Group items tagged

" iBooks Author is still making the news in the educational sphere. This is probably the first mobile app to be embraced wholly in education in such a short time since its release. After posting a simple and guided tutorial on how teachers can use the different services of iBooks Author , today I am sharing with you some hands-on examples of what students can actually do with it." Nice examples of how to use iBooks Author

Check out the extensive list for topics of interest to EFL/ESL teachers. These are interesting and professional-looking, each about 30-40 min. on embedded video.

This site creates several kinds of activities and games: interactive map, riddles, fill-in, crossword puzzles, dialogue with audio prompts, dictation, jumbled word or sentence, matching, word search, and quizzzes. You can store your creations for repeated use. Thanks to D. Gonzalez for sharing this.

This is a series of low-cost ($1 U.S.) podcasts about various topics in multimedia uses for teaching. The topics include narrated slideshows, telling a digital story, using smartphones, quick edit videos on the iPad, and creating multimedia ebooks. W. Fryer is the author of Playing with Media, also relatively low-cost for ebooks.

"Create and share great video lessons with your iPad or browser." This is a great tool for getting students talking, or for creating a lively presentation. You can upload a picture, or draw from scratch, as on a blackboard or whiteboard. Easy to use, free download, and available from the App Store for smart phone or iPad.

Several suggestions for teaching short poems, and websites with author interviews and poetry readings. Learning how to write poetry will help students appreciate the language better.

"The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and non-examples. This information is placed on a chart that is divided into four sections to provide a visual representation for students."

"The Frayer Model is a vocabulary development tool. In contrast with a straight definition, the model helps to develop a better understanding of complex concepts by having students identify not just what something is, but what something is not." This is an example of a worksheet, which I wasn't able to download in the other citation. The sheet is quite straightforward, and looks useful, insofar as vocabulary can be taught through direct method. Good for important concepts, class discussion, and work with definitions.

"What you see here are candid submissions from people who have engaged in a little exercise. Here's how it works. Think about the word Race. How would you distill your thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words?" This National Public Radio blog makes the perfect starting point for a multicultural lesson for ESL/EFL students. The entries are sheer poetry and give a great deal of content to think about the issue of race and one's place in society, for better or worse. Each 6-word "poem" makes us, as one contributor said, "Look past race to underlying humanity."

"With the advance of web 2.0 technologies, there emerged a wide range of educational tools that we can use with our students in and outside the classroom.Collaborative web tools is one example. Using such websites, teachers will be able to help in holding online and real-time discussions with their students, help them in their projects and assignments, guide their learning, do backchanneling, and synchronously moderate discussion threads and many more." The focus here is on tools for collaboration. Many are new and interesting, such as virtual whiteboards, search team to do online searches together, browse websites together, create online projects collaboratively, create your own chatroom, etc. Some of these will be gone quickly, but they all appear quite useful. About 30 in the list.

"Many schools are currently using Forms as a way to easily and quickly record data from teacher observations. The advantage is of using a Google Form is that it compiles all the data into a spreadsheet which allows school leaders to quickly and easily see trends in the school's classrooms." Suggests that the administrator can also use the Google spreadsheet to collect data on what teachers are doing in the school as a whole. Video shows how to go to the Template and create your own by copying the document. Links to template, which has an auto-mail feature.

A search engine for apps, organized first by the type of interface you are using: mobile, desktop, browser, or web (or all). May create some good short-cuts in the elusive quest for the perfect app.

"ScheduleHangout is great for scheduling group hangouts on Google+ Invite your guests, give them a few date options and ScheduleHangout does the rest. We'll help you organize the Hangout session around your friends/colleagues optimized availability." This may be a way to organize Google+ a little.

"The invention of the LMS (Learning Management System) was a mistake. And here I'm not going to make the same frustrated argument made numerous times before now that LMSs are limiting structures, that their interface and functionalities control how teachers teach online (although those things are true). The LMS was a mistake because it was premature. In a world that was just waking up to the Internet and the possibility of widely-networked culture, the LMS played to the lowest common denominator, creating a "classroom" that allowed learning -- or something like learning -- to happen behind tabs, in threaded discussions, and through automated quizzes. The LMS was not a creative decision, it was not pushing the capabilities of the Internet, it was settling for the least innovative classroom practice and repositioning that digitally. As a result classes taught within its structure generally land with a dull thud. No matter how creative and inspired the teacher or pedagogue behind the wheel, the LMS is no match for the wideness of the Internet. It was born a relic -- at its launch utterly irrelevant to its environment and its user." Very thought-provoking article on how digital pedagogy really differs from just "teaching online."

"If you're the "techy" person in your school but you're not in the IT department sometimes your colleagues come to you with their tech help questions before heading to the IT folks. Sometimes those questions come over the phone and you find yourself trying to explain where to click next or struggling to understand the problem the other person is trying to explain. That's when it's handy to have a screen sharing tool readily available. Here are five that are quick and easy to use." Actually, these screen-sharing tools might be really great for seeing what your students are doing, or to allow remote collaborations.

This looks like a cute app for the very young. You upload pictures and arrange them in a set, create one or more questions for each, which you record. The user taps to hear the questions and taps a place on the picture to answer it. TinyTap also has a market with free and purchaseable games already made. Lots of potential for ESL vocabulary practice, since once you get by the interface it doesn't look childish at all.

"A whole course can be organized around a wiki as shown here, an excerpt from the upcoming Multimedia Kit, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" which will include his book of the same name, a video, and a facilitator's guide from Corwin (corwinpress.com)." A concise (3 min) video on how to organize a course using wikis, with interviews with students. The course also uses Diigo to annotate readings. One students says it really makes her a better reader. As you read others' annotations, "It's really another way of having a discussion."

This looks like a great invention. As you are watching a video, take notes and the timeline codes will automatically link your notes to the portion of the video you were watching. The note tool will embed your video from YouTube, Khan Academy, or any of a number of sites, with the note-taking apparatus beside the video. Students might take notes of you or another lecturer in a flipped environment, and then compare each other's notes for review. Appears to be free so far.

This important article by the ACTFL discusses how the U.S. Common Core standards can be aligned with the National Standards for Learning Languages. Presents several diagrams and other visuals to help teachers see the crossovers for each skill--reading listening, speaking, and writing--in presentational and interpersonal modes, and how culture is woven into the whole.

These are divided by subject matter, and each has a short description, so it's not as daunting a list as appears at first glance. Take some time to explore the content areas, many of which are useful for language learners, such as Daily Haiku. There will be many apps with comparable features/functions for Droid-based smartphones and tablets also.