VOICETHREADS

THURSDAY CLASS
Little Charly's Adventures - Tiana, Colline, Coralie

The little girl who talked to animals - Justine, You and Celia

The princess and the flowers - Lamia, Aurore and Leslie


MONDAY CLASS
The Princess and the Fisherman - Aurore and Sylvain

A Mermaid adventure - Mathilde and Mandy

Mensah and Akilah - Mamadou and Gabriel

Brown skin - Betty and Nélia

The lost Necklace - Claire, Nabila and Justine

David's adventure - Charlene, Jennifer and Christopher

Questionnaire to be filled in class

This is the link to the Questionnaire I would like you to take a moment to fill out IN CLASS. Kindly do NOT do so at home.
See you all very soon for our last class this year :-)

Voicethreads

Please do not forget to add an activity at the end of your stories, an activity that you could suggest for other teachers to try out if they were to use your story.
After "THE END" of your story, you will need one slide in which you explain the activity that you suggest that students do and one slide where you actually DO the activity (video, photos, etc).... 

Good luck

Dont forget....

1. To mention in one introductory paragraph for EACH podcast written activity WHERE you have taken the podcast from: university, speaker, duration of the podcast.

 2. To dedicate one entire blog entry to all the new vocabulary (and/or pronunciation) that you have learnt over the course of the semester.

3. That your final blog entry will be a reflective one where you will think about your own learning of English. You will enlist the difficulties you encountered, steps you had to take to overcome those difficulties. Do you think your language improved? If so, how?

Deadlines closing in ....

Hello everyone, hope you have been consistently working on your tasks.

This is a quick reminder of your fast approaching deadlines. 

You should have finished your first 'stories through Voicethread' by this week.

You will submit your final 'stories through Voicethread' next week. 

Moreover, your last task with podcasts, which I will be grading, should be put online by the 22^nd of April, 2012.

Just a couple of weeks more and then you're done..... with 'Teaching méthodologies' in the least! 

Just for laughs

Boys who hate writing

Its easier to teach students who LIKE doing something... what when someone doesn't??

Read Web 2.0 for Rookies to understand what I'm talking about

Making your own online story

This is an easy, interactive way to teach beginning learners of English some simple vocabulary. They can also have fun making the story. Click on this link to make your own fantastic little story. 
Have fun :)

Storytelling in teaching

This is the link to the article we looked at in class: Storytelling in teaching  

Reminder

Have you been working on your podcasts lately? 
Don't forget, those will be graded :)
Looking forward to seeing your work

Trying out Wordle

1. Go to the Wordle homepage on:  www.wordle.net 

2. Click on Create

3. Write all the words you had decided to teach with Flickr. Write your title word (for ex: if you were teaching "animals", "animals" is your title word) several times.

4. Click on GO to see Wordle create your word list.

5. At the bottom of your created wordle list, you will see an icon "Ramdomize". Click on that to change the way in which your words can look. You can also change the font, colour, layout etc. (look above the list).

6. When you've decided what you want your list to look like, click on "Open in window". A new window will open. 

7. IF YOU WISH and you know how to, you could then take a screenshot and upload the picture on your blog. 

Happy Wordling !!

You can see my created word list on Wordle - 

TIP: Java needs to enabled in its latest version for this to work.... that's why we couldn't do it in class! 

Check out the 52 interesting ways to use Wordle in the classroom. If you have more ideas, do share them on your blog.  

The debate on Facebook

I see that most of you unanimously believe that there should be a distinction between "living" and "learning". In other words, as Mandy says, "there is a moment to learn and there is a moment to go on Facebook." I really liked that, Mandy! :-)

But if all our teachers had believed in this difference, they would never have used the radio or the television in teaching either. The radio was a familial moment, when the family gathered around to listen to the news and the songs that followed them. The television was also a means of entertainment, right? What about the videos on YouTube that we watch all the time in the classroom and outside? Aren't they supposed to be purely for 'having fun'? When did all these "tools" become adept for teaching? 

And I answer, when the teachers did NOT make this difference between "learning" and "life". For isn't life all about learning and learning all about life? How can we then make the distinction?

Take any online or offline tool from anywhere. It is how teachers USE these tools that determine if the tool is good enough or not, and not the tool by itself. Is this making sense? 

Here's a video that illustrates how a (junior) high school history teacher uses Facebook in her classes. Do watch it and leave your comments on my blog. That way we know what everyone has to say about this most interesting debate. Everyone is free to have an opinion, you know that!! :-)

Sarah Romeyn and her History class

Food for thought

Do you think it is possible to incorporate a social networking website like Facebook for teaching English as a foreign language? Why or why not?
How would you do so as a primary/ middle/ high school teacher? 
Any concrete ideas on how you would use a particular element from Facebook?

Videos used Week 3

The first video we watched  about the history of technology in education
The second video looked at the multifarious functions of a blog: What are blogs? Blogs in plain English
The third video was based on Ten ways to use your Edublog

IMPORTANT INFORMATION YOU NEED TO KNOW

THIS CONCERNS THE MONDAY BATCH OF STUDENTS ONLY (3.30-5.30 pm)
I have confirmed with the teacher concerned. We can use LAB 112 (MLC) for our class on the 20th of February. Please inform as many people of our class as you can. Though as I warned you before, you had better be looking at my blog regularly ...
So, you don't need to carry your laptops on that day. We will be in the same multimedia laboratory we were at for our first class.

Blogging to learn

We worked on an extract of this in class. Here's the link to the complete article:
"Blogging to learn" by Anne Bartlett-Bragg
Its opens into a .pdf file so you may save it for future use.

An interesting talk I found

You could watch it by clicking on the link "How to learn? From mistakes"

You will find an interactive transcript and information about the talk and the speaker on the right of the page.
The talk lasts about 10 minutes, so its certainly not very long.
Do watch it when you have a spare moment and reflect on her speech. What kind of teaching is this teacher providing? How does she teach? Would you, as a student, like to learn in the way she teaches? Why or why not?
You could reply to these questions by commenting on my blog itself .... :-) 

The first two weeks

We watched a few videos. Here are their links:
Are kids different because of digital media?
The 21st century Learner

You were expected to watch:
History of the Internet
The revolution of the Internet in 1993

And finally:
The machine is us/ing us