Plickers

Plickers - Clickers without the need for clickers!  This is a great app for taking polls, voting and giving your opinion with the added bonus that students don't need a mobile device. The teacher simply prints out the 'Plicker' cards and students hold them up in one of four positions in order to cast their vote. The letter of their vote needs to be at the top. There are 4 choices, A, B, C or D. The only device needed is one for the teacher in order to scan the cards and collect the data.  The Plicker cards are quickly scanned and the results can be seen on line in seconds.  This is particularly handy as many schools still don't agree with the BYOD idea and in many schools, mobiles and tablets in the classroom are still not allowed.  Plickers is being used for pre-assessment and assessment but you can also use them to GAMIFY your classroom.  How you use them is up to you and your own imagination!

See the following video which sums up the app in a nutshell.

MYSTERY SKYPE

MYSTERY SKYPE

Mystery Skype and other educational Skype activities are taking off in a big way in schools all over the world.  It's a great way to open up the walls of your classroom by taking your students to other classrooms around the world, virtually of course!  It's also a great way to bring interesting people into your own classroom.

There are three activities offered on the new Microsoft for Education platform:

1. Mystery Skype
2. Guest Speaker
3. Virtual Field trip

In all three activities, students are able to virtually go out into the world and see other places or meet interesting people thanks to video-conferencing tools such as Skype.
I have personally been trying out the Mystery Skype activity with teachers who are learning this new methodology and it has been a great success.  There are so many skills being worked on during a short 20 minute Mystery Skype game:

• Critical thinking skills
• Mapping skills
• Language skills
• Collaborative team-working skills

No matter what the age, the activity is fun and engaging.  I have seen teachers turn into children in minutes! I would highly recommend introducing Mystery Skype into your classroom.  It is such a rich activity in all senses and takes very little organisation if you allow the students to manage the activity using all the

 JOB TASKS that you give them. The big job for the teacher is finding a class to play with but nowadays with Twitter, Google Hangouts and the Microsoft Education platform, it's easy to make professional connections in order to organise the dates and time of the activity.

To play Mystery Skype, I signed up here and found a class almost immediately.

Here is an example of the activity, done by teachers from Catalonia and 5th graders from Canada.

Riddle - Create, Customise, Publish, Analyse!

Riddle is a great tool for creating polls, riddles and lists.  Very easy to use and with some imagination, students could create some great content for their classmates to comment or vote on.  Easy to use and easily shareable.

CLOUDS

Do clouds weigh?

YES

NO

MAYBE

HSTRY - Timelines for English language learners

HSTRY - Timelines for English language learners

There have been many different types of timeslines come out in these past few years and I have tried many of them.  They all have different features that make one better, easier or more practical than the next.  I just came across this one which also seems to have some unique features that your students may find attractive.  

The tool HSTRY allows you to add images, videos, audios to bring your timeline to life.  Students are also able to add comments to the timeline which creates interaction and feedback for the author of the timeline. They can add quizzes too!

I haven't tried it with students but it does look like it could be a fun tool to use and it could certainly be useful for EFL students when it comes to making oral presentations in English.  I am adding the link to HSTRY's webpage.  If you try it, I would love to hear how it went and see some examples!

https://www.hstry.co/

HEADLINE NEWS STORIES

This cool tool by Class Tools is great for creating personalized headlines related to real or fictive news. Students can use their imaginations to create dynamic titles, headlines and summaries of their news stories. The tool allows you to create an almost instant downloadable image which could be printed out to decorate the classroom.  It also allows you to share the url or tweet your headline instantly!

CODE-MONSTER

I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Scratch, which is a programming language which teaches kids how to code in order to make their own interactive games or stories.  I just came across CODE-MONSTER which has the same purpose of teaching code language to kids but is much more basic.  Kids carry out very simple tasks in order to get an idea of how coding works.  The results are instant.  Every task carries out some type of visual action that can actually be seen on the screen. I think this tool could be very motivating for those students who are interested in game designing, web page creation, etc. because of its simplicity.
Have a look and try it out yourselves!

http://www.crunchzilla.com/code-monster

GRAMMAR IN INFOGRAPHICS

Infographics are a great way to present grammar, punctuation or common spelling mistakes to your students. Not only are they good for students but also for many of us native speakers who often make the same common mistakes!  How many of us have misspelt 'there' or 'their', 'meet' or 'meat', 'who's or whose'? Present it on an infograph and get your students to create others. A great visual way for it to finally stick in your students' mind....and in yours!

Explore more visuals like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

MAKING GUESSING GAMES WITH PREZI

MAKING GUESSING GAMES WITH PREZI

To introduce my teens to Prezi for the first time, I had them make sentences about a 'secret animal'.  It was a great first activity because they learned how to place their sentences on the canvas, make their own paths and hide the image somewhere within the words.  They also practised the vocabulary we were learning; adjectives, comparatives and superlatives.  The end result was having short presentations in front of the class for everyone to guess the secret animal.  On top of using their English, both written and orally, they had fun making their Prezis.  I didn't correct all of their English mistakes because I didn't want to discourage them!! After this activity, Prezis became a norm in our classroom!

BUNCEE

BUNCEE

This looks like an interesting tool to use with your students. Basically, Buncee is yet another web-based content creation tool.  Students can add photos, videos, audio, text, drawings, etc. in order to create dynamic project presentations.  Teachers can use Buncee to create lessons online.  You can also make fun greeting cards like the example I am showing here. I joined and made it in less than 10 minutes!

http://www.buncee.com/buncee/45336

Here is another example where a video has been embedded.  A great tool for getting students to give presentations on whatever topic is related to your curriculum.

http://www.buncee.com/buncee/11996

SYMPHONICAL

I recently discovered this tool and thought that I'd put it here for you teachers to have a look at.  It could be very useful for organizing all of those tasks that seem to never get done and stack up on a pile.  This tool allows you to visual tasks to do, tasks in progress and tasks that have been completed.  I like the looks of it too!

MINDMUP MAPS

Make your mind tick! Have some fun making mind maps with Mind Mup. Easy to use and good for some brain exercise during the Summer months!!SUMMER TIME on MindMup

THINGLINK

Have some fun this Summer creating interactive images and sharing them with your friends. THINGLINK is a tool which allows you to add 'hotspots' to your image, making it interactive in some way. You can link the hotspots to text, exterior links, videos, etc... Give your students a task such as the one found in the example below. All they need is an image and some imagination!

CLICK HERE TO SEE ONLINE EXAMPLE

Create guides and tutorials with TILDEE

There is no better way to learn than by teaching. Getting your students involved in teaching is an effective way to get them to use new language and structures in a useful and purposeful way. TILDEE is a free tool that helps you to create and instantly share tutorials on any subject. In the example (http://www.tildee.com/y8A3tj)you will see that a teacher has written a tutorial on English expressions, however, I see this tool as being used by students to create easy tutorials that will enable them to use new language for specific purposes. See this example of 'How to make a fruit smootie'

They can easily share their tutorials with their teacher and classmates too which enriches the whole language exchange. There are other tools for making guides such as http://snapguide.com/, however the point I'm trying to make is that the actual practice of getting students to create guides and tutorials is very rich language learning strategy that has now been made easy and engaging with tools such as the two I have mentioned here. Getting students to create and 'teach' gives them the opportunity to use language in an active way.  They learn by 'doing'.  Check out the examples and please share with me any tutorials you create with your students!
I will leave with this Chinese proverb:

  I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand!

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

DIGITAL STORYTELLING



I have posted before about the educational value of creating digital stories but I am going to add some new thoughts.  We can all create a good story.  No matter the age of the students you are teaching or what their interests or 'learning-language' may be, I can guarantee you that they have a story to tell.  Let's help them as teachers to find their  voice and to put their stories on the web where they can be shared with others in their class, school or even other schools around the world.

Some benefits which will come out of storytelling:

These aren't my own but I couldn't have said it better! (By : Med Kharbach)

•  It develops creativity and critical thinking
•  Students who are shy or afraid to talk in class get a chance to speak out their minds
•  It empowers students voice to deliver rich, deep message that is capable of conveying a powerful message.
•  It helps students explore  the meaning of their own experience, give value to it, and communicate that experience with others.
• It promotes the notions of life long learning and independent learning
•  It develops students communicative skills
•  It is a reflective process that helps students reflect upon their learning and find deep connections with the subject matter of a course or with an out-of-class experience.
•  It fosters students sense of individuality
•  It also gives students an opportunity to experiment with self-representation and establish their identity
• Students creating digital stories develop proficiency with multimedia applications

What I can add is the additional and obvious language learning benefit.  Getting students to write in a language which is not their native tongue is hard enough.  Giving them the opportunity to write about something that interests them is a must and if you add the 'wow' factor of an engaging tool, you've won half the battle!  Sharing their stories with their classmates is also a rich language learning strategy.  They have to read and understand (hopefully!) others' stories which means that they are receiving more language input than if they had simply written down a story in paper-form and handed it in to the teacher.  

The following link will take you the article written by Med Kharbach where you will find a long list of great 2.0 tools that can be used to write digital stories:

LIST OF FREE DIGITAL STORYTELLING TOOLS FOR TEACHERS

Get creating!

GRAMMAR GAMBLE

Grammar is not usually fun so why not try making it fun with GRAMMAR GAMBLE?
Learn and practise grammar as a game with the whole class.  What I like about this game
is that you can practise specific grammar topics that you may be learning at the moment.
If not, you can go straight into playing the game and competing against others from all
over the world with mixed grammar-related questions.  The more confident you are with
your answers, the more you will 'gamble'.
Very practical and engaging!

USING POLLS WITH STUDENTS

Let’s talk about POLLS. 

A poll is a survey used to give a public opinion about a specific topic or question. Using a poll with in your class allows you to ask one multiple choice question and receive results which will reflect how other students feel about a particular subject.  Nowadays, most polls are being asked online.  An online poll tool gives you the opportunity to receive instant information or feedback from other students in your class.  You can use create polls to use on your computer or on any device such as a smartphone, ipod or ipad.

Some easy sites to make polls are:

1.      http://www.polldaddy.com/
2.    http://www.polleverywhere.com/
3.       http://www.surveymonkey.com/
4.       http://pollcode.com/
5.       http://www.polljunkie.com/
6.       http://newpoll.net/

Look at this example.





Let students control some of their own learning by giving them the opportunity to be active and  feel that they are the 'creator' of learning activities such as this one!

WORDSIFT

Here is a tool I came across that I think could be useful for teachers working  on reading skills.  I think it could best be used by the teacher with the whole class, projecting the text in question using the OHP and working on the text as a group activity.  As well as working on reading skills, teachers are introducing key vocabulary in a visual way which facilitates comprehension, esp. in a foreign language.

Wordsift visualizes texts and picks out the most frequent words used.  Wordsift also does a google image search and retrieves images to match the two most frequent words found. Examples from the source text containing the most frequent word in the text is displayed under the Visual Thesaurus word web.  One intended use of this feature is to organize the text to preview key vocabulary. 

CULIPS

ESL PODCASTS

A Canadian based website with playful podcasts to help you learn English. Culips podcasts have a lot of cultural contents and we talk a lot about life in Canada and in Montreal in particular.

THE TIMES IN PLAIN ENGLISH

Reading a newspaper can be a frustrating experience, even in one’s own language!

 Add to the equation a language which isn’t your native tongue and the task becomes even more cumbersome.   Try using ‘The Times in Plain English’.

 The Times in Plain English brings you important news from America’s best sources of information. The writing is in clear, readable English.  It’s a great for learners of the English language because it avoids:

• Complex sentences
• Compound sentences
• Distractions from the main thought
• Comparisons
• Metaphors, similes and analogies
• Argot, slang and idiomatic words
• Contractions
• Adjectives

This is a great reading resource for English teachers!

6 GREAT VIDEO TOOLS FOR TEACHERS

Here is a link to some great applications for making or editing videos.