PERSONAL OPINION

The effect of ICT on students' motivation is evident. They have
grown up in a world full of new technology and some of our
students feel as comfortable with a mouse as with a pen.

Learning and studying with the use of ICT is more exciting
and more motivating than with traditional means.
For teachers, Internet is also a useful tool. It’s an endless
source for interesting teaching material and a great help
for our work. They offer us new ideas and new didactic
material.

In my opinion, using technology effectively has clear benefits

for both teaching and learning and can help to improve motivation

by engaging pupils in activities in which, they are taught and learnt

about a subject using tools similar to those they use daily

outside school, types of tools with which they are often already 
familiar.

My personal opinion about the course is that I am very proud for 
taking part of it because I got up to date with some tools that were 
unknown for me but really interesting for dealing with english classes in 
secondary school. 

Apart from it, I recognize that not only this subject has been useful for me
but also the Master in general because now I have the strength to face 
the challenge of teaching and all this is thanks to the resources, techniques, 
methodologies and new tools and technologies that I have learned during 
this year.

So, personally, I want to thank your excellent job.

Thanks for all.

ICT into the class (part II)

Go!Animate

Apart from the programs

we can use just for the voice, we  can find others in which

you take story telling using online cartoon strip makers

that little bit further by allowing you to spark life into

your characters and create short animations.

This is Go!Animate. It’s useful for introducing stories,

to create different endings of a story or funny situations.

Glogster

The next one I am going

to explain is Glogster. It’s a web application that allows

students to create multimedia online posters or glogs.

Glogs can be made using images, sounds and video,

making Glogster therefore a wonderful, intuitive and

easy to use tool which encourages creativity and which

can be used to assess both writing and speaking. It can be

used as warm up activity, to emphazise items or even as

post-treatment activity. Students can also use it as an oral

presentation. For me, it is the most useful of the programs

that we have seen.

Voki

Of all the tools listed here, Voki is

perhaps the one I like most for animation. Voki is a type of

talking avatar and students create them (an imaginary,

online representation of themselves).

Once the students have had some fun creating their avatars,

they then record themselves speaking. I think students have

fun using Voki, because it’s very engaging and motivating.

It can be used for setting homework,  for short listening tasks

or to offer extra credits for students who listen to your Voki

and answer questions on what it says.

Wordle

 

This picture above is a word

cloud created with Wordle. Wordle picks out the most common

words and gives them prominence by increasing their size, making

it very easy to ascertain the essence of any text simply by looking

at the cloud.                                       

Behind this simple concept lie many possibilities for use in the

classroom. This tool, the blog and glogster are my favourite ones.

We can use them for different objectives and in different times

of the course. I really love them.

Edmodo

Edmodo is a micro-blogging 

platform based on a similar concept to Twitter; one short message 

is sent to all those who follow you (that’s happen in Twitter), 

or to all those in your group (in Edmodo).

Edmodo is used for education and is, in my view, a much better

alternative to Twitter because it provides extremely useful extra

functionality to both teacher and student, such as the ability to

set, collect and grade assignments, to keep a calendar  of event

and assignments.

ICT into the class (part I)

The traditional English Literature class make students 

feel bored and insipid and all students don’t enjoy literature. 
To solve the above problems, teachers should design 
diversity of teaching and learning activities in class.

So during this course we have been taught how to plan

and organize activities that will encourage a love for books

and the written word.

This course was full of ideas about how and why we might

use ITCs in and beyond the classroom, in order to inspire

students to work creatively and to acquire a taste for literature.
We have been taught about tools that let you create audio
recordings. We have been exploring SoundCloud to record
and save audio recordings and Vocaroo which allows you to
record your voice as well.

SoundCloud lets you save all your recordings into a dashboard
so that you can access them at anytime. You must create an
account to use SoundCloud.

Vocaroo lets you record and get the sound immediately to
embed into your publishing tool, like a blog or wiki. You do
not need to create an account to use Vocaroo.

For me, they could be a really powerful English teaching 
platforms where you could get students recording readings 
of texts, poems, and then annotate and identify or comment 
on language techniques or practice and feedback on delivery 
of speech. They could be used as: Co-constructing an audio 
book, recording instructions, add a widget to your Moodle/Edmodo
page for easy access, to record students’ oral presentations...

So, my pre-activity would be:
1.- Listen to the beginning of this story recorded in Vocaroo and try
to guess what the story is about. We could also use it with a famous 
sentence or with some lines of a story in order to recognize the story 
that students have been taught during the course.


Another possibility, would be as a post-reading activity:
1.- Students read a story or a text at home, for example, and afterwards 
they should record their voice, in Vocaroo or SoundCloud, explaining a brief 
summary of what they have understood of the story and embed into my blog.

Using them, I can hear to my students and assess students pronunciation,
intonation, and their discourse structures. Then I can give individual
students feedback via voice messages.

CLASSTOOLS.NET

   Classtools.net is a free website for teachers
and students to create interactive educational games and activities in
multiple formats.
Timelines, diagrams, graphic organizer tools, and essay planning tools
appropriate for every grade level are offered with the click of a mouse.
Teachers can create and save activities to revise content taught in class
by embedding them into a blog. Teachers can set up and run game
show themed lessons as a way to engage student interest. All of these
possibilities can be set up and run in matter of minutes.
It can be used to learn and review factual material in a fun and engaging way,
and to reinforce certain concepts. It's an excellent tool for test preparation
both inside and outside of the classroom.
I highly recommend this site. It provides many engaging tools for delivery
and review of factual information in any subject area. Activities and games
can be used individually and collaboratively by students and teacher.

How to...
Promote video

... create your own Arcade game

Examples
You can try out this example using vocabulary from one story, famous quotes, key terminology, words of a novel or dialogues, for example.