English Virtual Community

Yesterday La Nación newspaper published an article about online dangers for children and teens. According  to a survey conducted by LoJack and  Chicos.net , 56% of Argentine children between 12 and 15 years have shared personal information with strangers in a social network. And 29% have admitted that they have had direct contact with people they met through this medium. The article points out that banning surfing the net is not the way to prevent cyberbulling or sexting. It is advisable to teach children to share  neither personal information online about themselves  not their family without parental permission. Adults should help kids  become aware of the risks they may have if they use and interact with teachnology - PC, cell phone or webcam- without responsibility. Further reading: The article in Spanish Get Net Wise : About Kids' safety Wired Kids org Internet Safety

The international congress : " Inclusión Digital Educativa " ( Digital Educational Inclusion ) took place in Buenos Aires city, on September 1st and 2nd. This congress was  part of the   of digital inclusion policy promoted by the national program "Conectar Igualdad", which has provided more than 3 million netbooks to students and teachers of the state high school  level. This policy is very important for the social and educational future of Argentina. There was one netbook every two teachers  available work in the hands on workshops given. Argentinian authorities are convinced that the netbook the student takes home not only will allow him/her to have the possibility of developing the necessary skills to live and work in the information society, but also it will be an important tool to connect the rest of the family to the Internet.  Local and international speakers gave presentations and workshops about different topics : video games, movie ma...

Vance Stevens visited La Plata, and gave a presentation on PLN. More than 20 teachers came to the School of Languages to listen to him.  Among them was Susana Canelo who came from Del Valle (400km far form the capital of the province of Buenos Aires). Here is a picture of us: If you could not attend this event, you can see the slides of the presentation below these lines: PLN View more presentations from Escuela de Lenguas UNLP . And here is a link to the recording in PodOmatic:  PLN: The paradigm shift in teacher and learner autonomy

As I announced in this blog , last year I was appointed as ICT coordinator at two schools of languages. The experience was really enriching and with great satisfaction I can say that authorities  and teachers are much more interested in digital technology than they used to.  One school opened a  full equipped computing lab and the other changed all the computers for new ones! The beginning Things were not easy. I found a bit of resistance on the teachers' part. They used to think they would have more work for the same money. In a way, it is true that teachers should devote some extra time to update their professional skills or get familiar with any  new teaching material. I insisted on the importance of applying digital technology to language classes, but what was more important , I demonstrated it to them.  From simple tools to more complex ones I started showing them the advantages of the three portals : Google, Yahoo and Hotmail. How teachers can use a m...

educ.ar   is the educational portal of the Argentine Nation created with the support of the Martín Varsavsky Foundation in 2000, but after the economical and political breakdown which took place in Argentina in 2001, the portal needed to be reorganized. In 2003, the re-launching took place in the hands of Alejandro Piscitelli who considers his experience in educ.ar as the most challenging in his life. The aim of educ.ar re-launching was to work for and with Argentine teachers on digital literacy. An initial team of 23 specialists helped teachers and heads of educational institutions to get familiar with the use of ICT. Thus, the portal became one of the most respected online providers of educational contents and was the first educational national portal in Latin America. Actually, it has about 1,450 million of users and about 2,000,000 hits per month.   Educ.ar Mission   To generate opportunities for all the inhabitants of the Argentine Republic to learn no matter ...

Last November I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by Alejandro Piscitelli at Virtual Educa Congress . His presentation, massively attended by specialists on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), was about digital literacy and the Argentine Education system. It was really moving, sometimes ironic and sarcastic. Alejandro showed some acid humour when he opened his presentation with a slide showing an oven and the phrase “We are in the oven” (1) and continued describing with rich vocabulary the educational system resistance to put the use of ICT into practice. (1) It stands for the Spanish local colloquial expression “estamos en el horno” which means we are in a really difficult situation. Piscitelli’s book Alejandro wrote, among other titles, "Nativos Digitales" (2) . Although I had already read quite a lot about the topic in English, I decided to buy his book to know more about his opinion after having heard him at Virtual Educa. Luckily, I...

Graham Stanley spoke about the educational use of Twitter via Wiziq. We had some technological problems, but fortunately Miguel Mendoza (Venezuela) helped me online. Thank you, Mike!!! The session was a completely new experience for the audience - around 25 teachers of different languages - who were not very much familiar with the use of Web 2.0 tools. Here is a link to Graham's presentation. Enjoy it: div style="width:481px;"> sesion de Graham by Nelba Quintana Get your own Virtual Classroom

Last Sunday, Social Networking Congress 2009  finished its first session with great success. Abotu 699 participants from all over the world met on line to listen to ICT specialists and participate in MOODLE forums. The organizing team worked hard and as a testimony of this work you can have all the information about what happened in this event in a MOODLE platform, forums where to interchange knowledge and experience, and a blog. If you were not able to attend the sessions, do not worry. The videoconferences were recorded and and available at http://avealmec.blogspot.com/ Personally, I was very pleased working with so good professionals and warm people. I learned a lot about how to organize  and moderate an online event. I hope ARCALL and AVEALMEC will continue working together in projects like this one.

This post was written by Karen Schweitzer who kindly offered herself to contribute to this blog. Karen Schweitzer, Business School Guide for About.com, writes about online colleges for OnlineColleges.net. Thank you, Karen for this contribution!!! "Incorporating hi-tech learning aids and applications into a study regimen can sometimes make it easier for language learners to learn and retain new information. You can order many of these products for a cost from catalogs or from companies who provide such services. You can also find free options online . Most of the free options work just as well as the paid options and can be used indefinitely without incurring any costs. This list provides information about 5 free online tools that can be used for language learning. ( I will be including more online tools suggested by Karen in future posts, don´t miss them ) : 1- FreeRice - Language learners can give free rice to hungry people by playing this English vocabulary game from the UN F...

I was in Córdoba city (Argentina) on May 27th, 28th and 29th because the local university organized a 3-day-Congress on ICT applied to Language Learning. Teachers from different parts of the country attended the event. The papers were about different topics: use of blogs and forums, webquests, Collaborative Learning, Moodle platform, distance learning, moodle platforms. I found particularly interesting 6-hour-workshop about "How to introduce teachers to the use of ICT in their classrooms" given by Mgtr. Víctor Sajoza Juric who gave us some useful guidance about this issue. Now let me tell you about my experience in the city. I had the fortune to be in Córdoba on "El Cordobazo" (See more info in Wikipedia ) anniversary. The city seemed to vibrate at the rhytm of the drums played by the workers who marched along streets carrying Argentinian flags in the memory of their lost co-workers who died or suffered persecussion during the military dictatorship. Some teachers an...

Yesterday I started a three session teacher training course at Escuela Normal Superior N°3 "Almafuerte"- ISFD 97_Profesorado de Inglés organized by Prof. Patricia Guzmán - Head of the English Area of the Englsih Courses at Escuela Normal Superior N°3 . I had the pleasure to have as participants some colleagues of mine such as : Prof. Anahí Cuestas (Escuela de Lenguas Coordinator of the English area), Prof. Silvana Barboni (teacher at Profesorado de Inglés) and Prof. Silvana Fernández (Literature specialist and teacher at ICAB ) The session started with an introduction to ICT (Information and Communication Techonologies). Then we started exploring Google tools : mail , chat and calendar. The audience consisted of digital immigrants with different levels of computer literacy. Some of them were curious about what blogs and wikis are, and the advantages of having an account in Facebook. Next sessions will be on June 2nd and 12th.

The III National Conference for Teachers of English was held in Concepción del Uruguay from April 22nd to 25th. Teachers from different provinces (Tucumán, Corrientes, Formosa, among others) attended to different presentations at the new local auditorium. The event was fantastically organized by Ma. Laura Perrotta and Roxana Embon. I met Gustavo Gonzalez - vice president of APIBA (Asociación de Profesores de Inglés de Buenos Aires) and vice president of FAAPI (Federación Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Inglés) - who delighted the audience with his energy, videos, music and magic - yes, he performed some magic tricks. I also met Fabiana Parano (photo) who spoke about how to tell a story in L2 and performed "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe. I also spoke with Mady Casco about her material concerned with the first episode of the TV, her series "LOST" and her experience as teacher trainer. I spoke about Worldcall 2008 , presented ARCALL and spoke about mobi...

I went to a Design Exhibition in Buenos Aires last weekend and bought a magazine where I found an interesting article about LAN parties. What is a LAN party? It is a temporary gathering of people together with their computers, which they network together. These local area networks (LANs) come in various sizes, from very small (two people) to very large (more than 10,000 people. The Sweedish DreamHack Winter 2006 entered the guinness book of records because it was the biggest in the world : 10,638 laptops connected to the Net. According to the sociologist, Ana Wortman , Professor at the University of Buenos Aires ( UBA ) :"We can compare LAN Parties with a congress held by technology fans." LAN Parties may have different aims. Some are organized by companies and have economic aims; however, others are held just for the fun of sharing with friends. The latter ones may be held in a garage or a house. Some of the biggest events are Campus Party ( Valencia, Bogotá and San Pablo),...

Yesterday I attended an event called "Mundo Bloggers" (Blogger World) It took place in Buenos Aires and most of the participants were local people. I would like to point out the following: 1) 50% of participants were above their 40s - me among them :-) 2) Although most of the speakers were interesting, I found Santiago Bilinkis' power point presentation the most interesting and Alejandro Oxenford's speech the most enriching. 3) The most successful Argentinian bloggers are two ladies - good for women! - in their early 20s (19 and 25 respectively). If you want to read about them. Their virtual names are: Cumbio (fotolog teen age social leader who was interviewed by the New York Times!) and Conz 4) A 13-old-year boy broadcasted the event alive using http://www.ustream.tv/ Now my question is : According to points 3 and 4 mentioned above, shall we go on teaching with a common blackboard and chalk or maker ????