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Fascinating interview of Michael Horn (co-founder of a non-profit innovation think tank) and Vibhu Mittal (CEO of Edmodo) on the impact of social learning networks such as Edmodo on the classroom. Some topics covered: blended learning, privacy and student data, collaboration between teachers and between students, personalized learning.

Great suggestions in this article for using Flipgrid. I really like the idea of keeping track of completed assignments (in my school that would be considered a Habit of Work as we do not grade homework anyhow) and perhaps using Flipgrid as part of a summative assessment at the end of the semester...lots of no stress practice and, by the time the assessment comes, they are all familiar with the technology.

Thanks for sharing this article! I liked the idea of different context and different identity :-) Sometimes students express themselves more comfortable at the beginning through the use of alternate identities. Specially if they have to video record themselves when they are learning the language.

My only concern is that how much the material they use in video can be authentic.

Slide show on intelligence(s)

Although this article is about British language education and it's two years old, my interest was piqued when I read it: ""Languages cannot be taught, they can only be learnt. The best way is to tell students right away that they are responsible for their own learning process, and the teacher is just a guide who has to motivate them."" Made me think about relevancy and how Tech is only one part of that.

Really interesting. I wonder if we changed the setting to the U.S. if the same difficulties would apply. I never really thought about grammar being discarded simply because students don't know it well enough. While I've found that most students we teach don't understand their mother tongue, I still think that the shift to task-based work had as much to do with the lack of real communication skills. Just teaching them grammar and relying on them to go abroad to learn to speak wasn't doing it. That being said, I think the mixture of methods is best, and by mixture I mean the integration of many methods into accomplishing a task. And I agree that the meta-learning is key.

I remember getting a comment from a student once, many years ago, that she had learned more about English grammar in my Spanish class than anywhere else... (sigh)

Since others posted tutorials, I chose an article from a teacher who shares its value.

I really like this instructor's take on communication in the classroom, and how to use FlipGrid to foster it.

I loved the story of Connie who was nervous to speak in class but felt comfortable and excelled in flipgrid! Her picture was Sully from Monsters inc which gave me the idea of having students use dolls or stuffed animals to present stories on flip grid in the voice of that character.