The annual list of the top 100 tools for learning - a good place to check out some new tools, if you're looking. The analysis page is interesting, too - see what's moving up or down, in or out - http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/analysis-2013/
That's good to know. My students have a mixed bag of devices, and several have Ipads.
The first time students watch a video, they are unable to skip through the video; they have to watch the whole thing from start to finish and attempt every question.
Love this feature. Like with reading, middle schoolers pick through material to find the answers. We can't glue them to their seats, but they never know where those questions will pop up and they can't look ahead to see what answers they need to find. Love that!
You paste in the URL of the video, then watch it play
According to another blog I was reading regarding licensing and sharing, if the "embed" function is operable the owner has endorsed (consciously or thru oversight?) sharing.
Good to know to allay students' fears. Will they even think that their answers would be made public-probably not most MS students.
You can assign a video to the class, and then eduCanon collects data for you on your class’ completion of the task and their responses to your questions.
excellent description about teaching to this generation of digital natives, make sure you check out the article highlighted on "the 12 things you were not taught in school about creativity"
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.
All of these are great ideas for a content-based language classroom!!! I already plan to do a few of them. Now if only our school would unblock these sites, at least for teachers...
Have fun at conferences. If you are attending a conference, give BackChatter a try–a game that uses Twitter and makes attendees interactive participants.
I've done this at conferences - a great way to get notes from one session while you're in another. And a way to plan where to meet up for dinner!
Teachers in lecture classes use Twitter as a "back channel" for students to use to ask questions and discuss while the lecture is in progress. Oh, I see this is mentioned in the "Community" section below...
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.
Since this tool would be available to numerous students, it would be very helpful that a wide array of related topics are mapped out so that each student focuses on what's most relevant to their interests/needs.
Prezi is a good resource for students to look at a wide array of related topics and choose the angle that best suits their research or class direction. Gradeguru and Notehall are mainly about student exchange of helpful notes and study materials. Dropbox is mainly a storage tool that also allows sharing and exching files. Chegg is a book rental tool.
for teachers who would like to build a digital portfolio - LinguaFolio is a good online app to do this - and here is set of free, online modules to teach you how to do it.