Web 2.0: useful tools for teaching

Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of websites that allows users to interact and collaborate with one another as content creators in a virtual community using, wikis, blogs, web applications, social networking sites or video sharing sites.

Other examples of web 2.0 sites are Word Clouds and Voki. Both of them are useful tools to innovate in the classroom and they are very easy to manage.

As regards word clouds, they are the visual representation of a short text. There are different online free generator which allows you to create an image where the words are mixed and have different shapes, colours and size. These features vary according to the most important words. Which means that you can choose the words you would like to highlight or make your students pay attention to.

Voki is a web tool in which you can create a personalize “avatar”. In this web, you can choose either to record yourself or to insert a text and Voki does it for you. It is a useful teaching resource since teachers can either do different activities or ask students to work with it.

Here we would like to share with you a didactic sequence thought for a group of seventh graders, in which we include word clouds and voki so as to teach the seasons and the weather .

First of all, we are going to show students a word cloud as a pre-reading activity, in order to activate students prior knowledge about the topic and to anticipate the content of the text. The word cloud simple visual emphasis will allow us to highlight the most important words and help students preview what text might be about.

After working with the word cloud, students will work with a text in which they have to complete with the seasons and the weather. Before students read the text,we will work with the meaning of the words they need to use to complete the blanks and then we will work with the pronunciation of those words.

This is the picture dictionary students will use to complete the text.

This is the text in which students have to complete the blanks.

Once students complete the text, they will check their answers with a voki (this voki will be created by us). Also, as a post reading activity, students will create a voki in order to check pronunciation. The task consists in choosing an avatar and record themselves describing their favourite season of the year. We might do this activity on the computer lab so students can use the microphone.

Reference

• Rouse,M. (n.d) "What is Web 2.0?"

Blended Learning in the EFL Lessons

Nowadays, technologies have a great impact on education, thus influencing teaching and learning. For this reason, we consider that blended learning could be a good way of including technology in the classroom.

Blended Learning

By integrating technologies in their lessons, teachers can increase learners’ motivation and create positive attitudes towards the foreign language. Since the web offers a wide range of materials to develop a certain topic- such as, authentic texts, graphics and pictures, videos, songs, interactive web pages, blogs and social networks- teachers can profit from them to make students’ learning more meaningful by selecting and adapting resources according to the learners´ needs.  However, this does not mean that face-to-face learning is not valid. On the contrary, face-to-face learning provides learners with appropriate explanations for those abstract aspects and concepts of the foreign language, which might not be clear enough for students to work them out on their own.

According to Parterrieu (2015), face-to-face teaching provides the opportunity to create a good atmosphere to get to know students better and to develop effective activities and tasks for them. Also, learning a foreign language, might be a difficult or overwhelming task for students, and teachers can reduce this negative emotions and support learners with useful strategies to approach the language.

All in all, we consider that blended learning gives us the opportunity to innovate in our lessons by introducing interesting topics and by carrying out online tasks. Besides, it benefits students in the sense that a meaningful context is given and they can manage their own learning process.

References

• Itslearningglobal (2013); Blended learning in 2 minutes and 38 seconds
• Parterrieu, Sophie (2015), Why we still need face-to-face teaching in the digital age

Rethinking our teaching practices: Hugo Pardo’s talk.

Last month, we were invited to a talk held by Hugo Pardo Kuklinski about “Educacion y cultura digital” at Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias (FHUC), in Santa Fe. At the conference, Kuklinski presented the results of his last two projects: “Circópolis” in Salta and “SERO laboratorio vivo” in Medellin, Colombia; at the same time that he shared with us those experiences, he stated some of the key points teachers should consider when acting as “Intrapreneurs”.

Hugo started his talk saying that “Education and pedagogy need to be rethought”. This comment didn’t surprise us, since it is very well-known that there are important aspects in education to reconsider. As future teachers, we are constantly studying new approaches and strategies to improve and adapt our practices to the learners’ needs and interests. Therefore, we were expecting that this man, who is PhD in Communication Studies, told as something new.

However, everything changed when he began to show us videos of his experiences in Salta and Colombia.  Kulinski ‘s talk became more interesting when he stated that after doing some research, he realised that “despite including ITC in the classroom , there are still issues to consider in education”. We completely agree with his statement and that means that we have some interests and queries in common. For this reason, we would like to share with you, some of the ideas that Pardo suggested in his presentation.

At the talk, Hugo introduced the concepts of “digital revolution” and “ teachers as intrapreneurs”  in order to put forward his idea of “changing education logics” by taking into account the following points:

• Differentiation of contents, methods and nets. 

• Create a personal brand.

• There are always opportunities, even for new profiles.

• If you play ecstatic, you lose. 

• “Anywhere” is a classroom.

• Take care of the new.

• New postdigital language.

• Write your own manifest.

• We all are designers of experiences.

• Experts in the new liquidity. 

In our opinion, although he had quite a business-oriented view, he seemed to have innovative ideas and good intentions, such as motivating teachers to “try” new things in the classroom, which may be useful to tackle with some of the problems school is facing nowadays. 

It was also evident that Kulinski is more a businessman than a teacher, since most of the time, he was selling his projects and ideas without taking into consideration the different school contexts. In addition to this, we found some of his ideas rather contradictory, for example: he tried to convince the audience (teachers, in particular) of taking more risks and trying new things in their lessons, but he gave up teaching at university because his strategies didn’t work for some of his students.

To conclude, we found this experience really fruitful. It is true that some of Hugo’s opinion about teaching were a kind of “far-fetched” . However, we consider that, as future teachers, we should take into account his ideas and adapt them to our learners’ need and contexts.

There is nothing to lose. Just let’s offer our students new learning experiences which allow them to express themselves and inspire them to finish school and fulfill their dreams.

Reference

•  Pardo Kuklinski, Hugo (2016). "Educación y Cultura Digital". Universidad Nacional del Litoral-Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias. Santa Fe

Technology Integration through Prezi presentation

Whether to include technology in a regular lesson or not could be problematic if you do not know how to do it properly. For this reason, we designed a didactic sequence to show you how to include a Prezi presentation in the language classroom in a meaningful way. This sequence, which is supposed to last 80 minutes, was thought for a group of 1st year students at a secondary state school with an A1 level of English. The aim of the presentation is to provide the students with the opportunity to practice the language, focusing their attention on the features of the description. This is to assess what they have understood up to this moment. It is important to bear in mind that students are in the process to produce a final outcome, which is to design and describe their “ideal house” to present it to the whole class with a Prezi presentation. They are going to work in groups of five students and each member has to describe one room of their house. This lesson will be developed before students start writing their final task. In previous lessons, students have already worked with the vocabulary, the grammar content, the conventions for writing a description and they have also designed their houses and made a check list of the information they want to include in their descriptions. Below there is a brief description of how we developed the lesson: First of all, we presented students a pre-reading task to hypothesize about the pictures they could see (e.g. to guess whose family these rooms belong to, recognize and name the parts of the house and the pieces of furniture). After that, students read two texts silently from the slides and matched them with the correct picture. Finally, as a post reading task, students reconstructed two texts. The aim of this activity was to make students notice and explore the target features of this type of descriptions, in this case: there is/are, vocabulary related to furniture and prepositions.

Click here to have access to our Prezi presentation.

In 2006, Puentedura suggested the “SAMR model”  as a resource for teachers to evaluate technology integration in the classroom. The following video explains what SAMR is.

Assessing our presentation according to the SAMR model, we consider that our proposal is at the transformation level (modification). Prezi was a useful tool for the pre-reading task because of its zooming function which allowed us to fulfill the purpose of the activity: encouraging students to focus on details. Although for the reading task the role of technology is just to substitute the worksheet, Prezi freedom of movement makes the use of the texts meaningful in this context. In this sense, the matching activity was simplified thanks to the function that helped us move forward and backward from text to image.
Moreover, for the reconstructing task, Prezi meant a significant tool to redesign the activity making it practical and interactive.
It is useful to take this model into account because it will help you asses if your presentation is relevant enough to reach your purposes. By doing this evaluation, you can realize if it is completely necessary to use tech or if it can be easily replaced by other traditional resources.

References

• Candance, M (). SAMR in 120 Seconds
• Spencer, John (2015). What is the SAMR Model and what does it look like in schools?

Digital literacies in the language classroom

Hockly defined Digital Literacy as “our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal.” As future teachers, having this competence is highly important when designing digital materials, since it helps us to evaluate if the sources are reliable. Moreover, the development of digital skills allows us to decide which are the best sources to create materials that are relevant for our students.

In order to provide you with an example on how to assess webpages, here is a brief analysis of the site: "Discovery Education: Puzzlemaker". After taking into consideration different aspects such as, reliability, objectivity, clarity, currency and accessibility, we conclude that:  It is a valuable source since we can create the material with the topic and vocabulary we choose. The games offered by the webpage, which are very popular among children, teenagers and adults, are easy to design in this site. As we provide the words or phrases, we are able to manipulate the difficulty of the task. Furthermore, it only took some minutes to create a nice and enjoyable activity.

We used the site mentioned above to create a puzzle in the context of a project about climate change and human impact on the environment.

The following task is part of a lesson plan in which students are given the opportunity to review the new vocabulary. For this reason, we designed a crossword in which pupils have to fill in the sentences with the missing words and then complete the crossword. The phrases that appear in the following puzzle are related to "solutions to save the planet” that students have seen in previous lessons. 

Hope you like the puzzle and try using the site to create your own material!

References 
- Nicky Hockly (2013) "Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care?" . Retrieved from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/digital-literacies-what-are-they-why-should-we-care
- Discovery Education:Puzzlemaker

Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives controversy

Prensky coined these two terms to distinguish people born before and during the Digital era.  In his own words “Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology…Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet”. But, what about the rest who were not born in the digital world? According to Prensky, you have to be on one side or the other. i.e, if you did not have access to technology since birth, then you are a Digital Immigrant.

Retrieved from https://larrycuban.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/keefe.jpg

Nowadays, we are facing a dichotomy whether Digital Native students should learn the old ways, or Digital Immigrant educators learn the new. This view has generated a great deal of heated debate in the educational context, since many people believe that digital immigrants are the ones that should adapt to the natives. Unfortunately, many teachers still prefer dealing with something familiar rather than trying something new and keeping up-dated with the Digital natives. The same happens with the natives who are reluctant to learn in the traditional fashion.

For this reason, we do not agree with Prensky’s distinction as we consider that it is necessary to strike a balance between the different perspectives. Both generations have something to offer to one another and they can profit from that. Not only do we believe that it is necessary for digital immigrants to move forwards, but also it is important that Digital Natives respect and try to deal with classroom situations which do not include technologies or things that are familiar to them. Besides, there are other aspects to consider, such as, schools contexts that may lack the basic technological facilities.

Click here to have access to the complete article.

How valuable is it to design and create your own material?

As future teachers of English as Foreign Language (EFL), it is essential to consider the students' context when designing materials. In this way, we make sure that the materials are relevant and meaningful for learners. In addition to this, there are other important factors to bear in mind apart from contextualisation:

Retrived from
 http://www.anglistikdidaktikwiki.uni-jena.de/images/4/4b/Materials.jpg

• The material should attend to learners’ individual needs.

• The material should be flexible enough to be recycled.

• The layout should be attractive.

• The instruction should be simple and clear.

• The content should respond to the curriculum and at the same time, be organised and up-dated.

Although it may seem a difficult and time consuming task, we highly recommend that you follow these tips since the reward makes the effort worth.

This is just a brief summary of Howard and Major’s (2005) article called "Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials."

Click here to have access to the complete article.