Mario Sarlengue from Radio Universidad de La Plata interviewed both WorldCall awardees. He was really interested in trying to understand what we are doing and has become a Web 2.0 fan. This was not a common radio interview. While he asked us several questions we were having lunch!!
You can listen to the Spanish interview in these links: Part 1 and Part 2.
Before leaving to Japan I was hired by The Consultants-e to create a webquest. This was a special webquest because we were 3 teachers each living in a different continent that had to create a different webquest. The topics were quite similar but not the same.
Technology has been really useful for our project. We created a wiki to share our ideas and started brainstorming together even though we all had a different time zone.
This was a really wonderful collaborative project. We helped each other to look for information about each webquest topic and pasted it in the wiki.
I created the Matrix Museum webquest.
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The trip was really long and unfortunately we weren´t able to meet Erika in Altanta because her flight was cancelled. We met Evelyn on the plane and once we arrived to Narita airport Mr.Manabe Evelyn´s former Spanish student was waiting for us at the airport. He very kindly offered to be our tourist guide in Japan.
Today I got an email he wrote to us explaining all the things we did:
On August 2nd, we went to the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectual Museum in Koganei City where my house is located. They had this summer festival on 2nd and 3rd, only two days. The festival called Yusuzumi Festival, a cool breeze festival….so that we can forget the summer heat enjoying the cool night breeze. You participated in a Bon Odori Dancing event.
The followings are places we visited on Augusut 3rd, 2008 in Tokyo. It was quite an exhusting Kamikaze adventure but really so interesting.
1. Meiji Shrine
The station we got off is named Harajyuku Station. You learned how to wash your hands and mouth before you pray…..how to pray;two bows+two claps of hands+one bow…We observed a typical Japanese wedding style.
2. Asakusa Temple
The sourvenior street in front of the Temple is named Nakamise Street. We had Okonomiyaki and Fried noodles for lunch.
3. Ginza Street
We passed the Kabuki Theater. In the Ginza Street, they had a Sunday Stroll, blocking off the traffics. We observed an Uchimizu performance, splahing water in the street. In the old days when people didn’t have any air-conditioning, peoples used to water the gardens and streets to cool down the heat of the summer, a kind of wisdom of the people and the Japanese old custom in the summer time.The department store we shopped is named Matsuzakaya Department Store, one of the famous stores. The Ginza is the most sophisticated and famous street in Japan. One square meters of land in the Ginza Street is so expensive….as much as US$200,000 or more.
4. Odaiba
The bay side area, newly reclaimed land area in the sea. We crossed the famous bridge called the Rainbow Bridge by the new transportation system named Yurikamome Line. The trains have rubber wheels like a car, not with ordinary iron wheels. The building with a globe shape structure in the building is a headquarter of Fuji TV Station.
5. Palace
This is where the present Emperor is living . We went up to the Niju-bashi, the Double Bridge, as we saw two bridges in parallel. We learned the new vocabulary…..MOAT or foso in Spanish…..
6. Tokyo Tower
Nice view
7. Shinjuku Area
One of the famous downtown in Tokyo. We visited Yodobashi Camera shop.
8. Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office
We visited the 45th floor of observation floor in the building.
As you can observe Mr Manabe took us to the best tour we could have ever had in Tokyo. There are no words to thank him!! I´ll add the link to all the sites as soon as I have time.
Today a new journey starts in my life. It´s a journey that will be unforgettable and very cultural. As you can observe I added some pictures of Fukuoka our final destination to attend World Call. Take a look at the Hotel where we are staying.
The conference starts on August 4th and on August 5th many different workshops are offered. The first night will have dinner with most of the awardees. For the first time I will meet many enthusiastic webheads with whomI have shared many wonderful online moments.
Together with Nelba we will give a Poster presentation on Democratic Learning for Developing and Underdeveloped Countries. We prepared a very big poster and a power point presentation called: democratic-learning-for-developing1that can be read from our laptops. I would like to thank Joao who so kindly volunteered to help us with our presentation. We plan to help a rural school located in a very small town in La Pampa Province in Argentina. We will show many pictures, maps and specific information about this school.
Webheads and others are welcome to join all these groups and tools in order to share knowledge as well as bookmarks with everyone else. That´s why Webheads are called Webheads in Action you will confirm this automatically when you see all the different tools that have been created!!
A wiki created with Wetpaint.
I really hope we can enjoy this journey together!!!
Today the topic we are discussing with the web 2.0wednesday group is:
One of the beauties of Web 2.0 is how it connects us to people from all over the world, in different cultures with different ways of life. This gives us wonderful opportunities to learn from each other. So here’s this week’s activity:
Use a Web 2.0 tool to tell us something unique and interesting about where you live.
Therefore I thought that a great idea would be to talk about a lovely place here in Buenos Aires called Caminito. Do you want to learn about this place? Take a look at a Voicethread I created on this topic.
Do you like Caminito?
Each Wednesday I’m going to post a Web 2.0 activity for you to try. If you have the time and inclination to do so, then please join in. If you don’t–the activity just doesn’t do it for you or you’re too busy with other thing or whatever–then don’t worry about it. Wait until the next time. This is not, repeat NOT, something to put on your “to do” list and feel badly if you don’t get to. I don’t want to read any posts that say “I’m behind on the Web 2.0 Wednesday activity,” because it’s not meant to be that kind of thing. Seriously. This is low pressure learning.
If you do the activity, you can blog about it or not–it’s up to you. If you do choose to blog the activity, save it to del.icio.us with the tag “web2.0wednesday” so we can see your post on the feed page over at the Comment Challenge wiki where I’ll be setting up a Web 2.0 Wednesday page.
I would like to share with the Web 2.0 Wednesday group one feature I am exploring with my students.
The first part of the post can be found here. Once you read this post you will be able to take your own conclusions on how my students are using Delicious to create their own personal online dictionary.
I prepared a Power Point Presentation creating-online-dictionaries-for-students explaining how I´m enhancing my students to learn new vocabulary. You can also take a look at the PPT I uploaded on slideshare
Any ideas are more than welcome!!!
A brief update of what has been going on lately.
I have been mentioned in the alumni newsletter. 
This week teachers started using wikis in the classroom. Take a look at what they are creating and I hope you also get inspired!!!
The Head of my daughters school found out that Vicky´s blog has inspired many kindergarden students at school to continue learning after school. We will have an interview next month.
Red de Escuelas Medias has conctacted me because they will add this blog and my daughters blog to their blogroll. They also want to interview me on how I integrate technology in my teaching and tell them about my scholarship to WorldCall 2008 in Japan.
At the moment I am using wikis with my Business Students and can assure you that their interest in learning the language has changed considerably. Managers find out that they are learning English and technology at the same time. Many of them congratulated me and the best part is that they are never absent to their classes. I must thank Carl Dowse who was inspired me to start teaching Business people in a different way. We are creating a wiki together and are always sharing new discoveries.
Next month I will give a presentation together with Nelba Quintana on “The Web 2.0 Lifestlye” at APIBA.
I´ve been to one school where they are using Whiteboards in the classroom. Just amazing to have been there and see all the hard work the IT and English staff are devoting to this project. I will write more about this in another post.
There are still more things going on!!! I will add them asap.
If we want our students to blog we must be the first ones to blog.
That´s why I joined The Comment Challenge to learn more about blogging and how to become a better blogger.
We would like to challenge participants to be better blog citizens tracking who is the commenter with:
- The most comments on a wide range of blogs (not just the “top” edubloggers)
- The most high quality comments that thoughtfully reflect on the topic
- The comments that provoke and promote the most learning
- I never used Cocomment before so I´m ready to finally start following comments. This video shows you how to use cocomment.
Take a look at how to start and I hope to be reading your comments soon.
After finishing co-moderating Smielt I enrolled in a free course on Wikis called Wikieducator.
WikiEducator is a community project working collaboratively with the Free Culture Movement towards a free version of the education curriculum by 2015.
It was really interesting to learn from so many different teachers from all around the world. This has been one the most international courses I have taken. I became a Wikiembassador and there are so many features in Wikieducator that it´s really worth taking the free course.
Two weeks later I enrolled in Exeter Online. IATEFL held its 42nd annual conference - in Exeter.(7th. - 11th. April) called Exeter online in cooperation with the British Council. IATEFL also made a selection of the talks and workshops available online. There are presently 17 sessions online, 765 minutes, and more will come. Don´t worry if you have to register because it costs nothing.
After sharing ideas and brainstorming with teachers form many different countries together with another Business English teacher we are planning a lot of things together.. so there will be news soon.
At the moment I´m taking a moodle course offered by UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CORDOBA called ”El uso de aulas virtuales para la enseñanza de la lengua: descubriendo Moodle y Educativa”
This year I have been granted another scholarship to take another Moodle course that starts tomorrow. They offered me this scholarship because they want me to start working with them so there are lots of things to learn and discover.
My idea this first quarter was to start the Licentiate in Technological Education. They had problems with their platform so classes will start in two weeks. I´m having second thoughts about starting this because I´m already a Licentiate so maybe it´s time to start planning a Phd.
Dear Students,
I´m sure you like travelling so you will find this site very interesting.
It´s about Ten Days in Manchester.
You have two possibilities:
| Choose a ‘good day’ and everything goes according to plan… |
| …but choose a ‘bad day’ and it’s disaster after disaster after disaster! |
Have fun learning with this business English course featuring Tony Marshall and May Hunter.
Regards
Jennifer
After doing some research on the different possibilities Twitter offers I found the following options:
TwitDir enables you to find statistics of the Top 100 followers, Top 100 followed, Top 100 favoriters and Top 100 updaters. It also works as a search engine for Twitter users, which mean you can find any user information by searching his name.
With My Tweet Map you simply enter your Twitter name and password, and see the messages from those you follow pop up on a Google Map.
Search Inside Twitter Content
Tweet Scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter posts. Just enter your term plus a user name (optional), and the system will scan Twitter to show you the results
Twitteroo is a Windows Desktop client that allows you to monitor your Twitter account and update your status without logging into twitter.
An easy way to send Twitter Messages
TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
Say it with Pictures
With twitxr you can share a moment, a picture, a thought, instantly with your mobile phone.
Twype
It’s a small Windows tray program.
- Once every 5 minutes it checks your Twitter account and grabs the latest tweet. This gets posted to your Skype Mood.
What is twhirl?
twhirl is a desktop twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
Some of twhirl’s features:
connects to multiple Twitter accounts
notifications on new tweets
shorten long URLs (using snurl or is.gd)
cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
post images to TwitPic
search tweets (using TweetScan or terraminds)
Twitter Statistics a great tool to know how you are using Twitter.
How can we apply all this in education?
There are constantly new tools, better options, more opportunities and possibilities to motivate our students. But what should we consider the most important aspect of using this tool? Where should be start?
I agree with George Siemens:
Let’s abandon the somewhat silly notion of pedagogy first and recognize that the choice of technology is driven by many contextual factors and therefore context is what we are evaluating and considering when we first start talking about possible technology to use. Then, after we have selected technology, we can start talking about pedagogy. Pedagogy is just not a practical starting point for deciding the technology we should use.
The context where I´m trying to apply technology is very hard because in most schools computers are very old and most Headmasters and Coordinators think that incorporating technology will be overloading teachers with more work.
I truly hope to be able to see a paradigm shift in education.
In groups please discuss the following questions:
- Why do you need to learn/improve English?
- Where will you need to use English?
- What skills do you need to learn/improve?
- How soon do you need to see results?
- How much time can you afford to devote to learning English.
Different ways of improving my skills:
- Do your homework.
- Read a book a month.
- Learn a new word every day.
- Visit an English speaking forum every day.
- Read a news article on the net every day.
- Do 10 minutes listening practice every day.
- Watch an English film at least once a month.
How many different ways can you say Thank you!!!
Last friday I decided to incorporate del.icio.us as an online vocabulary dictionary for my students. First I make them read information about del.icio.us
What is del.icio.us?
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else’s. You can use del.icio.us to:
- Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
- Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
- Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.
They have to understand the concept of social bookmarking:
What is social bookmarking?
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages.First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private — only viewable by you — if you like.)Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, tooFinally we read about tags:
What are tags?
Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. They’re a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.
After reading and understanding the concepts abovementioned they watch the following video:
Once students create their own account they log in and leave it open while taking classes. Every new word is searched in dictionary.com and tagged in their del.ico.us account. In this way students start creating their own personal dictionary and by the end of the year they will have a long list of all the new words learnt.
Today I was informed that I have been selected to attend WorldCall 2008 in Fukuoka, Japan.
WorldCALL is the worldwide professional association for teachers and educators interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Members of WorldCALL are drawn from established, professional affiliated associations working in the areas of CALL throughout the world. The current members of WorldCALL are:
EUROCALL (European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning) (Europe-wide) (http://www.eurocall-languages.org)
CALICO (Computer Assisted Language Instruction consortium) (USA based) (http://www.calico.org)
IALLT (International Association for Language Learning Technology) (USA based) (http://www.iallt.org)
LET (formerly LLA) (Japan Association for Language Education and Technology) (http://www.j-let.org);
CERCLES (Confédération Européenne des Centres de Langues de l’Enseignement Supérieur) (http://www.cercles.org)
CCAQLL/CELAO (Canadian Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning)
ATELL (Australian Association for Technology Enhanced Language Learning) (http://www.atell.org)Take a look at the email I received:
Announcing the WorldCALL 2008 Scholarship Awardees
The scholarship committee has reached its final decisions. We had an extremely difficult time deciding the awardees. Many highly qualified applicants had to be turned down purely because of budgetary constraints. Our goal was to decide on individuals who met these criteria:
- People who have been active in CALL (not just language pedagogy or administration) as evidenced by recent publications, presentations or on-going projects.
- People who exhibited in their “Statements of Purpose” a clear goal for their attendance at WorldCALL 2008 and a plan to disseminate the knowledge so gained upon their return home.
- People who represent a wide spectrum of geographical areas, balanced by gender and years of experience. Geographical selection was also, to some extent, determined in proportion to the number of applications from that area of the world.
Congratulations to those who have been selected. At the same time, we thank those who applied and sincerely regret that they, too, could not be included.
The Awardees
| Cruvinel Teixeira Alves, Erika | Brazil |
| Elramady, Asem Aly Elsaid | Egypt |
| Fang, Ying | China |
| Fawzi, Hala | Sudan |
| Isharyanti, Neny | Indonesia |
| Izquierdo Mujica, Evelyn de Los Angeles | Venezuela |
| Kilickaya, Ferit | Turkey |
| Lyulkun, Nina | Russia |
| Marandi, Susan | Iran |
| Mo, Jinguo | China |
| Quintana, Nelba | Argentina |
| Verschoor, Jennifer | Argentina |
| Viswanathan, Revathi | India |
As you can read from the list I will be travelling with Nelba Quintana from La Plata. This is how this story started. We were both taking a course with Intel in downtown. Dafne a great webhead sent an email informing this great community that there was a scholarship to attend WorldCall 2008. We both have been dreaming about going to Japan together while taking the course. Now I can say that dreams come true!!
Webheads in Action is a group of teachers that are making a difference in the world. Teachers share their knowledge and experience incorporating CALL in their daily teaching. This group is vibrant and shines!!! Thanks Webheads for teaching me all I know and for always being an inspiration. This award is also for YOU!!!
What´s microblogging?
Wikipedia explains that Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.
You need time to blog but having to write something in only 200 characters is wonderful if you lack time. My baby and my daughter are very demanding and microblogging allows me to be in touch with educators that share my same passion. Claudia Ceraso told me about Twitter in a face to face meeting we had at a Chinese restaurant called Todos Contentos in Buenos Aires. At the beginning I didn´t understand what it was all about but I can assure you that I learnt more in 2 months with Twitter than in many conferences.
There are many microblogging tools and if you can´t decide among Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku or Tumblr just post to all of them at the same time and after figuring out all their features you can decide whoch one is the best according to your teaching objectives.
How is microblogging being used in ESL classrooms? Below you will find a short list with some examples .
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Twitter limits each entry to 140 characters (about the length of this writing so far) before the entry is saved and made viewable to others. Other Twitter users, “Twits,” can then respond to the original twit. This is a great way to get reluctant writers or students who are having trouble getting ideas for creative writing to brainstorm with each other. Source: Free Technology for Teachers
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For Tuesday your primary homework is to use and become familiar with Twitter. You don’t necessarily need to follow everyone in the class but add in at least ten to get the Twitter experience. You can also choose to follow people who are not in our class. Source: Storytelling for New Media
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Pownce is a great utility for starting conversations about events in the news. Post a link to a news story and have students reply, the formatting of Pownce allows users to reply to replies or to the original post. Pownce is a useful application for continuing conversation after class has ended. In their replies students can add related videos, web links, and images. Source: Free Technology for Teachers
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Take a look at this great post on Twitter for Academia.
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I think Twitter could be ideal for reminding students about homework, trips and such things, especially as they can enter their mobile phone number to be alerted when one of their ‘friends’ updates their account. The advantage is that you don’t need to know the phone numbers of students to get messages onto their device: they are the ones who authorize their mobile phone from the website and they subscribe to your Twitter feed. Source: Teaching.mrbelshaw
WordPress launcheda new microblogging feature last week called. Prologue. “Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.”
How are you planning to use these tools this year? I still have to continue researching and investigating but can obviously observe the great potential these tools have. I´m a technervy teacher!!!! This means I do what I can to show my students how to use technology.
I´m Jennifer from Argentina. I´m an ESL Teacher, Translator and hold a Master´s Degree in Educational Managemet. I love to integrate e-tools into my classes.
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