them later. Does anyone else find this?

"You have no idea what people will do to reach the United States - until you hear their stories". (From reviewed tool NPR Borderline Stories)

I vividly recall sitting in my son's Spanish classroom during an Open House back in 2011, listening to the teacher explain how they reviewed vocabulary and grammar during class. She reminded us of the importance of finding opportunities for students to listen to, and even better, speak the language outside of class.

Interesting comment promoting the discussed topic applied to Spanish.

There was a hyperlink to an article about whether we should still teach cursive. Apparently high schools are not doing it any more. My son stopped cursive in about the 5th grade and didn't have to use it and now he is struggling at the university because he can't read when the professor uses cursive in anything, like comments on his papers. I have to print when I leave him a note. Wow, technology is wiping out one of the long-standing activities that took humans decades to develop.

I like the balanced way this piece presents some of the pros and cons of technology in education. Just this week I had a conversation with another educator who has encountered recent studies suggesting a link between handwriting (of any kind) and certain cognitive development. Some schools are now emphasizing handwriting instruction because it helps boost students' academic achievement.

My daughter is 8 years old and she started learning cursive this year. So it must be back! I'm not sure if will help boost her achievement or not, but I'm glad she is learning it. I think the article made a good point about how students today have a short attention span and easily get off track. If they are typing a paper on the computer, for example, they can open a browser and start surfing the web. They don't necessarily stay focused on the task at hand. It is even hard for me sometimes. If I don't ignore email (just put it off until later, I mean), I would never get anything done!

This is a quick tutorial for embedding audio into QR codes. it provides a couple examples of how this might be used in an educational setting.

Adrianne, I like your link a lot. QR is a great helper. I have used it last year and make easy to my students to get faster to pages I wanted them to go.