My "Aha" Blog

My Professional Development Project

2011-05-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

Along the many online courses I have taken, I have noticed that effective and efficient communication seems to be one of the key factors in the success of a course. In face-to-face interaction, we have the aid of body language and intonation to perceive if and how we are getting our message across, and to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that our course is inclusive and engaging. In online environments we do not have these cues so it becomes crucial to make the best possible use of the tools at our disposal as well as to look for other ways to hone communication so that we can prevent the learner from feeling isolated and lost, and from eventually dropping out as a result.

I find this topic fascinating so I decided to choose it for my PD. I carried out my project directly on the Moodle sandbox (no links therefore), which helped me put into practice the skills I have acquired during these workshops.

Course Description

This is more or less what I had in mind, though I have been able to cover only 2 weeks of the three I had initially planned.

Week 1
The idea was to have participants reflect on the nature and requirements of effective communication and think of ways of making this possible in online learning.

Readings:

Activities and Resources:

Wordle image to trigger reflection and discussion
Forum to share views asynchronously
WiZiQ session to discuss the readings and the participants' reflections synchronously. Tutorials are provided for those not familiar with this virtual classroom.

Week 2
The focus of this week was the different types of communication available in online environments, the features and affordances of synchronous and asynchronous tools, and the importance of including synchronous tools in a medium that relies heavily on text-mediated communication.

Readings:

Activities and Resources:

Participants are invited to watch this video:
A forum is created for participants to share their views on the readings and the video.
Participants are invited to take part in a Webquest to explore different tools that can be used to provide online live meetings for the school where they work.

Week 3
In this week, the aim is to have participants explore other tools that can help enhance communication both synchronously (Skype, voice boards, instant messaging, mobile devices, chat) and asynchronously (email, forums, news groups, blogs, wikis, podcasts, text messaging)

M4T-A: Book Review

2011-05-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

For our book review, Sandra, Jose and I had chosen "Moodle 1.9: English Teacher's Cookbook" by Silvina P. Hillar. An English Teacher and a Certified Legal Translator, the author has done a lot of research on writing and composing techniques and describes herself as passionate about educational technology, qualities that can easily be noticed in her construction of the book.

Here, Hillar focuses on activities and resources for developing reading and writing skills with the Moodle environment in mind. Along its 10 chapters, the book moves gradually from simple activities designed to improve writing at sentence level, to reach more sophisticated levels of written discourse like poem, description, composition, essay and article writing.

She uses a wide variety of resources and tools, including Hot Potatoes, Twitter, Facebook, cubing techniques, Venn Diagrams, Mind Maps, Tree Diagrams and Discussion Clocks. Most of them call for collaborative and creative work, and are clearly presented and illustrated by means of abundant screenshots. The latter feature could be seen as a bit redundant for those who are already familiar with Moodle, though it will be of great help for the Moodle newbie.

All in all, this is a good book for those teachers looking at honing reading and writing skills within Moodle.

Here's our presentation:

Moodle Book Club: Review of "Moodle 1.9"

View more presentations from Mary Di Monaco

M4T-A: Week 4 Group Challenge Project

2011-05-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

For our group challenge project, we chose a voiceboard tool that Sandra came up with. All of us immediately fell for Gong since we think it would make an invaluable addition to any course. It would be particularly useful in the EFL field as it would provide listening and speaking practice in an invironment where there is normally not much opportunity for the development of these skills. Among other features, it offers the possibility of listening to and responding to text and voice messages. It also allows the participation in group discussions using synchronous and asynchronous chat.

Here's the presentation we put together:

Nanogong or gong

View more presentations from Mary Di Monaco.

And here's our advertisement for the tool:

M4T-A: Week 4 Readings

2011-05-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

I've been going through two of the suggested readings in Week 4: Success factors in online teaching and Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching

Not surprisingly, they both emphasise the need to engage learners by using materials that are relevant to their needs and to the learning objectives. Both of them also stress the importance of creating a supportive and safe environment for learners to achieve their goals.

Success factors in online teaching

This presentation states that, as online learning entails isolation and a need for time management skills, technical skills and computer access, it is essential to provide a collaborative and supportive environment and to ensure the accessibility of the course materials. In this medium, the role of the mentor becomes crucial for engaging and supporting learners. Success depends on learning resources that are relevant, challenging, but achievable, and easy to navigate.

Providing support and feedback by means of regular meetings becomes central in this context. The presentation illustrates the point by referring to an experience in which several tools were used to this effect:
Gmail: to profit from a wide variety of Google apps by creating a Google account.
Google Calendar: one of the many Google apps, useful to schedule and view events.
YouCanBook.me: for mentors to add events to calendars, and check preferred meeting times. Good tool for selecting event times convenient to the majority of the students.
FlashMeeting: to hold group meetings as a way to foster collaboration and a sense of belonging, as well as to provide opportunities to clarify doubts
my.TAFE: for students to receive announcements and see them in the Google calendar.
redcoal: to send meeting reminders by sms text with the link to the meeting, and feedback on marked assignments.

Nine principles of online education

This article elaborates a bit more on the subject, outlining nine principles that are essential for online education to become a successful experience.

The online world is a medium unto itself: materials need to be designed with the web dynamics in mind, providing clear guidelines to navigate them.
In the online world content is a verb: learners need to be actively involved with the content in order to master it. Rather than merely providing content, the instructor needs to design tasks and assignments that learners can engage with in order to meet the course objectives.
Technology is a vehicle, not a destination: tools must be chosen taken into account how they can help to meet the learning objectives, and they need to be constantly evaluated to make pedagogically informed decisions for their implementation.
Great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology: a successful online course presupposes clearly stated objectives and goals, regular and individual contact and feedback.
Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence: it is crucial to develop a sense of community to make up for the lack of face to face contact and so that the learner can be percieved as real person.
Excellence requires multiple areas of expertise: excellent instruction must be accompanied by technical expertise to ensure that the contents can be properly delivered and accessed.
A great web interface will not save a poor course; but a poor web interface will destroy a potentially great course: it is necessary to articulate a clear guide to lead students through the course.
Excellence comes from ongoing assessment and refinement: course effectiveness and efficiency should be regularly and systematically reviewed so as to obtain diagnostic feedback.
Sometimes the little extras go a long way: additions such as exemplars, rubrics, guides, tutorials, personal email messages, calendar reminders, audio clips and video segme

M4T-A: An Open Letter to Educators

2011-04-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

The young man in the video “An Open Letter to Educators” claims that he left university not because he was no longer interested in learning, but because he felt institutional education was interfering with his education.

He points out that information is no longer in the hands of a few. It is now accessible to everyone and, therefore, education can no longer be centered on simply imparting facts (which are now just a click away), and expecting students to memorize and then regurgitate them when testing time comes.

I believe he is right. This information era calls for new literacies. With the information overload we are exposed to, it is essential that students be taught how to look for, filter, analyse, evaluate, organise and apply information. This involves higher order thinking skills that go beyond just storing, remembering and recalling facts.

So what’s the role of educators in view of this paradigm shift? Incorporating technology in our classrooms is not enough if it does not serve a meaningful purpose and is supported by a sound pedagogy. Rather than spoon-feeding our students, we should seek to empower them to make the most of the tools and resources at their disposal. As Albin Toffler puts it, we must prepare them “to learn, unlearn and relearn”, to think creatively so that they can keep abreast in a fast changing world. But how can we prepare them for that if we are not ready to embrace change ourselves?

M4T-A: reflections on the first chapter of "Using Moodle"

2011-04-12T06:42:00.000-07:00

In the first chapter of their book “Using Moodle”, Jason Colen and Helen Foster clearly outline the factors that make Moodle special:

It’s open source, thus allowing for peer review and knowledge sharing.

It’s free, and as such, free from market pressures, which can sometimes result in detriment to quality.

It’s based on the educational philosophy of social constructionism which views learning as a reconstruction rather than a transmission of knowledge, emphasizing the role of creative experimentation and meaning negotiation. While CMSs are tool centered, Moodle is learning centered and aims at the construction of knowledge through exploration, discovery, sharing and collaboration rather than at the mere delivery of information.

It’s nurtured by a large and active community of users and developers who, through their feedback and suggestions, ensure quality and constant development.

M4T-A: my Moodling so far

2011-04-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

I started this series of Moodle workshops with Integrating Technology back in December last year and it's been a most enriching experience.

Right from the Orientation Workshop, I started exploring the philosophy underpinning Moodle, one with which I feel completely identified. And then were the practical aspects of using Moodle. The hands-on work in the sandboxes has helped me learn the ropes - well, sort of... I feel quite confident now using many of the activities and resources, though there are still a few that I need to continue working on.

Along the Beginners' workshop, team work became central, providing first-hand experience of the constructivist and social constructionist approach of this learning environment. I can truly say I've learned a lot from my partners all along.

Now I'm getting ready for the Advanced workshop. I hope I can manage to meet the course objectives but, in any event, I'm sure I'll continue learning a lot from my facilitators and partners.

Facebook in the classroom?

2011-01-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

Quite a controversial topic these days. I had my qualms about using Facebook with my EFL students, mainly because of the privacy issues the network has been involved in. However, since one of my main objectives is to have my students use the language in a way that is meaningful to them so that they can continue learning outside the classroom walls, I had to give the issue a second thought. After all, is there such a thing as "online privacy"? I don't think so. The moment you click "send" anywhere on the web, the information is no longer yours alone and can, in most cases, be easily retrieved by any search engine. Try googling your name and you'll see what I mean.

So why am I using Facebook with my students?

Most of my students already have a Facebook account and use it on a daily basis as the main means of communication with their friends.
I've found that, while I have to coax them to interact in their blogs, wikis and other social platforms, they seem to feel at home on Facebook and communicate there naturally and spontaneously.
Since they are already there, this is a good opportunity to model approriate and safe internet behaviour. Although in my opinion "online privacy" is a contradiction in terms, I do believe "internet safety" is quite a different matter, and something we must endeavour to train our students in.

How am I using it?

I created a Facebook Group instead of a Page since that gives you greater control over who joins the group and what others can see.
Parents were consulted and the topic was discussed in a meeting (most of them gave us a dismissive nod - here in Argentina the use of Facebook is incredibly pervasive)
We post discussions on different platforms so those students who do not have a Facebook account do not feel left out or under pressure to create one, and are still able to communicate and interact with their peers.

What am I using it for?
All the activities mentioned below are optional. Students are not forced to do them or marked on them. I somehow feel this would take away much of the fun.

Writing: students post short reviews of the songs they would like to work with in their f2f video classes.
Deciding what material they want to work with: polls are created with the students' suggestions and they have the opportunity to vote and have their say.
Extra practice: I post links to external sites which provide practice for listening, reading, writing, speaking, grammar, vocabulary, international exams.
Crosscultural experiences: again, I post links to safe pages that foster interaction with peers from all over the globe.
Responding to visual and oral stimuli: I post what I consider interesting articles and videos to trigger discussion. Sometimes I get lucky and can see exchanges like the one below (these are screen captures since it is not possible to see them in the group if you are not a member)

These are just a few of the uses you can put Facebook to. And another good thing is that I don't even do half of the work. Most of what happens there is geared by the students themselves. They upload material and interact of their own accord most of the time.

Note: this group is promoted only among teens and adults. In the case of kids, we work with blogs and wikis.

Flickr's Advanced Search Feature

2011-01-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

I have become quite aware of the importance of not infringing copyright laws. For example, when looking for images, I browse for those whose owners have chosen to share under a Creative Commons license, and try to return the favour when I upload images of my own.

I knew about Google's advanced search feature, which allows you to filter images by license. What I didn't know is that Flickr lets you carry out this type of search too. This came as quite a big surprise. Has it been there all along and I didn't pay attention to the small print?

For my previous post, I was looking for an image of a berry bush. I was painstakingly going through the properties of each image when it dawned on me that there must be an easier way. And there it was, Flickr's advanced search (Yes!)

I scrolled the Advanced Search page all the way down and ticked the box for Creative Commons:

So easy to be a law-abiding cyber citizen!

Back to the Berry Bush

2011-01-21T19:02:00.000-08:00

Here’s my long overdue first post for evomlit11 - Multiliteracies. In fact, I’d told myself that I wouldn’t join this session this year. Not that I didn’t feel attracted to it (quite the opposite!) but, being in the middle of a Moodle workshop, I have quite a full plate at the moment. Besides, I’m going away on holiday the day after tomorrow and do not expect to have internet access during that time.

Anyway, here I am. Having joined last year’s session, I’ve been following the pursuits and findings of this community through the different environments multiliterates move around. Little by little, members’ introductions started to make it to my email inbox from the Yahoo Group: new people, new questions, new paths to tread. It was getting more and more difficult to just lurk. And then enters Vance’s post reminding members that this is not your normal course but more like a berry bush of choices, thus triggering associations of something rich and untamed, something that invites you to delve into, disentangle, pick, share, taste and savour as you choose. Impossible to resist!

Video recorders in the classroom

2010-12-15T03:36:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting article I've just come across with in a digital newsletter. Lots of ideas worth coming back to during the summer holidays.
Video recorders in the classroom

Tagging in Action at ITValley10: Reflections after today’s Elluminate session

2010-02-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

I could only join today’s live session at Elluminate for the last half hour. Little as I heard (I haven't listened to the recording yet), it has prompted me to reflect on why, how, where - and perhaps, also for whom - I tag. Also, on how and why I could use this with my students.

I started tagging as a way to keep track of all the interesting information, pages, blogs, tools, etc that I encountered as I started my online journey. My very first experience with tagging goes back to my acquaintance with Delicious. As many others have said, those early tags were perhaps not very appropriate but, thanks to Rita Zeinstejer’s advice, I learned early on that, as far as tagging is concerned, “the more the merrier”, meaning that when you use a wide variety of tags, it’s much easier to find what you need later on. As I became more familiar with Delicious, I learned that it offers the possibility of creating groups. This is a great feature to work collaboratively with colleagues or simply to see what the people in your network, those whose judgement you trust, consider worth bookmarking. More recently, I joined Diigo, which, I must confess, I do not use as frequently as Delicious. However, I find it particularly useful in that, apart from all the features it shares with Delicious, it sends you updates of what the people in your network are bookmarking. I’m not sure Delicious offers this feature (I have to revise the settings, I guess)

Presently, I’m fascinated with a couple of applications, Twibes and TweetDeck, which have given me a new perspective on the power of tagging. Twibes has helped me sort out in groups the myriad of tweets that pop up on my Twitter homepage. Among other interesting features, it includes RSS for the tweets and for the members, as well as groups and people search. TweetDeck allows you to manage your Twitter lists, sort your information into columns and also search for lists. All of these of course require tagging. Another of my recent finds, is how to tag pictures in Flickr, though I’m not so sure I’ve mastered it yet - I tagged a picture in Flickr but I still can’t see it on Spezify (search engine that displays the results in the form of images and newspaper headlines) or Taggalaxy (which does the same with pictures)

So, how and why could I use tagging with my students? Basically, in the same way and for the same reasons I am using it: to search, bookmark, organize and get back to content, to network and connect, to work collaboratively. As Vance pointed out in the Elluminate session, it can be used to direct students to specific content. With the information overload on the web, it is necessary, especially when working with young learners, to provide some kind of guidance and selection. Apart from looking for content utilizing certain tags, students can tag any content they create and work collaboratively in this way. This could be accompanied with the creation of a backchannel for communication on Twibes.

Comment on David Weinberger and Andrew Keen's debate

2010-02-01T18:14:00.000-08:00

In truth, these are just notes taken while listening to David Weinberger and Andrew Keen debating Weinberger's thesis in "All Things Miscellaneous"

D. Weinberger’s argument:
The fundamental web challenge is how to organize information, how to find what matters to us.
He contrasts physical order with digital order:

Andrew Keen’s criticism
The main issue at stake: the value of authority in a connected world.
He views digital change as a threat:
Modernity provided mass society with mass access to culture, information, education, literacy.
The digital revolution might return us to the Middle Ages: increasing hierarchy, increasing division between rich and poor, between media literates and those who are not. He foresees the emergence of a digital aristocracy - the elite of the Middle Ages who lost touch of their physical community- resulting in more boundaries, more fragmentation and less conversation, in oligarchy rather than democracy.
He worries about scarceness of talent, information and education on the grounds that when you do away with the gatekeepers of mainstream media, you’re doing away with the access to information and education for the masses.

My impression:
I don’t see much point in Keen’s arguments:
He talks about declining standards of content in the web as if this were not also a problem in mainstream media, denying the presence of talent among the multiplicity of voices emerging in the web. Maybe is this what he fears? These days, as never before, ordinary people as well as experts can find a channel of expression. Whether what they say is valuable or not, is for people themselves to decide. And this seems to be another issue with Keen: the undermining of authority and power. His position strikes me as paternalistic and authoritarian: only those in power can decide what and how much people should have access to. Or could it be that he's just playing the devil's advocate, as Hanna Khamis, one of my partners at EVO multiliteracies, has suggested?

e-Portfolios, aggregation, tagging and RSS

2010-01-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

So far, these have been quite elusive concepts to me. I had a vague idea of what they were and how they worked, but could definitely not put that into words. Vance's post on this topic on the Multiliteracies YG has clarified this and I would like to quote him here (hope this is OK)

Vance says:

In our course on Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning environments, we intend to get into the concept of e-Portfolios, the idea being that anyone undertaking a learning journey can record and document the stages of that journey at a central hub with links to the associated documents.It's a portfolio in the sense that it can be viewed as a collection of documents in one container, but in fact what appears to be the container is a page linking to documents that could in fact be anywhere. The central page is where you send people if you want them to see what you have learned or accomplished. This could also be seen as a kind of CV professionally, or as an assessment tool at the end of a course of study for students.

Regarding aggregation, you can think of RSS and tagging on one side and aggregation as being the other side of the same coin. RSS is code that announces when a content on a site has been updated. Tags are keywords millions of users give to that content when they either produce or see it (because of it's grass roots nature, a tagging system is called a folksonomy).

Aggregators are tools that do two things. They read RSS code (when they have been given the URL of that code, or subscribed to it). And they search places where tags are likely to be found and they return links to content having the tags requested.

So aggregation is a kind of search that works off METAdata; that is code or tags or script associated with content, not the content itself. Google on the other hand searches actual content.

ESL Video

2009-08-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

This is a great tool that I read about in Nik Peachey's blog, Nik's Quick Shout

It allows you to embed a video and create a quiz based on it. Once you are done, you can grab the code to embed in a blog, wiki, etc. As my students love working with video clips, I find this tool of enormous pedagogical value since students are developing vocabulary and listening skills through a highly motivating activity. This has also proved a valuable resourse to entice students to visit their wiki, where, alongside their working spaces, they now have a video page.

The only weak points I have encountered so far are that ESL caters solely for multiple choice questions. Besides, if you want to embed the code on Ning, you'll find that you can only do so on the pages that have a text box (Main, Members, Groups) Apparently, "iframes" can only be added to text boxes in Ning.

Open & Networked Teaching: A Transformative Journey

2009-05-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Alec Couros gave a fantastic talk today on the benefits of open and networked teaching. In his one-hour passionate and inspiring presentation, he made attendees reflect on the nature of knowledge, the change of learning paradigms from individual to social, the benefits of sharing instead of hoarding.

Open & Networked Teaching: A Transformative Journey

View more PDF documents from Alec Couros.

WordSift: Tool for visualizing text

2009-05-07T20:12:00.000-07:00

Wordle taken a step beyond?

Apart from showing the most frequent words in a text in the form of tag clouds, this tool integrates visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. You can see images of the words, word webs, definitions, sentences where those words appear, etc.
Some of the applications suggested in the tutorial below include:

pre- reading activities, e.g. making predictions about a text, introducing unfamiliar vocabulary

post- reading activities, e.g. creating word webs to explore connections between words, writing a paragraph including some of the most frequent words

Bookmarking and annotating

2009-04-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

Today I came across this post by Robert which I definitely want to remember. I had no idea that there were tools like the ones he mentions below, which let you bookmark, annotate and share web pages.

"...I wonder if others have experience of these:

http://trailfire.com/

http://stickis.com

http://fleck.com/

http://sharedcopy.com/

http://info.jkn.com/

http://www.mystickies.com/

http://drawhere.com/"

I have had a quick look at some of them and they look really interesting. I'd like to explore this some more to see how they compare with del.icio.us, Diigo and SimplyBox.

SimplyBox

2009-04-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

SimplyBox

This is a tool for capturing, sharing and organising content you come across in the web. While you're surfing, you can make captures of any section of the page that interests you, put it in boxes you can organise according to topic, add comments to your boxes, share your boxes with other people who can also add comments and content.

Adding subtitles to videos

2009-04-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

Overstream is a free tool that allows you to add subtitles to online videos. It only takes a few seconds to upload the video of your choice. Adding the subtitles is quite straightforward as well. You only need to get the hang of the timing. Anyway, the step by step tutorials on the page are very clear and easy to follow. When you are done, you can get the url or the embed code.

Since students in general like working with videos, I think this tool offers a lot of potential for the language classroom. For example:

giving background information about a particular artist. My experiment:

describing feelings
telling the story behind the lyrics and the images of a music video
preparing vocabulary quizzes based on the lyrics/images, etc.

Digifolios

2009-04-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Today, as I was following a link in a blog, I came across "Digifolios", a tool completely new to me. When I googled the word, I ended up in a slideshare created by Cristina Costa. She provides a very clear explanation of what digifolios are and how they can benefit us and our students. This is part of what she says in one of her comments below the presentation:

"I think eportfolios really have a 'saying' in the 21st century, and we as educators need to look at it from the students' perspective. And also find ways to realize how it can add value to what they are doing. It is important to guide them to establish their professional and personal identity in order to make them more marketable to their future careers. How people can be prepared / mentored to show evidence of their knowledge (what they know), of their ongoing activity (what, how and with whom they are learning) and of their predisposition to keep learning and upgrading their skills ( how flexible, how dynamic and how willing they are to constantly improve and excel)"

And this is the actual presentation:

digifolio

View more presentations from Cristina Costa.

ISSUU: publishing tool

2009-03-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

ISSUU is an extremely versatile publishing tool. It allows you to publish different types of documents in a very attractive way, with the look and feel of a real book.
You can share your work with other users, create networks and work collaboratively with the people in them, insert relevant documents from other users into your own creations to have all the information relevant to you in a single place, and, I guess, many other things that I haven't explored yet.

This is a very simple example of what you can do with this tool:

My colleagues'reaction

2009-03-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, we had our first teachers' meeting of the year. Inspired by all I had experienced and shared during the Enhancing Lessons session, I went on and on about the benefits of integrating technology into our practice.

This is my colleagues' answer:

From Verónica Maser:

From Claudia Bondino:

Thomas Robb's posting in ARCALL

2009-03-08T04:52:00.000-07:00

The following is an article by Thomas Robb, posted in ARCALL blog. I was surprised by the fact that, even in highly developed countries, it is not easy to integrate technology into education. His mention of the importance of the "human element" resonates with me, since I am concerned about the difficulty to coax teachers into implementing ICTs to enhance our practice. His words made me feel that I am not alone in the struggle towards that aim.

Thomas Robb's contribution to our blog

It was my great pleasure to participate in the ARCALL online chat session in Elluminate on February 23rd with Jennifer Verschoor -ARCALL funding member- sitting next to me in my hotel room in Buenos Aires and others participating from distant locations. I'd just like to summarize what I said there and to add a few comments.

One person asked how CALL was organized in Japan and this was a very important question, because it brings to the fore a very important issue. Most teaching with technology, be it CALL or anything else, is not very organized at all. Despite the relative wealth of equipment available in Japanese universities, and recently even in secondary schools, only some teachers use technology and, for the most part, they stick to one or two tools that they are most familiar with and can use comfortably with their students.

Very few schools have any sort of coordinated program where multiple teachers collaborate and use the same tech tools in some sort of uniform fashion. Perhaps this will come in the future, but right now what I see is rather chaotic. Yet, on the other side of the coin, we need to be aware of attempts of institutions to force technology on us because generally it is not done effectively. Stories about rooms of computers gathering dust and other major expenses that have done to waste are legion. Administrations tend to spend money (when they have it) on hardware, but ignore the software and human elements (training and support) that are needed for any new technology to succeed. Teachers need to "buy in to" the system if it is going to have this chance.

The establishment of ARCALL is an important step in the right direction because technology is not going to succeed unless there are enthusiastic users to support the other teachers in their initial attempts to use technology and to experiment with what is currently available in order to discover what works best. I hope that ARCALL can grow into a major force towards the implemtation of technology in the schools so that students can take advantage of all of the wonderful advantages that it offers for langauge practice, communication and cultural exchange.

Tool for creating animations

2009-02-26T19:34:00.000-08:00

I have just learnt about this tool in AllSharing, a ning platform created by Mbarek Akkadar.

GoAnimate seems to have a lot of potential for story telling. One of the features I like the most is that it allows you to record your voice, thus lending itself to developing speaking and listening skills.

Interesting Article (in Spanish)

2009-02-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

I came across this article in ARCALL (Argentine Computer Assisted Language Learning)Yahoo Group. I think it perfectly illustrates the point of why it is essential for teachers to help their students develop their ICT competence.

Saturday, 6 Feb highlights

2009-02-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Rita's presentation at Elluminate with a clear classification of different web 2.0 tools followed by a demonstration of how she's using them with her students. Superb!

The Web 2.0 Honing Social Skills

View more presentations from RitaZ. (tags: #enhancinglessons writingmatrix)

Then we had another wonderful session at Elluminate, during which we put together a Bubbleshare album working collaboratively and having lots of fun in the process. Here's the outcome:

BubbleShare: Share photos - Play some Online Games.

3 Feb highlights

2009-02-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

Today a friend sent me this wonderful video and I immediately thought of embedding it here. Watching and listening to it was definitely an aha experience. You'll see why:

1 Feb highlights

2009-02-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

Today we finish Week 3. Incredible!
So many interesting things this week:

Alicia, Analía and Rita put together a great wrap up in the YG files

This conversation created by Vicky Saumell using Chinswing. She invited teachers around the world to introduce themselves. I think she has managed to produce invaluable authentic material for listening practice. Bonus track: listening to some famous webheads talking about themselves. A gem!

29 Jan highlights

2009-01-29T18:13:00.000-08:00

We are already in Week 3: Integrating Online Speaking and Listening. This has been a most fruitful week so far, with very interesting comments in the Enhancing Lessons Yahoo Group and warm friendly chats at Tapped In.
Some highlights:

Alicia's idea for using Chinswing:

"How about this idea? Children love listening to stories and inventing stories. After teaching and practising the past tense, the teacher could start a story in CS. Sth like 'It was Sunday and Roberta was going to visit her grandparents who lived in the wood. She woke up at seven and .....'
Then the children would have to continue the story (we could even ask them to begin by repeating the last sentence in the previous post). The teacher could post again if necessary (e.g if they have lost track of the story).

The discussion Rita started in Tapped In, which allowed me to discover this wonderful tool.

The links to Studystack provided by Robert. Great tool for learning and practising vocabulary.

The Flickr toys links provided by Analía. They are great for creating stories associated with images. Here they are: Bookr Bubblr Phrasr

18-22 Jan Highlights

2009-01-22T17:44:00.000-08:00

Five days without posting... but not precisely because I've had nothing to say. Quite the opposite!
So much has been going on that I've had no time to report here. The highlights?

Very interesting discussions in the Enhancing Lessons Yahoo! Group, mainly on the topic of lesson planning

Participants have started creating their blogs. A pleasure to read their posts and learn from their comments and reflections!

Some of them have started commenting (in their own blogs) on the scenario proposed by Robert for this week in the Enhancing Lessons Blog

Great chats at Tapped In with some participants. The night before last I got to know a bit more about Mónica from Buenos Aires and her lovely 4-year-old son, who actually typed some messages in a language of his own.

Thanks to Analía, I realised that I had to state my email in Settings>Comments here in order to receive notifications when someone commented here. Thanks Ana! And sorry dear visitors for not answering sooner. Now you know the reason :-)

17 Jan highlights

2009-01-18T13:45:00.000-08:00

Definitely, meeting some participants at Elluminate for a live session. It was wonderful to put a voice - and a face, because we uploaded our photos onto the whiteboard - to the names signing the posts in the YG and in the wiki.

We discussed some features of the Elluminate environment, generally getting familiar with it, and then we went on to share the kind of tools we have been using in our lessons.

The session was so exciting that some of us decided to continue chatting at Tapped In when the Elluminate session was over.

14 Jan highlights

2009-01-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

1. Watching the video here featuring Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, discussing Web 2.0 in terms of social impact. Some of the points he makes:

teaching has not changed but learning has
students learn what they do
to learn is to create meaningful connections, to create significance
there's no meaning without connection and no connection without meaning
students learn what they care about from people they care about and who, they know, care about them

Wow! And I just watched half of it (it lasts about an hour)

2. Meeting CarolinaL in Tapped In. Nice talking to you Carolina!

Co-moderating Enhancing Lessons

2009-01-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

Here I am, starting yet another blog. But the event well deserves an exclusive venue.
Being in the moderating team of Enhancing Lessons is proving to be a wonderful experience for so many reasons.
To begin with, because of the fabulous moderators:

Robert, the perfect gentleman, always so patient with us inexperienced members.
Rita, my mentor, so generous and warm.
Nina, another generous webhead.
Maru, whom I've known for only one year but has already become a true friend.
And then my colleagues from Rosario, Analía and Alicia whom I knew only by name or remembered vaguely and who are already becoming wonderful road companions on this journey.