Dolors Reig in conference: Technologies and Learning

Today I will comment on the conference we attended on October 7th, at UNL (Universidad Nacional del Litoral) in Santa Fe. It was Dolors Reig’s conference “Tecnologías del aprendizaje y el conocimiento en la agenda de las instituciones educativas”. Dolors Reig is a Spanish social psychologist, director of the academy “El caparazón” (an online academy for vocational training). She is specialized in psychology, media and social networks. 
She spoke about the relationship between learning, teaching and knowledge. For her, students subjectivities are constructed in close relation to the digital media and social networks widely available nowadays. That is why it is necessary to consider a new paradigm for reflecting on the effect that technologies have on students' lives. Following this, she resignified the most general conception of the TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación). Instead of it, she explained the importance of introducing the TAC (Tecnologías del Aprendizaje y del Conocimiento) nowadays in schools. Its implementation is extremely relevant for students to learn in a significant way, using the digital tools they use everyday everywhere outside school. Finally, she talked of the TEP (Tecnologías del Empoderamiento y la Participación). This term refers to the role we need to play as citizens and as teachers. What we need is to participate and also let others participate. These technologies will help us make it possible; consequently, I suggest including them into your daily teaching planning.

Some Web 2.0 tools

Wordle and Voki:

In a lesson of Eco II, we learned that Wordle is a tool in which you can generate "world clouds" from texts that you provide. I think that it can be useful for teaching and for entertaining students. Both teachers and students can create eye-catching visuals based on different topics using font, colour and arrangement strategies to appropriately represent content. I consider that the best use of this tool could be that of analysing texts, teachers could select and put the main ideas of a text in a word cloud and their students can read them and also think about them. Follow this link

 http://www.wordle.net/ and try to create your own word cloud, I will show you mine, let's see if you can guess what I am talking about:

Another thing that we learned was that Voki is a free service that lets you create customized avatars, add voices to them and post them to any blog, website, or profile. Using this, teachers or students can communicate a message in a diffent way, for example they can take a role of a character in a book. Have some fun creating your own avatar! Follow this link: http://www.voki.com/

This is my voki, listen to what she says!:

Web 2.0

I found and read a report by Paul Anderson in which he goes through the history behind Web 2.0. According to him, this term was coined in 2004 by Dale Daougherty, the vice-president of O'Reilly Media Inc. Web 2.0 makes reference to a group of technologies which have become popular nowadays, such as blogs or wikis. All these increase and facilitate the socially connected web in which everyone is able to add or edit information they want to share.

The inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview for a podcast was asked whether Web 2.0 was different to what might be called Web 1.0 he replied:

"Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If web 2.0 is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0', it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on 'Web 1.0'"

Laningham (ed.) developersWeb Interview, 22nd August, 2006.

If you want to read the whole report, you can follow this link:

http://21stcenturywalton.pbworks.com/f/What+is+Web+2.0.pdf 

The following video shows with images the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

What is Prezi?

Hi, everyone! I want to share with you another application that we can use to prepare a presentation. It is called "Prezi". "Prezi (or Prezi.com) was created by the support of Kitchen Budapest and Magyar Telekom in 2008 in order to replace the ordinary slide based presentations. Today the project is assisted by Sunstone Capital. The actual development was done by Lui Labs led by its three Hungarian founders Péter Árvai, Szabolcs Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy. The word prezi is the Hungarian short form of presentation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prezi#History

If you want to get the attention of your audience through innovative ways, try making your presentations using Prezi. Watch the following videos, you will know more about Prezi:

Click on 'Prezi' and you will see Prezi's webpage, you can create an account there: Prezi

Power Point Presentations

Today I am going to talk about a basic but a powerful tool used to prepare presentations. Power Point is considered to be the most useful and approachable way to create and present visual aids in colorful and attractive designs. It is an easy tool, accessible to everyone but we should be careful, the wrong use of it could make our final work look boring or unintelligible. There are some advantages and disadvantages that we should bear in mind before creating a presentation. For example, the duration it will have, the contents to be introduced. All these forces the presenter to reduce complex subjects. Also there is a basic equipment required to give a presentation, a computer and a projector.

Watch the following video and you will learn more about Power Point Presentations, it gives you some tips about how to use it in the best way:

  

I want to share with you our Practical Work number II, I did it with my partner Yanina Figueroa, we had to create a Power Point Presentation including the contents we wanted to teach our students in a certain lesson, I uploaded it in Slideshare, click on the link to see our presentation:

http://es.slideshare.net/tamaramp/eco-2-ppp-pw-2

Why is blogging important?

Hi everyone! 

I've just found a very interesting webpage called "Search Engine Journal", where I've read a post written by Neil Patel. Patel gives 7 reasons why blogging is still important. Since I consider blogs a great tool to record information and to reflect upon it, I want to share Patel's reasons with you: "A blog allows you to build a fuller picture of who you are. Most people will meet you through other places…"

1- Build your brand as an expert: some bloggers command attention and lead a remarkable life influencing trends, creating breakthrough ideas and giving us some of the best information out there.

2- So what should you talk about?: before you even start writing, you first need to do intense research to find out what your audience needs.

3- Buil trust: A blog with consistent, truthful and helpful content will allow you to bridge that gap between distrust to trust.

4- Exercise your creativity: in any competitive field it is the most creative who will succeed.

5- Growing stream of organic search traffic: as more posts increase, your overall site traffic will increase also.

6- Consistency is the key: look at all the famous bloggers today. People like Hugh MacLeod, Fred Wilson and Rand Fishkin. One of the reasons they are famous today is because they worked hard year after year producing attractive, useful and powerful blog posts.

7- Proven business model.

Follow this link if you want to read the whole post:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-reasons-why-blogging-is-still-important-in-2012/39225/

Website Review

Our first practical work in the subject was a website review in which we had to analyse and evaluate websites. As teachers, it is absolutely necessary to provide our students with some useful criteria to bear in mind when surfing the net and exploring websites. In future activities, thoroughly evaluating websites will help us, both teachers and students, to choose reliable and respectable webpages.

Click on this link and check what a website needs to be a good resource:

http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/webeval.html

If you are still interested in the topic, watch this video! It is clear enough to undestand the criteria needed:

Teacher-designed materials

Designing English Language Teaching Materials

According to Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major, there are many reasons why teachers may choose to produce their own teaching materials. One reason is contextualization. Adapting the teaching materials is paramount when the topics that the coursebook presents do not fit with students' interests. By modifying some activities and adding new ones, students may feel motivated to learn and eager to work in the task. Another reason is that of individual needs. Teachers should take into account learners' first language and culture, their learning needs and their previous experiences. Sometimes coursebooks do not give students the opportunity to learn the foreign language by building on students' first language skills and previous experiences. Consequently, students feel that learning another language is something completely alien to them and their lives. For this not to happen, teachers should offer students the chance to relate what they learn in English to their own experiences and knowledge. In this way, students will acquire the content they are expected to learn in a more significant way. Last but not least, personalisation. Block (1991) suggests that designing teaching materials would add a personal touch to teaching that learners would value immensely. Although designing it may sound a bit time consuming and challenging, it does save time since once created, teachers can use the same material again and again with different groups and students.  

If you want to read Jocelyn Howard and Jae Majorthe's whole article, follow this link:

http://www.paaljapan.org/resources/proceedings/PAAL9/pdf/Howard.pdf

 

Technology is a way of connecting with our students

"Marc Prensky is an international speaker, writer, consultant, and innovator in the field of education and learning. He offers deep experience and insight into educating today’s youth and into using technology — including social media, virtual worlds, programming, games and apps — in powerful ways for learning" (Marc Prensky. Practical and Visionary. Blog)

He coined the terms: "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants". Digital natives are a new generation of students who were born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies. Because of their early and regular contact with technologies, such as computers, iPods, laptops and smartphones, they have a greater understanding of the digital language. Digital immigrants, on the other hand, are people who were born before the existence of digital technology and adopted it to some extent later in life.

If you want to read the whole work of Mark Prensky, click on the next link:

http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf