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...

I am very happy because last week I received a mail from bab.la language portal and the Lexiophiles language blog. They told me that  EVC has been nominated for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2011 competition!  EVC is in the category Language Learning Blogs which focuses on blogs discussing technology as part of the language learning process.   Last year, this blog got the fifth position among the Top 10 Language Blogs thanks to the votes of  its followers. Will you vote me this time? Vote for English Virtual Community by clicking on this link

This is the fifth year I develop a blog for adults with an intermediate level of English and I still find students' resistance to use ICT resources as learning tools. What make things even more disappointing is the fact that teachers are not very eager to use the blog either. This does not happen with teachers with ESL courses for kids.  I was worried about this bad predisposition and asked blog developers from other schools about their experiences and they told me they have the same problem. Why do we have this problem with adults? I met Graham Stanley on chat and asked him for a piece of advice. He reminded me about the gap between digital inmigrants and natives. After Prenski's article " H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom", I thought this gap has disappeared but it has  not. Kids and teenagers can spend nearly the whole day in front of the PC because they do not use it only for doing school homework,  but also for ...

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