A Latecomer to Camp Magic Macguffin

My Daily Create assignment No 146 - a photo that represents destruction

I joined Camp Magic Macguffin a while ago, then forgot all about it, shame on me. I joined the camp because I love digital storytelling and the DS106 activities will give me something fun to do during summer. Since I am an open participant and not doing this for credit, I hope it is still not late to start creating.

I am grateful to @olHatchetJack for showing me the way to Bunkhouse Four and to @cogdog for reminding me that I haven't written a single blog post so far. So, here I am now.

If you are one of my regular readers and only came here looking for TEFL lesson ideas, I believe you are still at the right place. The reason why I didn't create a separate blog for DS106 is that I think that most of the stuff I do here can be transformed into lesson ideas. Today is no exception.

The first task I have decided to tackle is "Vonnegut and The Shape of Stories". Here is the original video:

Our task was to describe the shape of a story we are familiar with, based on Voneggut's video. Here is my contribution:

So, have you recognised the story yet?

Technorati Tags: DS106, VonnegutStory

Webskills Part 1 - Nicenet

Photo on Flickr by Aphrodite

I made a promise some time ago - I said I was going to write about my Webskills experience. Then I got very, very busy. Here I am now, ready for the first post.

My intention is not to transfer the whole learning experience into a series of blog posts. What I'll do instead is give you little bits and pieces, showing you how I am applying the knowledge in my teaching and giving you ideas how this could be explored further.

I decided to start with Nicenet because it was our main medium of communication during the course. Also, I have been using it with my CAE class ever since.

Nicenet is an "Internet classroom assisstant". It is a safe place for a class forum. The people behind Nicenet believe that "the classroom is not a marketplace", so you will find no advertising on the site.

The U of Oregon team has provided a very useful step-by-step instructions sheet on how to open a Nicenet class. The first page is intended for the teacher, while the second page can be printed and given to the students. It is a Word document and you can download it here.

It is very important to note that a class can't be accessed without the class key. If privacy is your issue, you couldn't have come to a better place. No one will be able to find your class unless you give them the key. No one will know your class is even there. Of course, this might be a big drawback as well, depending on how you look at it.

Another drawback of Nicenet is that, if you want to use HTML, you have to put it there yourself. Let's say that you want to create a link to my blog. It will have to look something like this:

 

You can substitute my link and my text by anything you want. Here's how: 


 

Feel free to copy-paste this code into your Nicenet posts, just make sure that you have removed my links and my text and replaced them with yours. This particular code will open your link in a new window, which is very convenient.

Alternatively, you can learn more here. 

Flickr photos can be embedded into Nicenet posts by copy-pasting the embed code. You can't embed YouTube videos or other multimedia, though.

What I am doing in Nicenet with my CAE students right now is a book club of sorts. I share a new short story with them every week. They read it and write a short review or answer a couple of questions I have asked them. It works, since CAE students desperately need extensive reading. What they also need is a place where they can write freely and exchange opinions, since most of their regular writing homework revolves around exam preparation. 


If looking for short stories to do with your students, here's where you can go: American Stories for English Learners.

That's all for now, folks, but stay tuned for more. I would also like to inform you that I will be the guest blogger on SEETA at the end of May.

 

If you are not a SEETA member, why not join? It is a wonderful site with lots of great workshops to attend and everything is free. See you there, I hope.

Technorati Tags: TEFL, SEETA, Webskills, Nicenet

April Fools 2012 - A Lesson Plan

Photo on Flickr by David Reeves

This year April 1st was on a Sunday, which is unfortunate. However, while it was impossible to make a lesson plan for that day, it seems quite OK to make one a week after the day.

April Fools online has provided a wealth of resources that can be exploited at leisure, mostly thanks to the Google guys and their geeky sense of humour. Other geeks have joined in the fun as well. Some of the videos sound more like prophecies than like jokes. Take, for example, the self-driving car and Chrome's "multitasking" function. My favourite remains last year's Google Motion, but this year it has been joined by the equally hilarious Google Really Advanced Search. And I want that fiber bar.

If you don't quite know what I am talking about, here's my collection of this year's online April Fools jokes:

April Fools

As you can see, I have used Storify to create this lesson and the questions for the students are inside. I learnt how to use Storify in Nik Peachey's "Adapting Your Coursebook With Technology" workshop on Seeta.

Storify is a really handy tool. You can search for different media while inside it and it is easy to drag and drop items into your story. That way you can create your own collection of readings and listenings for the students, or they can create their own stories collaboratively. Here's Storify's help page with a collection of screencasts.

Next year, I will be on the lookout for Google April Fools jokes and I might even do a scavenger hunt with my students and ask them to search for online pranks.

Technorati Tags: TEFL, "April Fools", Storify, Google, Reading, Listening

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Life After Webskills

I am a little disoriented. I feel like I haven't been online for 10 weeks.

In fact, I was online all the time. When I wasn't working, I spent every waking moment online, typing, reading, playing with web tools. I was online, but I didn't update this blog. I didn't visit Facebook or tweet. I didn't participate in my forums and I didn't leave comments in your blogs.

I spent every single moment of my time online in my Webskills course. I even blogged elsewhere.

Webskills is a long-distance course offered through the University of Oregon's Linguistics Department/American English Institute (UO AEI). The full course name is Building Teacher Skills through the Interactive Web and you can find out more about it here. This is one of the seven courses offered through the E-Teacher Scholarship program. You can find out about other courses this program offers here.

It was amazing. That is all I am going to say at this stage. I will not even try to cram the 10 weeks of this wonderful course into a single blog post. That will not do the course justice. I want to take time and share at leisure. One thing I learnt in Webskills is that, every time we reflect on something we did or something that happened to us, we learn something new.

I can't promise that I will do this in an uninterrupted series of posts. There are other things that I want to write about as well.

If you are impatient, you can read my Webskills blog. However, it is a very reflective blog (even more reflective than this one) and it was aimed at other participants of the course. In order to share what I learnt with a larger audience, I have to start from scratch and present, rather than reflect.

If you pay attention to the Wordle I started with, you will see that it resembles a jigsaw puzzle. That is because going through the course felt like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and, once the last piece was in, I could see the big picture.

I was going to write more about the course here, but I would like to try something else instead. I would like you to look at the Wordle-puzzle from the beginning of this post and tell me what you see. Listed are the topics we covered, some websites we used and some practical tasks we did. If you could describe this puzzle with one word or one sentence, what would it be?

I know this is a very difficult challenge. After all, I just spent ten weeks learning about something and now I want you to figure it out from a single Wordle. It is a crazy idea and it came to me while I was writing.

I hope this will at least peak your curiosity. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: TEFL, Webskills

Ladies and Gentlemen, My New Podcasting Blog

Photo on Flickr by John Thurm

It has been a week since EVO sessions have finished and I haven't had time to post. I haven't finished all my Classdigitools assignments and I am really planning to. Once I finish all Week 5 projects, I will post about them here.

I have, however, completed all my Podcasting tasks and I proudly give you Natasa's Podcasting Blog. The blog, exactly as it is, is the final product of the workshop, an eportfolio. This doesn't go to say that it will always remain as it is now. I am planning to add more pages once I start working on my future podcasting projects, but at this stage, everything you see there has been created during the workshop.

Here is a preview:

Natasa's podcasting 2012 blog

View more PowerPoint from lunas994

The blog contains three pages - About Me, My Podcasts and My Podcast Projects. I will share some highlights here:

Here is something about me, but I mostly talk about my school:



My interview with Janet Bianchini:

Podcast Powered By Podbean

My Mystery Person:

My future podcasting plans:



Finally, my "Animotocast":





It is not difficult to create an "Animotocast". You just create an Animoto clip the usual way and, instead of choosing their audio, you upload your own. The trick is to have enough photos ready to last you until the end of your audio. Otherwise, your podcast will be cut short. It goes both ways, so be prepared to sacrifice some of your photos if the audio is short.

You can create the audio for your Animoto using any of the podcasting tools, but I am hooked on Audacity. If you think Audacity is scary or too difficult to use, I advise you to attend the next Podcasting EVO session. You won't regret it. I feel that


Original image on Flickr by Floeshie

Technorati Tags: podcasting2012, podcasting, TEFL

Classdigitools Week 4 - Speaking

Photo on Flickr by visual.dichotomy

By the time I post this we will be well into Week 5. However, I am very, very busy with my Webskills course. Not to mention Podcasting.

I didn't devote as much time to EVO as I usually do, but I am glad that I didn't give up completely. I learnt a lot and, even though I am late with some tasks, I am going to continue working on them after the session is over. One thing I am really sorry about is that I had to sacrifice the interaction, which is always the best part of any online course. But I did most of the tasks.

This week in Classdigitools we did tools for speaking. My main problem is my webcam, which is very old and very cheap. I need a new one and it is on my priority list. I couldn't do some of the tasks because of my camera and I had to modify others.

One of our tasks was to talk about why we became teachers, using Recordr. It is a handy tool and luckily lets you choose whether you will record video or audio only. Here is my audio:

Week 4:Task 2 recorded by lunas994

Another task was to go to Intervue.me and talk about how we spend Christmas with our family. I bravely recorded my video with my terrible little camera, but it wouldn't work. So, I modified the task. Before I show you what I did, let me tell you that I am going to use Intervue.me a lot when I buy a new camera. It is easy to use. The teacher puts a question at the top of the page, and the students answer talking into their webcams. You can listen to what other participants said here.

And this is what I did:


Photo on Flickr by Milica Sekulic

We were very busy this week. Task 3 was to draw our family using Educreations. It is a very user-friendly tool and I can recommend it warmly. Here is what I did:



Task 5 was to create a lesson plan using one of the tools offered. This is where I am going to "borrow" my Podcasting lesson plan. Though the template is different from the one provided in the Classdigitools wiki, I hope it will do the trick:

Podcast Project Plan
Title: MY FAVOURITE PLACE
Main objective: Participants describe their favourite place.
Level: Intermediate
Class type: adults
Aim: Describing a place
Activity focus: Speaking
Time: Max 3 minutes
Material: Computer with access to Internet / Headphones (which students use from home)
Procedure:
1. Teacher and students practice describing their favourite place in class. Teacher introduces relevant vocabulary.
2. Teacher posts an example to the class wiki. Teacher also posts a screencast explaining how to use Audioboo.
3. Student signs up for an account in Audioboo.
4. Student records the Boo. 
5. Teacher posts a screencast explaining how to post a link to the Boo in the class wiki.
 6. Student posts a link to their Boo in the class wiki. 
7. Teacher posts a Screencast explaining how to write/record a reply to a Boo.
8. Teacher posts the first reply to the student’s Boo. 
9. Student chooses a classmate and listens to his/her recording and writes/records comments or questions in their classmate´s Boo. 
10. In class, teacher and students discuss the experience and what they learnt from it. 
11. Students brainstorm ideas for the next Boo. 
12. Students choose the best idea for a new podcast.

As you can see from the plan, the students will do the task from home, which is why I have chosen Audioboo, since it is very user-friendly.

And here is the Boo I made for my Podcasting class. It is called My Mystery Person:



Apart from being very easy to use, Audioboo allows voice comments as well as text comments and this can be great for class discussions or interviews.

I am going to stop here for now. This post is very long as it is and it probably took ages to load, considering everything that I have embedded into it. However, there were some tools in our Classdigitools wiki that I would like to explore further and I am going to do that in one of my next posts.

Technorati Tags: #tools12, speaking, podcasting, TEFL

Week 3 in Classdigitools

Photo on Flickr by emilybean

It is week 3 in all my workshops. I have a brand new Podcasting blog and I am really, really busy in Webtools. My Webtools forums are bustling with activity and I am having the fun of my life. Meanwhile in Classdigitools we are doing sites for listening comprehension.

Since it is already the second part of the week, I will do all my Classdigitools tasks here in one place:

Tasks 1 and 2 - Find a listening resource that we could use in class. Review the resource.

I am between terms and there are no classes at my school, but I did this task with my Advanced class in mind. Here is what I have found:

Time 10 questions is, in their own words: "A selection of reader-submitted questions on TIME.com serves as the basis for a candid interview with each newsmaker." It is really good for adult learners. The questions are often provocative and I really like the journalist. One way to use the site would be to let the students choose a clip, listen to the interview and report about it in class. As I was "in a hurry, preparing for my class", I chose the video:

I don't think I have to explain why I chose this video, but if you insist - I love the man. And so do my students, as most of them are girls. Apart from that, both the questions and the answers are very interesting. I would have the students write the questions down as they listen. They are not implicitly asked, so the task is not that easy. After that I would let them discuss Sting's answers.

Task 3 was to combine the site found first with one more site offered in the wiki and to combine them into a lesson plan. I will not write a full lesson plan, I'll just think out loud here.

The second site I chose is TED. Most of us have watched TED videos and I think they are a wonderful listening resource for adult students.

This is what I chose:

Discussing this video would probably take one whole class, but since I am going to combine the two together, this is what I would do:

After watching the video where Sir Ken Robinson is discussing education and creativity, I would ask the students to find similarities between his talk and Sting's interview. Are they talking about similar things? How would Sting rate in Sir Ken's school? What sort of school do we need for people like Sting?

I would ask them to come up with ten questions to ask Sir Ken Robinson. Then I would ask the students to write 10 questions to interview each other.

As a follow-up, I would ask the students to find interesting TED talks and to present them in the next task.

Task 3 - Listening List

I will not go into the complexities of this task. Let me just tell you that I need to come up with a list of 12 things I could do with these 2 resources. I have already mentioned the first four.

1. Watch a 10 Questions video and write down the questions asked.

2. Come up with 10 questions for the TED speaker.

3. Find the connection between the two speakers.

4. Interview each other, using the 10 questions format.

5. If you had to give a TED speech, what would it be about?

6. Prepare a short speech on something you feel passionate about.

7. Write a letter to the TED speaker, telling him/her what you think about his/her speech.

8. Which famous person would you interview for the 10 questions site? Write 10 questions for them.

9. Write a new set of questions for the person interviewed in the clip. What do you think their answers would be like?

10 If the people from the two videos met, what would they talk about? Would they like each other?

11. Write 10 questions for your teacher and interview her (ouch).

12. Write an elevator pitch for one of the videos. Why should people watch it?

I could go on, but I believe I have just completed my tasks for this week.

Technorati Tags: #tools12 TEFL