Students using their cellphones to learn

Do you let your students have their cellphones on in your class or do you ask them to turn them off ? 

Cellphones have not been well received in the educational arena because they are considered a distracting "toy" .  But cellphones are an essencial item in the screen agers' lives. Do you doubt about this statement? Look at the infography below: 

Via: STUDYBLUE.com

So, as educators, let's understand and explore with our students the possibilities cellphones offer to include them in our classes. 

You can start with very simple tasks such as taking photos with a purpose such as to illustrate a piece of writing. As you and your students get familiar with different softs, you can do more challenging projects: slide shows and short films!

When I attended Virtual Educa Buenos Aires, there was a workshop called "Short-films" using cellphones. I liked the idea very much because short films may help students to improve their narrative literacy, and understanding how stories work. Short films focus on a single idea - they usually run between 30 and 10 minutes. They are excellent beginning points for engaging students in discussions. 

Watch the 2010 winning short film to have an idea of how creative students may be :)

You will find plenty of tips and ideas about the topic in the following links:

http://blog.remind101.com/
http://mediateacher.squarespace.com/teaching-short-films/
How to make a cellphone fill in 5 easy steps
http://cinescopophilia.com/tips-for-making-films-on-your-mobile-cell-phone/

Wording by bab.la

Daniel Johansson from the bab.la team has sent me a mail asking to spread the news about a new product called Wording  a very useful tool for those who want to improve their writing.

Wording acts as a correct sentence structure checker. It is ideal for English language learners  to improve the use of collocation, diction and syntax in their writing when choosing the appropriate sentence pattern. 


For example, by associating correct examples of prepositions with common language usage to give you the best suggestions for the proper preposition. 
 

I would like to remind the reader that bab.la offers students some other tools such as quizzes and games to study/revise the English language. 

Link: http://en.bab.la/wording/ 

Northfield School launches its own magazine

Susana Giambruni told me that the school where she works, Northfield School, was planning to publish a magazine. She kindly asked me to contribute with an article about IT. I love writing, so I immediately accepted her proposal.

My article was titled: "Do not fear IT" and was specially intended for parents and teachers who still despise and keep off digital technology. I tried to convince the reader that technology is not a calamity, but a good excuse to share adults' time, experience and knowledge with our students or children using the tools they are so fond of.

I sent my lines to Daniela Barbariol, NFS MAG Coordinator, who told me she would send me two copies of the magazine. 

 

I received the copies last week and I was completely amazed not only at the excellent presentation and quality of the copies ,but also at the very interesting project described in the different sections of the magazine NFS offers to the community . 

NFS MAG staff has done a very good job and I am really honored to be invited as a contributor.

Congratulations!

  

 

Creating Speaking Avatars

http://www.voki.com

is an excellent tool to develop students' imagination and practise the English language. 

Advantages: 

• It is free and embeddable in blogs and wikis
• Registration is optional
• Stimulates imagination and creativity
• Young learners love it !

Disadvantages:

• Students may spend too much time on the avatar's design
• You may not record your voice properly
• Embedding avatars on blogs may be difficult for teachers and students with weak tech - skills

Possible Activities:

1- Introduce yourself, say what you did last weekend, say your plans for next holidays, etc. 
2- Teacher asks questions about a given topic and Students write the answers in the section "comments" in Blogger .

I have used it with young learners and the results were very good. Let me show you some examples: 
http://n4icablaplata.blogspot.com/search/label/voki
http://n3-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/voki
http://n2-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/voki

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this tool. If you want to do something different at the computer room, read more about VOKI 

If you click on the following LINK, you will find ready made lesson plans to use VOKI.