Ice breakers

and now..., originally uploaded by Zero Rae.

An ice-breaker...

• Opens the way
•  Sets the course
•  Clears the path
•  Facilitates the movement
•  Cuts through barriers
•  Breaks resistance

Icebreakers are more than fun and games. They are activities that help people connect. These creative interactive processes open the way to learning. I have been collecting activities that I usually use and adapt from. I have been thinking about how to add a digital twist to old timers.

Flickr - 

I could take my students to the computer lab and ask them to share some of their pictures -  

I could ask students to choose some pictures that they relate to and ask them to talk about themselves using the images.

Students could get in small groups and guess information about  each other through the pictures they chose.

Photopeach

I've read about this great site on Life is a feast,  you can learn more about this tool on her blog post. I really liked this web2.0 because it's user friendly and we can make visually rich quizzes to enliven our classes. I used Photopeach to upgrade an ice breaking activity called 

        What's True? 

Students write sentences about themselves, preferably something funny or unusual that most people wouldn't know. one of the sentences should be a lie. students read their sentences aloud to the group and they try to guess which one is the false one.

This simple interactive activity can help you set the course and start a great semester! Have fun!

esl warmer on PhotoPeach

Wordle

 For the very beginning of the semester we could use wordle to design an ice- breaker.

You could write a text about yourself, turn it into a cloud using wordle and ask students to guess pieces of information about you using the words. Students could do the same in the computer lab using wordle or on a blank sheet of paper.

This activity might generate lots of interaction and exchange of information among your learners.

What tool would you use to design an ice-breaker? How would you use it?

How about planning a digital trip in class? With Google Earth we can talk about cities and we can actually go there! I'm sure students will benefit from getting to know where the cities are before they talk about them. I used one of my favorite tools and planned an information gap activity. Student A listens to a couple planning a day in Jerusalem... Student B goes to Hawaii... Students share and plan a day in a city of their choice or compare the two places. How would you use Google Earth in class?

Fun Photo Editing Sites

This directory of amazing sites for photo editing - 28 Online Photo Editing Websites to Have Fun With - was shared with me by a dear online friend who lives in Argentina. First, it shows the power of our online communities. Jennifer Verschoor has kindly shared this link because she knew I was into working with images.

I just picked one of the sites, befunky, and tested it. What I loved about befunky is the fact that no logins are required and the effects are really cool. Teens would love to play around with their photos in this photo editing space.

Then, if you explore it, you'll see that you can make fun editing in your own photos to add them to your school digital resources, to enliven classes. Most important of all, you could try out some of those sites to make your classes even more student-centered by

• encouraging your students to remix their photos and tell a story.


• sharing their best remixes and have a class vote


• having students choose a topic, take a photo and edit the photo with text
  


• students sharing their photos remix and the others asking questions about them.
  


• encouraging students to remix a photo to match with a reading


• encouraging a photo remix plus poetry (like in this haiku project)

Another interesting resource for image editing,yearbookyourself, is the one Nik Peachey points out in his blog . Really fun to play around with.

Which tool from these resources would you give it a try and what kind of activities do you picture doing with your students?

Halloween for teens (vuvox)

I've been writing digital plans with Vuvox. Whenever  I'm learning something new, I have to do it at least a couple of times or I foget. I decided to write another digital halloween plan with Vuvox, but this one is for teens. students are invited to take a digital journey while learning about this spooky holiday. If you decide to give Vuvox a try do not forget to publish your presentation as public or you won't be able to embed your great plans!  Enjoy!
Here is a short tutorial.


 

Halloween for young learners ( vuvox)

How many times have you realized that Halloween was just around the corner and had absolutely no time to plan a topic related activity for your kids? Well...It has happened many times to me and I ended up having a fast trick or treating in the end of the lesson.
 Inspired by Web2.0 for educators, I decided to write a digital lesson plan that I could rely on for some holiday fun.  A plan that would blend technology and creativity to motivate learners.
 I chose  vuvox as an aggregator and I started by downloading  a Disney movie to pre teach vocabulary. I had some problems uploading at first, I learned that Vuvox recognizes flv for movies and  that I needed a converter. I used a user friendly one called Prism.
I wanted to promote opportunity for sharing written work with an authentic audience. I read Larry Ferlazo's post about storybird and Tikatok and decided to add them to my plan. I printscreened the cover of the books and used the hotspot icon in Vulvox to hyperlink.
     I hope I find the time to plan more presentations like this one. we could have one for each level to avoid repeating the same activities. What about giving Vuvox a try?
Reminder
 File format (vuvox).
    Audio - mp3
    Image - jpeg
    Video - flv

How to tell a digital story using Voicethread

How many times have you written a composition about a vacation you've taken? Many, right? However, how many times have you written a digital story about a vacation you've taken? Never, right? Guess what? Now you can do it. Better yet, you can ask your students to do it! Isn't it great! And this is only one of the things you can use Voicethread for. Having said that, take a look at the Lesson Plan I've prepared to my students. What are you waiting for? Pretend you are one of my students and try to write your own digital story. Please, after doing so, post a comment to tell me how your experience using Voicethread was.

Lesson Plan

Title: Sharing your vacation using Voicethread

Objective/ Overview of the lesson plan: By the end of the lesson, students will be able to create their Voicethread accounts and use this webtool to talk about their vacation. Students will be asked to comment on at least two of their classmates' work.

Level: This lesson plan was designed for intermediate and advanced teenage students.

Time frame: Students will be given 7 days to talk about their vacation using Voicethread.

Procedures and Steps:

1 - Tell a digital story about your vacation using "Voicethread". The tutorial below will help you. Please, watch it carefully. Also, as soon as you finish your digital story, don't forget to allow public access to it. All you have to do is click on the "menu" icon on the bottom right of your digital story, click on "edit" and then click on "Publishing Options". Finally, click on the first, second and forth boxes and then click "save".

2 - In case you need extra inspiration, click on the links below and take some time to watch two of the digital stories I've created a while ago. One is about one day of my life as a teacher. The other one is about my last vacation, which was also my honeymoon. Have fun!

http://voicethread.com/share/230050/

http://voicethread.com/share/245522/

Social Networking with Basic Levels

Juvenile is fun - A place to have fun and learn via kwout

If we ask our students if they are part of an online community, probably ninty nine percent of them will say they have an account in orkut. Orkut is a wonderful social networking site and is a way to connect students with things they love doing and with people they like to share things with.
However, orkut as social networking has its limitations. It works more like a message board and it lacks features that can really connect students in a more meaningful way. Not only that, it is also public and does not allow you to control its features and decide who joins the community, what questions you can ask joining members, and so on.
I have been using ning for some time and have found out that my students really enjoy using it.Up to now, I had used with more advanced levels. However, most recently, after unsuccsessfully trying to set up a wiki in pbworks for my Juvenile 2 students (aged 11 to 13), I decided to give ning a try. To my surprise, it worked really well and students loved it. I also got rid of the problem I was having with pbworks that seemed to heavy to load.
Let me summarize some of the features of ning that in my opinion make it the perfect social networking site for learners from basic to advanced levels.
- Chat - ning has a chat feature that can connect the whole class. Besides having a group chat with your class in the computers lab, you can also schedule a chat session with your students at any time. Not only that, but you can also have a guest to join in and chat with you class.
- Videos/photos - your students can add videos of their own or pictures to their albums.
- Forums - you can create forums to discuss any topic.
- Music - the music feature allows your students to add their favorite music.
- Customization - Your students can choose colors and pictures of their favorite soccer teams to customize their pages.
- Blogs - you can create blog posts and have your students to create theirs with pictures, tags, etc.
- And some others that you can explore by yourself.
How am I using ning?
I am now using with my 12-year-old juvenile 2 students at Leonardo. I always write step by instructions in Portuguese on how to join the community and how to customize their pages. I first set the community sign up and open to anyone and public so that the ones joining in do not need any approval. I later change the settings on that to avoid unwanted members.
I take the whole group to the computer lab for the sign up and they generally get very enthusiastic about it. I also let them have a group chat. The chat feature is the one they like the most. I frequently catch them chatting with each other in the evenings from their home computers.
I have just started and now I am teaching them to blog.
If you decide to give Ning a try, I would be more than happy to help you set up your community.

Neat free/bundle Software for Netbooks

Netbooks represent the future of mobile computers. They are lightweight, compact and have long battery life, which means they can be carried around every day.

Given the proper software choices and some attention to detail, netbooks can replace paper and pen as one's standard way of recording and creating data. This has several implications to the end-user:

Media can be added to notes

Internet based services can be controlled from everywhere

Search for additional information can be performed from the desktop and much more.

Netbooks work on very limited hardware. Therefore, they require specific or lightweight software. All the programs presented here were tested on my Acer AspireOne D250 (1.66GHz Intel Atom, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD). Due to the limitations imposed by this type of computer, I have selected software that will perform many tasks instead of specific software for each task.

There are a few issues one must have in mind when installing software on netbooks. Number one is startup time. You want the computer to boot as fast as it can, so installing software that will start with windows is hardly a good idea. Most programs present this setting in the options menu. All you have to do is disable the checkbox related to start up.

Here's the lineup:

1. Web browser.

Face it, Internet Explorer is old and bad. Most netbooks carry Windows XP, websites will not offer support to the WinXP version

of Internet Explorer, furthermore it has severe security issues.

I suggest you to at least update your browser version.

On the other hand, Google Chrome is lightweight and free and it is supported by most websites today. Here is a link to download the installer:

http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html?hl=pt-BR

2. Replacing pen and paper.

The Microsoft Office application suite is known to most of you. In its current version (MS Office

2007), there is a very useful program for text and notes, it is the Microsoft OneNote. What it does is it creates virtual notebooks which can be organized into sections and give users freedom to write where they want in pages (this feature is very useful during class preparation, because it allows you to add notes on the side of the main text).

You can also add hypertext links to websites and media to the notebook, placing all the information you might need on the same screen (page) or in the related section.

This comes with Microsoft Office 2007.

3. Dealing with the lack of a CD/DVD drive.

Netbooks are too small to hold physical optical drives so the best alternative is using a virtual drive emulator. This software creates a virtual drive you can use to open image files from regular disks. There are many extension formats for images, but Daemon Tools Lite can open all popular kinds of images.

I use a 4GB USB2 flash drive to carry CD images from one computer to another, this has been proved enough to handle MOST CD/DVD image files.

You can create image files from disks you own using a computer with an optical drive or download them from the internet.

Here is the link to Daemon tools lite (checked malware free):

http://superdownloads.uol.com.br/download/164/daemon-tools/

4. Mail and feed aggregators.

I honestly do not believe in having software to do this since netbooks have hardware limitations and these features use large screen areas. Also, there are great web-based services which fulfill most users' needs. Using Google Chrome facilitates using Google's online features such as GMail and Google Reader.

5. Communication.

MSN, Gtalk and Skype are the leaders in this area and they are all effective. Choice here is made considering the user's preferences.

I recommend you disable the auto startup feature in them since most people do not use this type of software right after they turn on the computer and they use a considerably high amount of resources to initialize.

Twitter Users: There are many available options for having twitter on your desktop, I've been using Twibble, which runs on the very fast Adobe AIR platform.

You can download it from http://www.twibble.de/.

6. Playing Media.

Contrary to what most people believe, Windows Media Player can be a complete media station, able to play all mainstream media file extensions with the exception of FLVs. In order to do this, you must download a codec pack. I suggest the K-Lite codec pack. Its installing process is easy and user-friendly, just go for standard/typical install.

http://www.baixaki.com.br/download/k-lite-codec-pack-full.htm

Alternatively, you can download VLC Player, which also provides support to many different types of media file extensions.

Now, this should be enough to get you started. For more experienced users I suggest upgrading to Windows 7 through a bootable USB Flash Drive. If you would like to do this, let me know, I can give you the information you need.

No cell phones in class!

Since the invention of mobile phones, they have become more and more popular among us; actually, a lot of incredible features have been developed and cell phones have become user-friendly. Among thousands of models, no one can deny the iPhone and other smartphones have been part of our daily lives. Nowadays, even 11 year-olds have been popping up in our classrooms with a cell phone in their hands, pockets or school bags. There are lots of reasons to celebrate this fact, but rather, teachers in many schools have blamed electronic gadgets (and cell phones, of course) for being class distractors. In addition, some states in Brazil, like Rio de Janeiro, for instance, have approved law acts against the use of cell phones and other electronic devices in schools, unless teachers are given official permit to use them for educational purposes.


It is not my objective to discuss the pros and cons of this kind of law, but rather to bring up the incredible and powerful potential cell phones may have in an EFL class. Just to give you a very simple example, in a class of teens aged 11 - 14, I asked them who had a cell phone; to my surprise, half of them raised their hands affirmatively. Some of them had powerful smartphones (a blackberry, an iPhone, a Nokia N95 etc) and some of them had ordinary ones. It goes without saying that all of them were able to send a simple SMS. The grammar topic was GOING TO + VERB and the lesson theme was "resolutions". In general, what most teachers do is, in a way or another, exercise the structure in meaningful contexts by having them write sentences. Well, any teenager can do it, but they get bored. So I wrote my number on the board and challenged them to think of a problem (anything they felt like sharing) and their resolutions. After that, I turned my mobile on so that everyone would be able to listen to the message beep. It was amazing to see how engaged in texting they were. No single student was disruptive. All of them, even those who didn't have a cell phone available, were either typing or helping a friend to send the SMS.

In a matter of seconds I got the first SMS and I quickly read to the class: "My brothers sometimes piece me off. I'm going to trap them into a role". Funny? Morally appropriate? Correctly written? It does NOT matter! The main point here is they produced authentic sentences, based on their previous knowledge and used the structure which had just been taught. By not being judgmental (although I would refuse to read swear language and could also manipulate to pronounce the words correctly) students could feel free to participate actively. In some cases, especially when the structure used was not the one we had been working on, I read it aloud so that all the class could highlight any problems, increasing their awareness of form and appropriateness of language and grammar use, such as the following example: "My problem is my shape. I will try to stop eating so much!".

Nevertheless, there might be drawbacks too:

1. students who do not have a cell phone or cannot send messages may feel left out. To minimize this problem, I reinforced the students' participation positively, making sure they would have their identities kept in secret as well; this way they could have their sentences read aloud too as if they had sent an SMS and no one would know they didn't have a cell phone to send it.
   
2. Some students may feel free to use their phones the way they wish instead of taking part in the group activity. Fortunately, this group of students got so involved they didn't cause any trouble.
   
3. This kind of activity costs money, no matter if they spend just a few cents, some parents may complain their kids have spent too much in the English class. This is the most difficult issue in my opinion, because it is pretty hard to control the way they use their cell phones and even more difficult to prove the teacher is not responsible for any extra expenses he or she has been blamed on.
   

To sum up, regardless of these and other drawbacks I haven't thought, it was such a nice experience. Using their own cell phones to promote language learning and increase motivation was worth the risk and I am pretty sure come up with many other ideas. For instance, two groups of students in different rooms could exchange messages with questions, problems, puzzling situations, etc and receive replies prior to their meeting face-to-face (F2F). This activity could also be followed by another F2F activity with food and drinks or just music for students to live it up. I hope you all have inspiring moments after this reading and, please, do share your ideas, I'm looking forward to trying something different again!

Elysio

How-To Series - Using Laptops and Projectors in the Classroom

Dear all,

For you who are still not so confident about how to operate the laptops and projectors at CTJ, here´s a tutorial video.



Question? What would you like to have in our how-to series?

We promise to do our best to meet your ed tech curiosity and help you out with this fascinating digital world.

The Ed Tech Team


Just a reminder. When you are using videos in the classroom, be selective. Think of the age group you are teaching. Some parents have complained that the videos shown in class were not adequate to the age level of their kids.

Stories for the Interactive Whiteboard

I couldn't miss this one and pass it along to you all.

This site is an exciting compilation of stories that are just great to be projected on a big scree for the little ones or even for our adult classes.

Take a look at it and enjoy! Let us know if it was useful for you and if you planned something for it.

http://plattsburgh.neric.org/oak/smartboard/stories.htm

How-To - CTJConnected

The Ed Tech Monitors have set the main goals for this semester:

• Give tech support to teachers and encourage even more of us to become content creators
• Give tech support to teachers who are in the process of turning themselves into Educational Technology users

Never have we had such a great response from this wonderful crowd of educators in relation to the technological field. It has been some years now that we´ve had a team working for CTJ, but the time has come. Now, everybody sees the importance of adding this digital element into their lesson plans. It´s not a matter of being a "cool" teacher or even a "digital" one, but it´s about relevance, content, and connecting our students to the world. It´s about showing how relevant English is in a connected world.

So, here´s our deal. We start this blog to be our open channel, a place where we connect, ask and share. The Ed Tech Team and any of our teachers can be bloggers here to give a tip, to share a cool resource, or to tell us about a nice lesson plan.

Well, we start with a tutorial on how to use our CTJConnected wiki. Enjoy! And we´re waiting for your feedback.

Be a little patient to load the video.

http://www.screencast.com/t/I0PcwQNZpSph

Hello!

Let's work hard.

Are you ready to dive in?

Hi Guys!

We are Carla and Erika, CTJ teachers and Technology enthusiasts. We love to look for new applications of technological resources to the classroom.

We invite you to join us on the Web 2.0 and experience all our excitement of using online tools with our students and partners around the world!

During this workshop we will only give you a taste of what is out there!

How about you? What kind of online tools have you been using?