The Future of Learning

Rethink before you type by Trisha Prabhu

Cyber Safety Tips for Kids and Teenagers

How the digital revolution is changing learning

Google Classroom

Classroom is a new tool in Google Apps for Education that helps teachers create and organise assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently and communicate easily with their classes.

This video shows how the tool works for teachers and students. In this video, you will learn how to set up classes and add students, create assignments, and review student work.

Maya Angelou's Biography by Catarina Sá

Vyclone - Social Video Editing

Vyclone is a social video platform that lets you co-create, sync and edit multiple views of a shared moment, effortlessly. It is a free service for collaboratively editing videos on your iPhone, on your Android phone, or on the web (does not work in Firefox, only with IE 10 or Chrome). It can be an incredible ELT resource if you assign your students with a group project, for example. Give it a try!

How it works:

Credits: Vyclone

Setting true goals for school tasks

To check some ways of really doing it, as far as ELT is concerned, please visit:
- Writing Tasks;
- British & American Festivals and Holidays.

Twitter as an ELT Tool

image credits: Edudemic

For educators and professionals working in the English language teaching sphere, Twitter can be a great tool to aid professional development. Creating a profile on Twitter marks the first steps to developing your own online presence and allows you to build connections with others in your industry within an open community space.

So from helping your students in the classroom to giving your online presence a boost, here are some simple suggestions on how to make sure you’re tweeting the right way!

1. Follow the right crowd
You’ve set up your Twitter account. One of the first things you’ll want to do is start following others in the educational area who share your teaching interests. Accounts with a large amount of followers may be industry leaders, but seeing who your colleagues and peers follow will also help you decide which accounts are most relevant to you.

To help you get started, here are just a few examples.They help keep you updated with everything that’s going on in the world of ELT and blended learning:

@SirKenRobinson

@Edudemic

@web20classroom

@Microsoft Education

@Learn4OurFuture 

 
@anacf3

2. Share your own expertise
Communication is a two-way street. As well as a research tool to find relevant news, it’s crucial to make sure that you’re also tweeting information which will be of interest to your community. Keep in mind who will be reading your tweets.

3. Reach out to other professionals
One of the best things about Twitter is that it opens channels of communication with people who you may otherwise not get a chance to speak to. Don’t be afraid of approaching people you’ve never met or industry influencers you follow, and responding to interesting tweets they post. Think of Twitter as a way to casually network without the awkwardness of small talk and empty silences. It’s great for connecting with people you may have met in passing at conferences or events. What’s more, meeting someone in real life after you’ve already spoken to them on Twitter immediately establishes some common ground and always helps to make that first meeting feel a bit more familiar.

4. Manage your twitter presence
For those serious about using Twitter as a professional tool, one of the things you’ll definitely want to consider is using a desktop application to manage your profile. Popular options include TweetDeck and Buffer. If you’re too busy during your working day to tweet, the apps allow you to schedule posts in advance and respond to tweets through a user-friendly interface. All of these apps offer free-to-access options, so do take a look!

5. Measure your influence
Finally, if you’re well on your way to becoming a tweet-a-holic, then the last thing you’ll probably want to do is to take a look at how well you’re doing in terms of social engagement. So to make sure that your tweets are reaching all the right people, there are plenty of tools out there which offer statistics  for Twitter. A place to look is Klout which will give you a score between 1-100 to represent your influence.

Papyrus - ebook creator

Papyrus is a Web 2.0 tool to create and edit ebooks collaborately and in a very easy and intuitive way. The platform allows you to export the book in a pdf, Kindle and e-pub format. Once you have finished, you may sell your book on the main online bookshops.

The free version is quite simple, clean and, as I said before, intuitive. The only if is that you will face a limit of 5000 words, unless you want the full version for $20.

It's a great tool to work collaborative writing, without using the same old wikis and the final product is worth the effort! Give it a try...

Using Video to Reinvent Education

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

Creating Video Questionnaires

Intervue.me is a website based on the use of webcams. The site enables users to create questionnaires and then get the recipients of the questionnaire to leave video recorded answers. The site is very easy to use.

Register the go to 'My Dashboard' and click on 'Create New' to start your first questionnaire.

First you decide on the levels of privacy you want for the questionnaire and whether you want people to be able to leave anonymous answers or add comments to the answers.

Next you click on 'Start adding questions'.

You can type in your question and give more explanation below the question if you think that makes it clearer. You can add as many questions as you want. You'll also need to click on 'Edit title' so that you can give your questionnaire a name.

Once you have added all your questions you can just click on 'Share' or 'Invite' to either get a URL for your questionnaire or to email it to specific people.

Then once people receive the questionnaire they just click on the questions and record their answers using the webcam in their laptop.

To see all the videos you can just go to 'My Dashboard' and click on the 'Videos' tab.

How to use Intervue.me with students:

• Create comprehension check questions to go with reading homework so that students also do some speaking for homework.
• Create opinion polls for students to answer.
• Make action research questionnaires
• Play the alibi game and get students to explain where they were and what they were doing at particular points in time.
• Ask students about childhood memories.

Source: Nik's Learning Technology Blog

Implementing Blended Learning

Source: gettingsmart.com via TRACIE'S on Pinterest

Getting Students Familiar with Teacher Website

image credits: memorialpto

While teacher websites appear to be more popular, I have many colleagues who lament the fact that, halfway through a semester, many of their students have never found one. In order to ensure that my students at least know mine is there and how to find it, I have several ‘homework’ assignments that rely on them personally going to the site.

Student Information Form – Can I get this information from our school’s student information system? Yes.  But…to reduce time spent on administrivia, and have useful data for me accessible from anywhere, I now have students complete their student information from a Google Docs form embedded in my site. It is required first night homework, can be accessed from school computers and must be done in order to gain entry into class the next day.

Photo/Email Assignment – I generally put up a page of interesting photos related to my subject. You can find many that are in the public domain. Recently I chose photos from my last trip to Japan. Students are required to email me (we await Google Voice and the ability to call/text here in Canada) with their favorite photo and why. I learn a bit about them – but most importantly – I now have an email address for them.

Web-Posted Homework – Once in the first 5 or 6 days of class I announce that the homework will be posted on the website ONLY. I ensure that it is already up there by the end of class so students can easily access it from school computers.

Practice Tests/Quizzes –  I frequently will post a practice test prior to assessing student’s knowledge. In my area of languages this can be an audio clip, a reading multiple choice test or a straight ‘paper’ quiz. Students know that I do this. To reward those that find it I sometimes use the practice quiz as the real one. I may only do it once a semester, but students learn that practice can make (almost) perfect.

“You have a site?” is one question that I don’t hear from my students. Requiring them to use it in Week 1 means that they know it is there!

Source: Edudemic

Teacher 2.0

Visit Teacher 2.0

Classroom 2.0

Visit Classroom 2.0

Glogging about myths

Basic Rules of Social Media

Source: hypebot.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

Project-based Learning: creating a viral video

The sharing and re-sharing of videos via email and through Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly given rise to the phenomenon of ‘viral’ videos.

It goes without saying that shared video content is more popular than ever before, with more than 48 hours worth of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Given that YouTube is the most popular video sharing website on the web, and only six years old, there is huge potential for virtually any video content to go viral.

What Is A Viral Video?

A viral video is quite simply a video that becomes popular through internet sharing. As a platform for sharing, social media lends itself and has certainly triggered the drastic increase that we have seen over the last few years. Two of the most viral YouTube videos last year were Kony 2012, which received more than 100 million views in six days, and Gangnam Style, which according to Unruly Media was shared 29 million times!

For businesses it has become a widely used marketing tool; viral marketing dates back to the mid-1990s when marketers wanted to create slogans or taglines that would be spread through word-of-mouth. The latest form of this ‘infectious’ marketing is viral video, which is commonly used as part of a campaign these days.

So what does it take for a video to go viral? We really don’t think there is an answer, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason if we look at some of the videos that have gone viral in previous years. It sounds obvious, but “shareability” is the most important element; the content needs to contain something that deals with topical subjects or characters of importance to people in a cultural context – someone or something that people would want to share and discuss. If the content relates to anything that people are already talking about then it’s bound to be a big hit. Additionally, it needs to be easy to share, so made in a format and tone that users would want to share.

The Project-Based Learning Idea

As a project for your pupils, why not get them to create their very own viral video or viral marketing campaign using video editing software such as iMovie, MoviePlus, YouTube’s built-in movie editor, or Vine? You could have students build out their ideas on a notepad, share with their group, and then start mapping out what each scene might look like. After that, the filming can begin using any camera you have handy! From an iPod Touch to a DSLR, the camera quality is not the important part. While it’s great to have a fancy camera, any camera is better than no camera.

After you film your scenes, you can use the above mentioned video editing tools to start forming your viral video. For a few quick ideas on what makes a video go viral, check out the below videos as they each have a different take on what a film should do to go viral.

Source: Edudemic (sligtly abridged)

Easter Break

Hope you're about to have some days to take a rest and spend some quality time with your family! After dealing with a huge amount of assessments, evaluation documents and postponed tasks, we are going to do just the same... Meanwhile, if you're a social networker, check Teaching & Learning page on Facebook for some news and curiosities. We promise to be back soon. ;)

Have yourself a blessed Easter!