English Virtual Community

Hello, everybody: I am in front of the pc screen - where else could I be? - thinking about a title for this post and the lyrics of "The Wall" by Pink Floyd came to my mind when they sing: Hey, teachers. Leave the kids alone. Please, read the title of this post with the tune of the song ;) Although Pink Floyd and their fans may insist, teachers cannot leave kids alone. Poor little things, they are learning how to cope with the Internet alone because neither teachers nor parents know much about it :( But I am not going to write about Pink Floyd or music. As I have announced in my previous post, today Ana María Menezes has given a presentation at the School of Languages. If you attended the event, I hope you have enjoyed it and got some ideas to incorporate technology in your classes and stop teaching as decades ago. She started pointing out the differences between how students used to learn before the digital revolution and how they learn now . One of the differ...

I am very happy because Ana Maria Menezes is visiting La Plata next Thursday, August 25th. She kindly accepted my invitation to tour the city and give a presentation at the School of Languages: Homework Assignments using Web 2.0 Web 2.0 has influenced the way we teach. What about homework assignments? Do you assign the same kind of homework you used to have as a student decades ago? Homework can involve much more than reading and writing. She will share a project Ishe has developed with 3 groups of students during the first semester of 2011 at a language institute in Brazil. During the semester, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students apart from doing their traditional homework, also had to carry out tasks in which they used recently learned language to develop dialogues, comic strips, recordings, animations and much more.  BIODATA: Ana Maria Menezes EFL teacher and teacher trainer in Brazil. Head of the EDtech department of Cultura Inglesa Uberlândia. Helps t...