English Virtual Community

Yesterday I took a KET course to the computer room. Let  me share my lesson plan with you: - I prepared a questionaire. They were about 10 questions such as:  what is the level course? , how many students are there in the class? Do they have laptops/computers/ smartphones/ tablets? , how many students have wifi at home, etc.) - I asked the students to take a sheet of paper and write✎ down the questions. - Then I asked them to gather in pairs or groups of three and go to different courses to get the answers. They had 20 minutes for this task. - While the students were doing the questionaire, I went to the computing room and turned on the computers. - I wrote the digital activities to do on the board: Open Word, Set Arial Font, size 14 for the title and 12 for the text, Copy the questions and the answers, Enrich your text with images downloaded from Internet, Edit the images,  Revise spelling using the spell checker, Include your names, course code ...

Making a comic strip may be a very attractive a activity for ESL learners of all levels. (Read about " comic strips " in Wikipedia) There are different tools to make comic strips but this post will be devoted to Bitstrips- an online tool Advantages: Bitstrips is free Registration is optional You can log in with your Facebook account Students can create comics and their own characters Students create dialogues using vocabulary they know Bitstrips s timulates imagination and creativity because everything, from characters to complex backgrounds, is customizable. Sharing: Bitstrips is embeddable on blogs and wikis ! Disadvantages: Students may spend too much time designing their comics, so it is advisable to work on the script before sitting them in front of the PC. Characters can only be human Bitstrips is suitable for tweens with some tech skills. Possible Activity: Creating Story boards . After watching a movie in your class, you can even h...

School year is about to start in Argentina and I am thinking about which tools I can suggest teachers to use in their IT projects. We can start talking about Google docs which can be used for IT projects with students and colleagues. Let's watch a Plain English video to understand the concept of this fantastic tool. Personally, I do not save my files in the hard disk any more. I use Google Docs because I have access to all my files from any computer with Internet conection.  Sharing files is very useful and important. I hardly take xerox copies or print documents. I just share my files with the people I am working with. Google Docs not only reduces our shelves burden with piles of sheets of paper but also contributes to   protect the environment. Here is an example of an IT poject using Google presentations: Spring in art

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 Y ou 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:  My avatar http://n4icablaplata.blogspot.com/search/label/voki http://n3-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/voki http://n2-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/...