English Virtual Community

This will be one of many posts devoted to my online English students. In this opportunity the material is related to "Giving opinions" ( intermediate level) Activity one: Turn on the speakers, watch this video . Pay attention the speaker will ask you to repeat after him. Activity two: Activity two: Watch this excellent video about the topic and take notes in order to define these words/expressions in our chat session: opinion dialogue debate heated debate hot topic give your two cents sit on the fence expert witness political party

This year I have had a new challenge:  the responsibility of coordinating the team that has re-designed the website of the School of Languages of La Plata. It has been built on a PLONE platform. Learning how to administer PLONE and working with web programmers and coordinators of different areas has been an interesting as well as enriching experience.  In this section you can see the list of blogs I administrate for the School and where IT projects are uploaded :

When I coach teachers on how to use web 2.0 tools, I can see that they need to achieve strategies for creating and managing IT learning environments to get students really engaged in the task proposed. Many teachers think IT sessions cannot be related to what they are doing in class :(  , so students cannot see the purpose of the session and take it as a break to "play and have fun".  For this purpose, IT classes require teacher's skills of the web2 tools to make the IT session or project work well. If teachers show uncertainty they will experience chaos instead of flow. Teachers must be familiar with the tools but be flexible if a new situation appears. What do I mean by flexible?  Digital natives are not afraid of exploring the web, so they may ask for other possibilities the tool may offer whichthe teacher may not know. So, my piece of advice is do not panic or feel uncertain. Just be honest and say you do not know about that possibility , and that you will...

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...