Group items tagged

"Over the course of this event we will be looking at a small range of web based tools that will enable you to create motivating online language learning activities for your students. These can be used either in class or set as homework. You will have the chance to understand how these tools work, find out how to use them with students and be able to try your hand at creating and sharing activities with other teachers. By the end of the event you should have a small 'toolkit' of resources and ideas that will enable you to enhance your lessons though the effective and pedagogically sound use of technology."

Over the course of this event we will be looking at a small range of web based tools that will enable you to create motivating online language learning activities for your students. These can be used either in class or set as homework. You will have the chance to understand how these tools work, find out how to use them with students and be able to try your hand at creating and sharing activities with other teachers. By the end of the event you should have a small 'toolkit' of resources and ideas that will enable you to enhance your lessons though the effective and pedagogically sound use of technology.

A framework for entry-level web literacy & 21st Century skills. Explore the map by selecting what you want to learn more about, to see definitions and activities. Start teaching others how to read, write and participate on the web with these free activities created by teachers, educators and technologists like you. Each featured activity includes step-by-step instructions and has been tested in schools, afterschool programs, libraries and community centers around the globe. Whether learning how to code, understanding why privacy matters, or creating openly-licensed web content, we believe teaching the web should be fun and engaging!

It is great that English is spoken by so many people around the world, but this can make it very difficult to understand, because there are such a range of different accents. In today's activity we use a website called The Speech Accent Archive to listen to different accents and compare them.

Back in November 2008 I published Part 1 of a series of articles intended to explore the use of WebCams in education. I have now finally got round to writing Part 2 which is a collection of 20 activities EFL ESL teachers can do with their students.

"Educators seem to be constantly searching for new activities and ways to use Twitter with their Students. At the same time developers seem to be constantly looking for ways to build on the success of Twitter and develop apps and sites that will extend its functionality and increase its usefulness and usability."

The first step is to grab a text you want to use with your students. I just grabbed the first couple of paragraphs of a BBC News Report. Paste the text into the field and select which type of words you want to remove. Then select the type of activity you want it to be. At present there are 3 choices:

Being able to cut-and-paste a Wikipedia answer about Social Darwinism into an online activity for credit suggests to me the need for more inspired activities, rather than a different technology. There are ways to stimulate thinking, rather than copying, about Social Darwinism -- thinking that you couldn't fake, whether that student is thinking in a classroom or at home. Part of what I take from this article is that schools are using online for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. This shouldn't be an indictment of the medium, but of the way in which it has been integrated into the K12 system.

Daily autonomous online learning for students of EFL and ESL

Daily autonomous online learning for students of EFL and ESL. Translation can be a very useful tool in helping you to learn a language. It can make you think much more closely about the relationship of your language to the language you are learning. Translating also makes you think very carefully about the meaning of the text you need to translate and how to express it in your own language.

Students often expect their teacher to correct their written errors, but students can also learn a lot from looking for and correcting errors in written work. This activity gives you the chance to test your correction skills and find errors in short texts using a site called BookOven and a tool called SpellChecker

LANGUAGES AND LEARNING - THE PATH I HAVE FOLLOWED "with my "Languages and Learning" blog at http://amandasalt.blogspot.com I also joined Twitter, although I found it a lonely and pointless activity initially. I now find it to be one of my main sources of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and also a place where people are generous with their praise and genuine in their concern. A visit to the Isle of Wight for a languages and ICT conference, organised by the amazing Joe Dale (www.joedale.typepad.com), added to my enthusiasm, and as I approach the end of this academic year, I have created a wiki for my pupils (http://spanishingrosvenor.wikispaces.com) and also dabbled with Audacity, Goanimate, Voki, ToonDoo, Animoto and Voice Thread, amongst others.Today I ran workshops on all of these as well as an overview of blogging, Twitter and Diigo."

LANGUAGES AND LEARNING - THE PATH I HAVE FOLLOWED with my "Languages and Learning" blog at http://amandasalt.blogspot.com I also joined Twitter, although I found it a lonely and pointless activity initially. I now find it to be one of my main sources of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and also a place where people are generous with their praise and genuine in their concern. A visit to the Isle of Wight for a languages and ICT conference, organised by the amazing Joe Dale (www.joedale.typepad.com), added to my enthusiasm, and as I approach the end of this academic year, I have created a wiki for my pupils (http://spanishingrosvenor.wikispaces.com) and also dabbled with Audacity, Goanimate, Voki, ToonDoo, Animoto and Voice Thread, amongst others.Today I ran workshops on all of these as well as an overview of blogging, Twitter and Diigo.

Info/activities for FL classes - the web reading strategies info is good

Learning and enjoying songs can be a great way to improve your listening, vocabulary and pronunciation. In this activity we are going to use two websites to help you find, listen to and memorize the words of a song. First you'll use YouLyrics to find the words and a video of the song, then you will use MemorizeNow to help you learn and remember the words.

Translation can be a very useful tool in helping you to learn a language. It can make you think much more closely about the relationship of your language to the language you are learning. Translating also makes you think very carefully about the meaning of the text you need to translate and how to express it in your own language. Translation is also a valuable skill and one that could help you to get work. Today's activity uses a site called Social Translator where you can find lots of translated videos, and texts and some that are waiting to be translated.

Automatically generate a range of interactive browser-based activities based on any text of up to 500 words.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is a public voice of mathematics education, providing vision, leadership, and professional development to support teachers in ensuring mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students. With 100,000 members and 250 affiliates, NCTM is the world's largest organization dedicated to improving math education in preK‑12. The Greek mathematician Archimedes approximated pi by inscribing and circumscribing polygons about a circle and calculating their perimeters. Similarly, the value of pi can be approximated by calculating the areas of inscribed and circumscribed polygons. This activity allows for the investigation and comparison of both methods. Instructions:   In this applet, polygons are inscribed and circumscribed around circles. The area of the polygons around a circle of radius 1 are calculated on the left, and the perimeter of the polygons around a circle of diameter 1 are calculated on the right. Change the value of n to increase or decrease the number of sides in the polygons, and notice how the calculations of the areas and perimeters begin to approximate pi.

February is Black History Month. Here's a word list to add to your lesson plans! This list can be used to play all of the games and activities on our site. http://www.spellingcity.com/view-spelling-list.html?listId=2851114

VocabularySpellingCity is a fun way to learn spelling and vocabulary words by playing engaging learning games using any word list. The most popular activities are Spelling TestMe, HangMouse, and our vocabulary games, available to Premium Members. The most popular word lists are Sound Alikes, Compound Words, Hunger Games and SAT Words. This is a free app!

ESL movie activities

"Text2Phonetics is a very handy site if you like to use phonemic script with your students. It can take a lot of the hard work out of transcribing text to phonetic symbols. You just paste in a short piece of text, click a button, and it does it for you."