Web 2.0 World In Our English Language Classroom Handout Elinda Gjondedaj
TESOL FRANCE 30th ANNUAL COLLOQUIUM PARIS 2011
Web 2.0 World in our English Language Classroom
The Poster Presenter:
I am Elinda Gjondedaj and I have just graduated from University of Athens where I studied English Language and Literature. At the same time I was working as a freelance English teacher and Translator in Athens, Greece. Last year, I made my first steps to the teacher training area and started to present on topics that are related with the use of technology in education and especially in the English language classroom.
How digital is our life? Technology and especially the internet is nowadays an important element of our lives. Not to mention the fact that our students are digital natives and as a matter of fact digital literate from an early age. But how can you as a teacher use this for your benefit? For your lesson? In this presentation we will explore the world of Web 2.0. This particular handout includes useful information on how to use Web 2.0 tools in education and especially in the English Language Classroom. The tools that are described are more popular and widely used. That is why they are analyzed and recommended.
You can keep up with my recent work at my personal blog: www.magicineducation.wordpress.com and contact me : elindagjondedaj@gmail.com
Content-Based Tools Publishing Content - Using Blogs & Wikis in Class Why to use a blog or wiki with your students? • • • • • • • •
Why to use youtube with your students? Practice and Develop reading and writing skills The Motivating Element Attach Media (pictures, videos, presentations) Improve Self-confidence Communication is strengthened Practice and Develop Reading and Writing Skills Create Digital Portfolios Parents can have an overview of their child's work
How to use blog or a wiki with your students? • • • • •
Set up a class bog or wiki Upload class announcements, homework, notes and anything useful for your class Upload material (texts, images, videos) that can help students to develop their English skills but also raise their interest and motivation for your lesson. When your students are used to the blog or wiki, you can assign in turns to be responsible for the class blog or wiki. After that, as an addition to the main class blogs or wikis, students can create their own personal blogs where they can upload the work that they have done in class such as projects, researchs or essays etc.
Where can I find a free provider for a blog or wiki? •
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Sharing Content (Images, Videos, Presentations) - Using Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare in Class
Wordpress, Blogger, Edublog, Blogspot Wikispaces
Visit my blog: www.magicineducation.wordpress.com
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Spark Lively Discussions Organize Your Video Content For Easier Access Archive Your Work Encourage Students To Dig Deeper Help Both Struggling And Advanced Students Review For Upcoming Exams Create A YouTube Center In Your Classroom Add Quizzes To Videos Create Interactive Video ‘Quests’ Students can Become Teacher
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Register with YouTube. Set up a video playlist or a collection of favourites, then click them to stream the videos from a laptop. Just remember that YouTube videos are often removed without notice, so the clip you watched at home last night may not be there the next morning. Also, your school or school district might block access to the site. In classrooms where YouTube is blocked, download the video. Convert it to your playback format of choice (mp4, FLV, HD, AVI, MPEG, 3GP, iPhone, PSP, mp3, GIF) and store it on your laptop or PDA, which lets you access it at any time, even if it's removed from the site. YouTube doesn't typically offer a way to download and save most videos directly, but if you use Firefox, you can use the free Download Helper extension, which makes most videos downloadable and convertible to several formats.
Subscribe to my youtube channel: magicineducation
Flickr – Educational Use The use of images in teaching and learning makes most students react positively and get more motivated. Everybody can get different things out of images. How can we embrace visual enhancements in instruction? Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application that allows educators to play with many different tools.
How to use Flickr in Class? •
Creative writing assignment with individual pictures or storytelling with multiple pictures…can you imagine the possibilities?
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Create Virtual
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Teach students about intellectual property rights with Creative Commons
field trips!
licensing.
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Use the Flickr slideshow feature as an alternative to PowerPoint or other presentation tools.
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Create digital portfolios.
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Create various different groups to upload photos to and encourage
Slideshare – Presentations from all over the world! Some things that you can do on SlideShare: • •
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Upload presentations publicly or privately Download presentations on any topic and reuse or remix Embed on blogs, websites, company intranets Share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
21st Century Skills - In the Classroom Students can use this site to communicate with different audiences using digital media and environments. The site allows students to share their work, view other students’ work and make comments. First, the site is a treasure chest of resources for teachers to use. Presentations on many different topics can be found using the site’s search feature. The site has a widget called Playlist that creates a customized list of your uploaded presentations or other presentations that you have in your Favorites list. The playlist can be embedded on a blog or wiki.
collaboration and commenting from students.
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Explore with Flickr's map feature to see what is happening all over the world.
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Use Flickr’s search feature to have your students collect photos of important monuments or symbols, then create a presentation on what and why those are important to history.
During a unit project for a Web 2.0 course a high school teacher taught students how to upload PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare. Students emailed the published URL for their slideshows to the teacher and the posted the URL to a school discussion forum. Students’ PowerPoint presentations can be uploaded and then embedded into class/school blogs, wikis and other web sites. Older students can search the site for slideshows about a curriculum topic, design a wiki for a class project on the topic and embed the slideshows they found in the wiki. See below for Safety Concerns.
Find the pictures I share on Flickr: magicineducation
Social Tools Discussing – Social Networking – Microblogging - Using Skype, Facebook, Google+, Twitter in Education Skype – Educational Use Imagine taking your class on an "around the world" field trip or having your favourite children's author lead today's read-aloud. You can do both of these and more without leaving your classroom thanks to Skype. Skype is free communication software that allows you to make calls, instant message
What you can do on Skype in the classroom? Skype in the classroom brings together a community of people and information to save teachers time and help them make the most of Skype and the international teaching community. Once teachers create a profile that sets out their interests, specialties and location, they can create projects. Projects are a way for teachers to find partner classes, partner teachers or guest speakers for a specific learning activity. You can browse through projects or even search by keyword, which makes it easy for teachers to share expertise and collaborate on projects even when they don’t already know each other.
and video conference online. Here are just a few of the endless possibilities for using this ed tech tool in the classroom.
Skype Tips for Teachers
One amazing experience you can have with Skype in the classroom is a virtual author
• Get started by downloading Skype ahead of time.
visit or other amazing guest speaker.
• Choose the venue that works best for your purposes (whether it be your classroom, the library or a media center.)
Cultural exchange
• Be careful about your privacy settings.
Introduce your students to new ways of seeing the world with a cultural exchange between your class and another classroom anywhere in the world.
• Only allow student supervised access to Skype. • Try Skype’s built-in recording option to rebroadcast your conversations later! • Whether you’re conferencing with an author or another class, have your students
Language skills
prepare test questions to make the most of your chat.
Bring language to life with real-life conversations where students can practice a new language with a class of native speakers, or help English learners practice their skills.
• The whiteboard feature also allows you all the freedom of being in the classroom and
Discovery Try mystery Skype calls, where classes connect online and give clues to help each guess the other's location. Or introduce your students to a classroom in the location of a book they're reading or a subject they're studying.
writing notes on the board for students.
Facilitate Communication
26 Ways you should be using Facebook & Google + in your classroom Facebook and lately Google + is not just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what’s happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize these tools for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Class Projects The following ideas are just a starting point for class projects that can be used with Facebook in the classroom. 1. Follow news feeds. Have students follow news feeds relevant to the course material in order to keep current information flowing through the class. 2. Share book reviews. Students can post their book reviews for the instructor to grade and other students to read. If it’s a peer-reviewed project, then students can more easily access each other’s papers online. 3. Poll your class. Use polls as an interactive teaching tool in class or just to help facilitate getting to know one another with the Poll app for Facebook. 4. Create your own news source. A great way for journalism students to practice their craft, use the Facebook or Google + status update feed as a breaking news source for sports results, academic competition results, and other campus news. 5. Follow news stories. Keep up with news through Facebook on groups like World News Webcast that provides video clips of world news. 6. Create apps for Facebook. A class at Stanford started doing this in 2007 and still has a Facebook group profiling their work. A class at Berkeley also did the same. 7. Bring literature to life. Create a Facebook representation of a work of literature.
8. Create groups or circles. You can create groups for entire classes or for study groups with smaller subsets of students that allow for easy sharing of information and communication, without students even having to friend each other. 9. Schedule events. From beginning of semester mixers to after-finals celebrations, easily schedule events for the entire class using Facebook. 10. Send messages. From unexpected absences to rescheduling exams, it’s easy to send messages through Facebook or Google +. 11. Share multimedia. With the ability to post videos, photos, and more, you can share multimedia content easily with the entire class. 12. Post class notes. Post notes after each class period for students to have access for review or in case they were absent. 13. Provide direct communication with instructors. Instructors and students can contact each other through Facebook or Google +, providing an opportunity for better sharing of information and promoting better working relationships. 14. Allows shy students a way to communicate. Shy students who may not want to approach their teacher after class or during office hours can use Facebook to communicate. 15. Facilitate classmate connections. When students get to know each other more intimately, they become more involved in the learning experience. This is helpful in both large classes that wouldn’t normally promote such intimacy and in smaller settings that regularly depend on that connection. 16. Make announcements. Instructors can send out reminders about upcoming tests, upcoming due dates, or any classroom news. 17. Brainstorm. Students can have the ability to add their thoughts to the class any time they occur allows for more opportunities for brainstorming off each other. Share interesting websites. Students and instructors alike can post interesting websites that add relevancy to the class. 18. Post homework. Posting homework through Facebook not only provides easy access for students, it also puts in writing specifically what is expected and when it is due.
Ways to use Twitter in Education:
Benefits Why use Facebook with your class? Here are some of the benefits you may see when you decide to use Facebook as a learning tool. 19. Inviting atmosphere. Since Facebook isn’t exclusively the instructor’s any more than it is the students’, this offers students an opportunity for active participation on a level playing field. 20. Students are comfortable with Facebook. Most students are already users of Facebook, so implementing it into class provides a comfortable way for students to participate in class. 21. Informal. The informality inherent in Facebook’s connections lend to yet another reason students may be more willing to participate in class activities here. 22. Promotes collaboration. Facebook’s design promotes social interchange between participants, thereby increasing collaboration between students working on activities. 23. Keeps schools current. Mark Federman asserts that universities must move from a skills-centered approach to learning to one of connectivity to stay relevant to students. 24. Students engaged outside of class. When students are accessing the class content more often, that means they will be thinking about and engaging in the lessons more frequently. 25. Ambient awareness. Facebook provides an excellent opportunity for students and instructors to participate in ambient awareness, a way of getting to know those you follow on social networks in more meaningful ways. 26. Teach personal responsibility. Instructors can take this opportunity to teach students how to responsibly use Facebook and other social networking sites so it helps their future–not the opposite.
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Follow me on twitter : @Magicinedu
Class Chatter: Using Twitter in and outside your classroom will really help to keep conversations continue inside and outside of class. Most of these conversations may not be directly related to class material, but many will tangentially related. Because the students had the bn bnpm classroom experience when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time it often got twittered. This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the “real world.” Classroom Community: Twitter can help your students know each other better beyond the 3 hours per week that may spend in your classroom. This carried with it a range of benefits, from more productive classroom conversations (people were more willing to talk, and more respectful of others), and also helped me to understand what type of students they were. Get a Sense of the World, Track a Word: You can have students look at the Public Timeline of Twitter. This is the place where all public messages get posted. The “noise” ratio here is pretty high, but one gets a sense of how varied are the things people are doing around the globe. Just a quick look at the timeline shows a range of languages, although English is still the predominate one. Instant Feedback: Because Twitter is always on, and gets pushed to your cell phone if you set it up this way, it is a good way to get instant feedback. Follow a Professional: Students can follow someone else who is on Twitter, who interests them. Grammar: Surprisingly Twitter is actually good for teaching grammar. Why? Because of its short form those who tweet often abbreviate and abuse grammar rules, developing their own unique “twitter rules.” This helps to demonstrate, both how all communication needs rules/structure and how important something like a comma or a period can be. (Some Tweets become really ambiguous because of their lack of punctuation.) Rule Based Writing: Related to the above is the idea that when you change the rules (context) around any written communication you necessarily change the content of such an utterance. Rules rather than hindering communication can actually be really productive. Because Twitter is based on SMS technology it limits communication to 140 characters, it is surprising what develops out of this limit, and how quickly one starts to think in messages of 140 characters. Writing Assignments:Remember that game you used to play where one person would start a story, the next person would continue it, etc
Other Web Tools: MakeBeliefsComix.com
Makebeliefscomix is an application where you can design your own comics. You can choose from a variety of characters and create your own dialogues. In other words, you can make a whole comic on your own. You can ask the students to make a story by using some given words. In addition, you can give them a comic with empty bubbles or missing words and ask them to fill the gaps. The students will be positively surprised and more motivated and engaged to your lesson. The comic can be printed or stored by sending it us an email. It is an easy to use application and it does not need to sign up in order to start creating your comic.
Glogster.com
Glogster is a social network, based totally on flash, that allows users to create their own online posts which are called “glogs”. Glogs are interactive. This means that the readers of the glogs can insert images, texts and even songs and videos on it and, generally, contribute on their content.
Wallwisher.com
Wallwisher is an online notice board maker. It is ideal for keeping notes, making announcements or discussing several topics. It’s an innovative way to communicate as you use post-it notes to read and write. The works are like a real notice board where you may drag, drop and re-arrange the posts.You can also say more with images, music, video and pages attachments are allowed.
Tagxedo.com, Wordle.net
If you want to have an image of which terms or words you use more frequently while you write, Wordle.net is the application that you should use. Wordle is an application for generating “word clouds” from a text you have provided. But what is a “word cloud”? It is a visual depiction of words that make up the content of a web site. Words that exist in a “word cloud” are known as tags.
Testmoz.com
Testmoz is a simple test generating application. Why to use: - Detailed Reports. See the scores, averages and actual responses to questions. You can even export the data to CSV. - No Registration -Neither you nor your test takers have to register. - Professional Appearance- The neutral colour scheme works with any business or school. - No Ads. You won’t find any text ads, banners, or pop-ups. - Passcode Protected. Prevent strangers from taking your test.
For more Web 2.0 applications that can be used in education you can check www.magicineducation.wordpress.com THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!!!