Learning technology teacher development blog

3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations

Published on 2010-05-10 07:50:00

Coming as I do from a background in language teaching that emphasises that the teacher should shut up and get the students to do the talking, I often feel uncomfortable doing conference presentations, many of which still follow the format of; speaker gets up in front of audience with presentation - does presentation - audience listen (try to stay awake) and desperately try to think of a few questions at the end to prove they were awake and listening.One of the gifted- Jamie Keddie.There are of c

3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

Published on 2010-05-03 09:01:00

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.The free trial creature

Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak

Published on 2010-04-20 07:44:00

I discovered Urtak a couple of weeks ago and took an instant liking to it. Urtak is a web based social polling application that enables you to very quickly and easily create online polls and questionnaires.The only thing you require to get started is an email address to register as it is completely free. Here’s a short tutorial showing how it’s done.Watch or download a higher quality video: Urtak tutorialThe polls it creates are pretty simple. You just type in 'Yes , No' questions or state

A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers

Published on 2010-04-03 07:19:00

I've just been brainstorming digital skills that I believe are required by teachers in the 21st Century. So far I've come up with 45 of them.What's striking for me about this is:few of these skills will have been taught to anyone who trained as a teacher longer than 5 years ago.few of these skills are being taught to teachers training now.the 21st century teacher needs to be a pretty amazingly skilled professional.Please look through the list and tick on the ones you believe you have.Teachers Di

Cropping YouTube Videos to Create Activities

Published on 2010-01-13 08:46:00

Using YouTube videos with students can be really great, but finding a video with the exact language you want and at a suitable length with too many other distractions around can be really difficult. That's why SafeShare.TV is so useful.SafeShare.TV is a tool that has two primary functions. The first is to enable you to share YouTube videos using a direct URL that frames the video without the advertising and other distracting features that might cause students to wander off into less suitable mat

10 Teacher Development Task for Web 2.0 Tools

Published on 2009-11-24 14:45:00

Over the last couple of months I've been busy travelling round a bit and doing some face to face training and workshops. As part of the materials for these workshops I created a number of tasks for teachers which I hope will help develop their ability to use technology and to evaluate and create materials using web based tools. I've decide now to share those tasks so anyone who wants to use them to train other teachers or to develop their own skills can take advantage of and make good use of the

Creating an Online Journal for CPD

Published on 2009-10-27 06:11:00

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice.Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can la

Revising Short Texts and Syntax on IWB

Published on 2009-10-01 05:37:00

WordMagnets is a really useful tool that students can either use alone on a computer, or that you can use in class with a projector or IWB.Here's a short video showing you how to use it.You can download a copy of the video here and copy suitable for iPod here.WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange. Here's a text that I quickly copied in

Using Wise Quotes with EFL ESL Students

Published on 2009-07-22 06:27:00

I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.You can search for quotes by keyword, look at quotes of the day, browse quotes by topic or just click for a random quote.That isn't all, iWise is comp

20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

Published on 2009-07-17 06:57:00

Back in November 2008 I published Part 1 of a series of articles intended to explore the use of WebCams in education. I have now finally got round to writing Part 2 which is a collection of 20 activities EFL ESL teachers can do with their students. The post was instigated by Ana Maria Menezes who sent a video message to me through Tokbox asking for suggestions for ways yo exploit it.I've used Tokbox because it is a free online video conferencing tool that enables you to communicate using differe

Brainstorm and Debate Collaboratively

Published on 2009-05-20 13:24:00

This morning I spotted Solvr on MakeUseOf and decided to give it a try. Solvr is a free easy and interesting way to collaboratively brainstorm and attempt to solve problems online.It's very simple set up. You just got to http://www.a.freshbrain.com/solvr/ type your problem into the field and then click 'Start'.You will then see your problem with a number of options underneath.You can add different elements of the problem, make suggestions by adding ideas and leave comments.The collaborative par

Using Online Sticky Noticeboards

Published on 2009-04-13 12:51:00

For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to.You can see a wall that I created here with some notes about Web 2.0 Tools for EFL ESL Teachers.It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are:Uploading an imageChoosing coloursAdding title and subtitle Creating your passwordDec

Getting Video Tasks Online

Published on 2009-02-20 06:32:00

I've been aware of 280Slides for some time now, but haven't really tried to use it much as I'm a very keen user of Keynote on my MAC, but this week I was looking around for ways to get video type lessons online and discovered what an incredibly easy and useful tool 280Slides is for this.Basically 280Slides is an online tool for creating presentations. It works in a very simple way and has a very intuitive interface which is very quick to understand. It has a few basic themes and layouts and you

Can Music Aid Memory of Text?

Published on 2009-02-13 05:25:00

This is a really interesting site that I spotted a little while back. The site was inspired by the late great John Cage, one of the most revolutionary composers of the last century.The site is called P22 Music Text Composition Generator and you can find it at: http://p22.com/musicfont/What the site does is to convert a written text into musical notation with a midi music file to play the notation.It's quite simple to do. You just copy and paste your text into the field, give it a file name (with

Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners?

Published on 2008-12-16 05:12:00

This series of postings are the result of a training presentation I was asked to deliver for Moroccan teachers of English in Kinitra on 15th December 08.To prepare the session I looked back at many of the postings from my blogs over the last 18 months and thought about some of the changes that have been taking place in the way online video sharing has developed.I've split the materials from the session into four sections.Online Video: For Language DevelopmentOnline Video: As CommunicationOnline

Online Video: As Knowledge Resource

Published on 2008-12-15 19:40:00

Since the birth of YouTube, the web has seen huge growth in the availability and quality of user generated online video. With just a simple webcam, or a digital camera or camcorder it is now possible for teachers and students to create and share their knowledge and experience of a vast range of topics. It's also possible for them to access a global pool of knowledge and experience from cultures all over the world.YouTube YouTube was originally set up as an online dating site, but has become one

Online Video: As Communication

Published on 2008-12-15 19:24:00

Over the past couple of years online video communication has been transformed, not only price and quality, but in ease of use and accessibility. This tool has great potential for extending the reaches of our classroom and opening access to much better support for distance learners.Video conferencingVideo conferencing was once a very difficult and expensive activity that required specific software, hardware and in many cases an expensive account with a service provider. You can now do video confe

Online Video: Authentic Genres

Published on 2008-12-15 19:13:00

Over the past few years video sharing websites have become increasingly specialised, bringing about the development of different 'genres' of video sharing sites. As online video increasingly competes with TV this has also brought about the development of genres of 'micro shows'. These are complete episodes of shows that take place within 2 - 5 mins. This is an ideal length both for or 'digital native' students with their characteristically shorter attention span, but also for our English langua

Online Video: For Language Development

Published on 2008-12-15 19:02:00

There are now a number of online video sharing communities that are specifically designed to support the development of language and communication skills. These websites don't just provide us with video content, but also the tools to help us make authentic video accessible to learners.DotsubAuthentic video can be very challenging for language learners so at times it is useful to have translation in subtitles or a transcription of the text. Dotsub is a website that enables users to upload and add

Seven Things You Don't Need to Know About Me

Published on 2008-12-05 06:23:00

I have been tagged by Gavin Dudeney for the ‘Seven Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me’ thing…So here are my seven things:1. My first teaching job was in a prison.While I was studying music at Dartington College of Arts I heard that they were looking for a guitar teacher and a nearby prison. I got the job and spent two years visiting a group of inmates each week and trying to teach them to play Blues. I recently found a journal that I kept of the time, but can't share any of it with

A River of Images

Published on 2008-12-01 09:28:00

I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver, an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site.This is great because it provi

Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1

Published on 2008-11-21 06:19:00

I'm beginning to think that besides the actual computer itself, a WebCam is one of the most fundamentally useful tools we can possibly have to help us teach and learn a language and of course what's great about WebCams is that they are getting very cheap and many laptop computer come with one ready installed for free!Beware of bad hair days!!!!So I've decide to start a mini series of postings on 'Things you can do with a WebCam' - Even if you don't have an Internet connection.Create fictional ch

Create Image Books

Published on 2008-11-13 19:08:00

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool called Bookr.Bookr enable us to create nice interactive image books with text captions.Here's an example that I created based on the poem 'In White' by Robert Frost.I found the words to the poem on Poem Hunter here: 'In White'You can see the full size versi

A Tool for Comparing Words

Published on 2008-11-05 09:21:00

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in.There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle, (an alternative is Google Fight) because it shows you a nice graphic of a s

Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL

Published on 2008-10-30 16:32:00

Yesterday on my Quick Shout blog, I wrote about a new tool called Xtranormal for creating text to speech animated movies. Since then I've had a little time to put together a tutorial video and think about how to use it in the classroom. First I thought I'd show you what extra normal produces.There is quite a range of characters and backgrounds so the possibilities for creating situational dialogues is terrific and you can also build these scenes into a series, so this would be great for longer p