ESL Podcasts

       Another, great tool that can provide a wide range of opportunities for ESL learners-podcast.
When I arrived to USA I used to listen to NPR podcast  because I wanted to improve my English. I just wanted to listen to English native speaker talking about different subjects. I've never thought that pod-casting can be used in ESL classroom but after exploring English as a Second Language Podcast I see many ways it could serve students to practice their listening skills.
     For example, this podcast http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=9605140 is a dialogue between a waitress and a customer in a restaurant. It is a source of not only vocabulary used in a context but also provides an opportunity for students to listen a natural conversation in English by English native speakers. Additionally, the teacher could design a handouts based on the dialog with questions and blanks to fill in for explicit or implicit listening.
    In fact, podcast could bee extremely helpful if ESL teacher is not a native speaker of English, thus the learners would became expose to a authentic pronunciation and language usage.

ePals for better collaboration and communication.

ePals is a virtual workspace that provides opportunities for students and teachers to connect with people from all-round the globe who share the same interests. It is designed to promote safe global teaching and learning while using technology in a classroom.

 After surfing through the website I  realized that implying ePals in language classroom will allowed my students to not olny improve their language skills but also to learn about different countries and cultures. In addition, they would also be able to connect with students from different countries at the same age and hopefully develop some friendships.  For a teachers, this program provides and opportunities to connect with other teachers from different countries and to share their work and experiences.

I've already done a cultural project about holidays and different Spanish traditions in a Spanish language classroom. Except we didn't have an opportunity to connect with native speakers and to discuss what interests the students the most; how does it look like in a real life. Moreover, students could pick the subject that interests them so they explore and learn about it more. Also, I like the fact that beside common subjects in a language classroom such as culture, there are projects such as global worming, environment issues, weather or habitats developing critical thinking skills.

More fun in a classroom.

            More and more I am impressed  with what technology has to offer in terms of making teaching and learning more effective and enjoyable. When I go back to the time when I was learning English I remember a text book and grammar exercises, that is all. Today, thanks to technology, learning can be so much more divers, creative and moreover, effective.

   For example, I was planing a lesson that would create an opportunity to use a food and kitchen vocabulary and to teach adverbs of sequence( first, next, then, finally).I was thinking about creating a class cook book with the recipes of my students's favorite food.
http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/index.php would be ideal to do so and to add pictures of the dishes. Thanks to Flickr, students would be able to find a pictures of the food from their home countries. This would be picture of my favorite polish food- pierogi.

Creative Common

Photo by Valentina

Creative Common is a non-profit corporation that provides opportunities for people to share their work and build upon work of others according to rules of copyright. Thanks to Creative Common, creative work of others is available to the public for free.Creative common licences work alongside copyright so users can modifie their copyrights terms and change them according to theirs needs.


Creative Common offers four types of licences for it's users to choose from; attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works and share alike. What does it mean:

Attribution	Noncommercial	No Derivative Works	Share Alike
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.	You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.	You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.	You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work

Creators choose the type of licences upon which they wish to share their work.
Some of the best known users of Creative Commons licenses are: Flickr, Google, Public Library of Science, Wikipedia and Al Jazeera.

Is Twitter right for me?

I am not convinced that Twitter is necessary in my professional collaborative on line learning and sharing experience . I do see why PLN ( Personal Learning Network) is a valuable resource of sharing ideas and opinions but as we all  have preferences about how we learn new things, I think we also can like or dislike how we are going to connect with  other teachers on line. Reading this blog help me to understand why others like it and why they use Twitter every day to learn and to share information. The blog also contains many short videos and power point presentation which explain why PLN is important in teachers' professional development. Thanks to this video "Twitter in Plain English"I obtained  much better understanding of how Twitter works. It also suppose to explain "How a skeptical person fell in love with Twitter"....but I didn't. 

Another great educational post on Twitter Integrating  ICT into the MFL classroom:: Twitter for teachers introduces the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. Moreover, the videos in this post suggest how important it is for teacher from all over the world to stay connected with each other to learn from one another. And again, I do agree....but I'm not comfortable using Twitter. Maybe those couple days that I had to explore Twitter is not enough to see its greatness. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed with the amount of the information flowing and fallowing and being tweeted.  The time will tell.

Potato from patata

     Had enough anglicisms? | Macmillan discusses the influence of Spanish and English language on each other.  The author, Joseph Persico,  explains how the flow of the words in both directions effects both languages and supports his idea with very interesting facts. For example,  "according to the Oxford Dictionary 1,650 words have entered English directly from the Spanish" ( like: potato, avocado, tequila, hurricane, chili,chocolate.....)
     For those who are the language teachers it is very important to know where the words are coming from because it might be helpful  while explaining many of students' concerns. For example, the pronunciation of the word "ghost" and silent "h" can be explained by tracking where this word came from.

Learn,Share, Create on Ning.com

This very interesting social networking service is a site where people from all over the world share their knowledge and ideas about the subjects they are passionate about. It is a Facebook-like environment, however allows you to create your own free networking site about whatever topic you want. For educators, who wants to deliver some of their curriculum on line and to teach theirs students social networking skills, this site has many advantages.

When I visited Ning.com I found a group Peace X Peace Community: Raise Women's Voices, Build Cultures of Peace.
This group is focused on peace education, how it relates to the success of all people and especially women. Throughout my early educational career I've been focused on the motivation for women to migrate to the U.S. and learn English. I've found that one of the number one motivating factors is the want of a more peaceful situation. I hope to work with refugees in the future and a healthy understanding of the power of peace, especially as it relates to women, is something I believe will be helpful to me developing my perspective on the issue.

Stay connected!

A learner is like a music note.It is a single sound but only when connected to other notes it creates a melody.

George Siemens (2005) states that, "Learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity." Connectivism, his new theory of learning,  is a vision of learning in today's world. Siemens believes that, "The field of education has been slow to recognize both the impact of new learning tools and the environmental changes in what it means to learn. Connectivism provides insight into learning skills and tasks needed for learners to flourish in a digital era." 

 

In his video,The Network is the Learning, Siemens discuses importance of the connections that learners create with each other and with the other sources of knowledge. This changing and reforming network is the learning. In other words, the way we are connected to each other is responsible for our ability to stay current. How we dialog, how we stay in touch with our friends and family is essential to exchanging the most current information.  As Siemens says, "What we know today is not as important as ability to stay current."  On the other hand, how important is it that we incorporate all of our experiences, past included, into what we call knowledge.  

I didn't know.

Hello!

I often forget how lucky and fortunate I am to have an opportunity to get an education and to learn new things every day. I often to forget that the times are different now than when I first went to school.  I was a teenager without an email account and google and now it is impossible to not use a computer every day. Now more then ever I feel like it is me who needs to keep up with new technology. Why? 

With new technology, internet, Google, YouTube, cellphones and many more not only the world have changed but my life have changed as well. It has happened already. 

This powerful video http://youtu.be/pMcfrLYDm2U explains a lot in a very simple way. It presents many facts about the way that the new technology influences our liefs and explains why the internet is not only a source of information but also a way to connect with people from all over the world. Also, the video made me think about the needs of students in a 21st century.

If you want to learn more or to join the conversation about this subject you can click here . I invite you to be a part of it!

Best-

Ania

technology, blogging, education, internet, Google, teaching, discussion 

Safe Blogging?

I am convinced that safety comes first while using internet. I want to be safe my self and I want my students to be safe as well while surfing through pages of web world. 

There are several ways to protect students' privacy and to make a whole experience of blogging safe. 

• First, we can educate out students about ways to protect their privacy, for example never to publish their personal information (tinyurl.com/5y919n is a great resource for documents about protecting students' privacy and safe blogging).
• Second, we should communicate to the parents about all the steps we are going to take to protect their children. Some parents might have doubts about how blogging can help in their children education and not be a waist of time. It is our role to inform the parents about how students will benefit from it and what they can learn.
• Third, we can monitor activity of students' and the blogs they're using. 
• Finally, we can reward students' best posts by appropriate responding back to those posts. By rewarding students' good ideas we can create a good community of learners.

It is our role as the teachers to protect our students and to teach them how they can protect them self. My question is: how to create a safe blog if I want to find a connections with out side native speakers in a ESL classroom. 

3 ways to learn.

Before I started this blog I had no idea about how to do this and what possibly I can learn from it. Well, I already learned a lot, creating this blog including.
After reading 3 chapters in "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts" I gained an idea about what I could learn from blogs in my future teaching. Furthermore, I realized that my students could also learn from blogging if I decided to use it as a teaching tool. I am exited to discover more about blogging as I go and I'm sure these days I could even learn from my students( since kids start blogging at age 6).
Before I use it in a classroom I would like to gain more confidence and knowledge by being part of teachers community that are familiar with this subject. I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who has questions, who doesn't know much and wants to learn more about using blogs in English language teaching.

Through blogging I could ask questions about teaching abroad and using blogs in a country I'm interested in going to. Blog would be a space where I can learn about methods of teaching English abroad and stay in touch with teachers I met here, in United Stats. Also I could share my experience of teaching abroad with those who wants to do the same thing. I think blogging could also help me in critical reading and writhing because as a not native speaker I look for opportunities to develop my L2 acquisition.

Do you have any good or bad experience with blogging? Please, share:)

hello

I may as well enjoy it. My first BLOG!!!!!