Sharing Learning

Collaborative writing

2012-01-28T01:39:00.004+01:00

New week, new exciting tasks! This week I have been exploring some digital tools for collaborative writing in the English class. The first activity consisted of selecting one of the four pictures in each column, three columns in total, and write a 50-word story-starter based on those pictures.

These are the three pictures I chose and my short story:

It was a beautiful sunny morning on Coconut island. Nina woke up with the idea of enjoying the exciting school trip to the city of Pombo. She had breadfast, hastily kissed her mum and raced off to take the school bus. Nobody could imagine that that would be a day for sorrow and grief...

Written under each picture, there were some tools we had to explore and share our thoughts on what at least one tool is for, how can we use it, what age group is the tool for and what are its advantages and limitations:

One of the tools I liked the most was Five Card Flickr Stories, an interesting website based on the Five Card Nancy game which lets you pick five pictures from a group of images from Flickr and get some inspiration to write creative stories. Would you like to read my story? Could you continue it? Could you write a different story with the same pictures?

Five Card Story: Through the Bare Land

a Five Card Flickr story created by Inma Alcázar

flickr photo by Serenae

flickr photo by bionicteaching

flickr photo by IKnowHowToWhistle

flickr photo by bionicteaching

flickr photo by Serenae
Strolling down the narrow streets of Katmandu where not much happens, legend has it that a mysterious woman dressed in black used to wander through the forest. All the villagers were completely frightened. No birds, no crops, no flowers grew in the area, just death and desolation.

I think this website is a great tool for secondary school and Bachillerato students (15-18) to develop their creative writing skills through these visual prompts. It is true that students can do this without technology. However, what this tools adds to education is the possibility to receive feedback from other students. In my opinion, this fact is very motivating for them since they are writing for an audience, not just for the teacher.

How can we use it in the English class?

Collaborative writing: publish your own student and share it in your English class blog with your students. Ask them to write two or three more lines each to the story.
5 pictures = a lot of stories: go to Five Card Flickr Stories, choose five inspiring photographs, embed them in your class blog. Divide students in groups of three and ask them to write their own collaborative story using those pictures.
Creative writing: as in the previous activity but letting students to choose their own pictures.
Twitstory: ask students to write 140 characters stories based on five pictures, chosen from Five Card Flickr Stories, using a class hashtag. Embed students' stories in the class blog using EmbedTweet. Students vote their favourite one.

Optional: provide them with different categories for their stories:

horror
romantic
funny
inspirational

After exploring these great collaborative website, our amazing teachers asked us to put collaboration into practice. They provided us a list of sites designed to allow multiple writers to participate in a kind of collaborative literary experimentation:

BubbleUs Brainstorming made simple
Entri Get feedback on rough drafts / Jot down ideas and share through Twitter
Google Docs Collaborative writing
LiveTyping Collaborative writing
MixedInk Collaborative writing for groups
Novlet Collaborative writing of nonlinear stories
ThinkFree Online Virtual office / Edit documents in your web browser
TypeWithMe Collaborative writing
WriteBoard Sharable web-based documents
Zoho Writer Online word processor - create, connect, collaborate

We had to read other teachers' stories, choose one story starter I had liked and contribute to it using one of the previous tools mentioned. I chose Vicky Theodoraki's story about The Sanders and their strange neighbour, Mr Tucker, using Just Paste It, a cool tool for collaborative writing. What I liked about this tool is that you don't need to spend time signing in, just start writing, include pictures or even a video, and share the link to encourage more people to contribute to it. This was our story:

The loving Sanders family had just moved to a provincial town. Little did they know that their life would soon take a sinister turn. Their new neighbour Mr Tucker, an elderly man, had an unworldy quality. Howls and all sorts of weird sound would often come from his house.
Last night, while they were having dinner in the garden their daughter Margaret screamed: 'Have you seen that? Look! There is an odd shadow coming out of the wall. I mean, out of the wall where there isn't a hole.'
"What in the world is that?" cried Mother Sanders. Fearful, she quickly escorted her family back into the house. Dinner in the garden had sounded like such a nice idea, but now it seemed a much safer choice to be inside. Who could they talk to? What could they do? What was it that they saw?!
When they went inside they could hardly sleep. They kept on talking about the odd shadow that Margaret saw and then Mother Sanders had an idea. She decided that in the morning they will go over to Mr. Tucker's house an ask him to come for a visit. The point was to try and find out what he was like and what were the howls and weird sounds that were heard from his house.
The family had a restless night and could hardly wait for morning. As soon as dawn broke and the first rays lit up the little town, they were up and about, eager to solve the mystery of their mysterious neighbor.
They arrive to Mr. Tucker's house and knock the door, but nobody respond then they decide to enter. It's dark inside still but they have a light. They look across the room and see in the middle a beautiful glass vase on a table and a painting on the wall. They call Mr. Tucker but nobody respond. This is very mysterious.
Suddenly there was some noise under the table. They all jumped up but it was just a cat. When their daughter wanted to caress it, the cat ran away. Then the daughter shrieked - the painting on the wall moved.
The moment they realised there was an unmarked door set in the wall, it creaked open. Mr Sanders stood in the doorway for a moment before he popped his head through the narrow oak door. He decided to enter the pitch-dark corridor.
He disappeared in the darkness. His wife wanted to follow him there but SLAM - the door closed and they could not open it again. Mr Sanders was on his own in the dark.

What other ideas can you come up with for using these tools?

Electronic Village Online 2012: Classdigitools

2012-01-15T03:08:00.002+01:00

New year, new resolution: to take any opportunity I can to improve my professional development. No sooner said than done! Seven days ago I joined Electronic Village Online Sessions 2012 which are free virtual courses. For five weeks teachers will connect to others teachers from all over the world, will discuss different topics related to the ELT world, collaborate and dare to work out new ideas and activities which can spice up their teaching practice.

One of the sessions I have enrolled in is Digital Tools with a Purpose in the Classroom. Throughout the first week we had to complete several tasks:

TASK 1: Join the group online meeting place: Edmodo and Wiki.

These two learning environments were absolutely new to me, but I have not had many problems so far since they are really intuitive. It just took me some time to explore them and know where I had to publish comments or share my portfolio, this blog.

Edmodo is a virtual learning environment which includes several tools to share documents, pictures, videos, audios, links and others to foster participation, colaboration. As it is private and there are no age restrictions, we can use it with students from any educative level.

TASK 2: Exchange introductions and become familiar with the group environments.
TASK 3: Explore different online tools:

http://animoto.com (make a 30-second video about ourselves)
http://about.me/ (tell other participants who we are)
http://flavors.me
http://prezi.com

This time we were asked to introduce ourselves using different tools, interact and provide feedback to other participants. There is so much creativity in the group! I was really impressed by some teachers who expressed themselves through poems, songs and really nice presentations using a great variety of tools such as Glogster, Voicethread (two of my favourite tools), Dvolver and Sliderocket, among others.

For this task I preferred to use Stupeflix, an online video editing service similar to Animoto. However, instead of just 30 seconds, it allowed me to create a bit longer presentation for free. In addition to this, Stupeflix is very easy to use and straightforward. You only need to sign up, upload the pictures you would like to include in your video, add text, choose or upload your own music and share it. This is the video I produced using this tool:

Another tool I decided to explore was http://flavors.me, a free service with an appealing interface. What I like about this tools is that it allows you to gather all your social activity in one place.

TASK 4: Create and/or share our digital portfolios. As you can see I have decided to use my blog as my digital portfolio since it is where I have been writing about topics related to ELT, sharing links and teaching ideas for three years now.

The idea was that we:

collected the digital resources we produced along the way.
kept a space for reflection on our learning and the tools we get to know about.
received feedback from our peers in what we had been producing.
started our journey as a lifelong learner.

TASK 5: Go on a web safari about technology integration. This time we were asked to check the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) which illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 and reflect upon where we are nowadays and where we would like to be according to our own education context. We added our thoughts to our Edmodo Group Discussion:

I love this useful and detailed matrix you have shared with us! Generally speaking, I would say I'm in the adoption / active level. As I mainly teach one-to-one and small groups with different learning abilities, it is not always easy to integrate technology in the way I would like to do it - collaboratively. Some of my students use technology outside the classroom just to revise some language aspects previously seen in class. Others love using web 2.0 tools like Glogster, Blabberize or Xtranormal for writing and speaking tasks.

In the near future, I would like to work in a secondary school where I have the opportunity to move ahead and use technology to enhance collaboration and participate in projects together with other schools.

Achieving the transformation stage is another of my goals, I would like my students to work more independently and provide them learning activities which help all of them to succeed. However, we should not forget that technology is just a means for students to achieve their learning objectives and not an end in itself.In the near future, I would like to work in a secondary school where I have the opportunity to move ahead and use technology to enhance collaboration and participate in projects together with other schools.Achieving the transformation stage is another of my goals, I would like my students to work more independently and provide them learning activities which help all of them to succeed. However, we should not forget that technology is just a means for students to achieve their learning objectives and not an end in itself.

Discuss our own ideas on how we can use those tools with our students. I am afraid I will not have enough time to complete this task on time. Nevertheless, I would like to share with my colleages some ideas I wrote some time ago about using Glogster in the English class: Do you glog? Reinventing posters with Glogster Edu. It includes:

Tutorials.
Posters created by my students.
A poster I created as an example to write a biography and create a poem based on Rudyard Kipling's poem If.
Ideas from other teachers.

Waiting for your comments and suggestions!

From the screen to the classroom. Part 2.

2012-01-12T11:47:00.000+01:00

Last week, I introduced the amazing work that some great teachers are producing to work with films in the English class. They are really inspiring to encourage other teachers to create their own video activities and improve their teaching practice.

This week, I would like to concentrate on different techniques we can use to plan our lessons based on films. Any ideas you would like to add or share? Please, contact me! I will post them in the blog.

How to use them?

We can resort to the old way bringing a film, pressing play, watching it for the whole class and asking students to answer some questions about the film or write a summary of it. But have you wondered if there is any point in approaching the learning of English in such a way? Are you sure your students have learnt something in that lesson?

I think that a more sensible idea to work deeply with films in our classes is to select a short film scene (3 – 4 minutes) and divide the lesson in three parts, including pre-viewing, while-viewing, and post-viewing activities.

Previewing activities are really good to arouse the students’ interest to the film clip they are going to watch.

Vocabulary: pre-teaching some words which appear in the video and may be unfamiliar to students is essential to avoid interruptions and questions during the viewing process.
Brainstorming: this is a great technique, and very student-centered. We can use visuals, trailers or film scenes and ask students to speculate about the scene’s details such as the characters, the plot or the setting.
Predicting:

You can provide students with a handout with some facts about the film and they have to predict if they are true or false.
You can create a series of screen shots with Vidinotes or just with Paint and ask students to predict what the story is about or what the characters may say.

While-viewing activities: they provide a deeper understanding of the film, and allow to check if students.

Predicting: the students check if they were right or wrong in their previous predictions about the film.
Imaging: freeze the scene as something is going to happen and ask students to work in group and try to deduce what will happen next. Elicit from the class what happens.
Jigsaw predictions: divide students into two big groups and sit down back to back in two rows. Only students in group B can watch the video, while students in group A will be able to listen to the video only. When the video ends, the teacher asks students in group A to interpret the meaning of what they have heard. Once they have finished reconstructing the story, students in group B tell students in group A what actually happened.
Video ON/ Sound OFF: play the film scene, but this time with the sound turned off. Ask students to write a short narrative text predicting the content of the scene. They do this activity in small groups. You can show them some questions on the overhead projector or on the digital blackboard to guide them. Once they have finished, they read their stories and vote for the funniest story. After that, they watch the scene with the sound on to know what really happened.
Ordering events: play the video and distribute a worksheet to students with a series of events from the video. Ask them to put them in order, as they happen in the film. The students watch the video a second time to confirm the correct order.

Post-viewing:

There is no need to leave grammar out of a video-based lesson. We can use sentence examples which appear on a video to introduce a grammar point and ask students to deduce the rules and uses planning different kinds of activities. How we teach grammar is really important since grammar is necessary so that students achieve accuracy in English. So, we need to be creative and produce student-friendly, student-centered activities which develop students’ curiosity in how English works. You will find a lot of ideas in Claudio Azevedo’s blog Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals
Production of the next scene script: ask students to write a dialogue between two characters of the movie which take place after the part of the video they have previously watched. To do this, they can use some free web 2.0 tools:

Writing a movie review for the school (online) newspaper.
Discussion group activity: ask students to choose sides around the topic introduced in the video and take a in-favour/against position from others in the classroom to debate it.
Watching videos can also enhance some pronunciation aspects which students have difficulties with, such as connected speech, word stress and sentence intonation, among others. They are a really good source of authentic listening material.

This is my lesson plan sample on excuses and relationships using the film scene I found in Claudio Azevedo's blog.

Lesson plan (economical with the truth

View more documents from Inma Alcázar

Some websites where you can find videos and information about films to create your own activities:

Free Online Movies
The Hyde Tube: huge collection of short films.
Aniboom: animated films.
Documentary Tube: documentaries.
CLIL: history, science and so on.
IMDb: great information about films, film stars, and a lot of more.
Film Scripts

If you found this post useful, you may also like:

Harmer, Jeremy; The Practice of English Language Teaching (2007), 4^th edition. Person Longman.
Stempleski, S. & Tomalin, B., Film (2001), Oxford University Press.
Intercultural Training with Films by Christine Roell.
ESL PartyLand Video Activities

From screen to the classroom. Part 1

2012-01-04T23:41:00.001+01:00

Films have always been a great source of ideas and an excellent resource we can use to suit our English classes, motivate our students and help them develop their listening, speaking and writing skills.

Apart from that, films are a highly valuable source of authentic language since they are full of vocabulary, expressions and structures that native speakers use. They are perfect to bring the English-speaking world into the classroom.

The question for teachers is what kinds of film clips we can use, what for and how to use them.

What kinds of films can we use and how?

Did you know that there are some absolutely fabulous teachers’ blogs which can inspire you to create your own activities to suit your students’ needs? Through their blogs they share their own materials just for free and give useful tips on how to create your own ones.

One of them is Film English, a wonderful project started by Kieran Donaghy, an English teacher at UAB Idiomes Barcelona, whose aim is to promote the use of film in the language classroom. In this blog you will find lesson plans around different topics such as jobs, money and greed, football and values, among others.

Claudio Azevedo is another teacher who I have inspired me and I have learnt a lot from. He publish his own resources in two blogs:

Movie Segments for Warm-ups and Follow-ups which includes a series of movie segments to be used to brainstorm and prepare students for the topic that will be discussed in class.

His second blog, Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals, is full of creative ideas and challenging activities to introduce grammar in our classes.

What can I say about Jamie Keddie’s Lessonstream website? Well, he is a really creative and enthusiastic teacher and this can just be seen by visiting his new website full of free lesson plans based on films for different levels and aims.

Next week, I will publish the second part of this post with more ideas and examples on how to work with films in the English class.

It's Christmas time!

2011-12-18T18:57:00.003+01:00

Christmas is just around the corner! No matter what religion or place in the world you live, Christmas is a celebration all children and teenagers love and cannot be ignored.

This is a lesson plan I have produced.

LEVEL: pre-intermediate / intermediate
OBJECTIVES:

VOCABULARY: revise Christmas vocabulary.
GRAMMAR:

practice past simple and past continuous in context.
express opinions about the best and worst Christmas presents using expressions such as I think, in my opinion, from my point of view, among others.

CULTURE: learn about Christmas traditions in other countries around the world.
WRITING: for students to develop their creativity and plan the writing of a poem.
READING: for students to develop strategies to understand general and specific information about different Christmas traditions around the world in order to carry out specific tasks.
VIEWING: extract specific and global information from a Christmas commercial to perform required tasks.

TASK 1: WARM-UP ACTIVITIES.

Chat about Christmas and traditions. Ask your students what kinds of activities they usually do, what special dishes they eat, what is their opinion about the over-commercialisation of Christmas and so on.
Display the wordle with Christmas vocabulary on the overhead projector and ask students to place them into the correct category FEELINGS/ACTIONS, THINGS, FOOD. Discuss how they relate to Christmas.

TASK 2: WRITING AN ACROSTIC POEM

Ask your students to write their own acrostic poems using a Christmas word.

Poem written by Laura (2º E.S.O.)

If you have many students in your classes, it would be a great idea to ask them to create a class poems book using GoogleDocs and publish the document in the class blog. Students vote on which is the most original poem.

TASK 3: READING COMPREHENSION: Where in the world?

Pre-reading: ask students to predict a series of facts related to the celebration of Christmas in different countries.

Post-reading: once they have read the text, they confirm their predictions.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ce_Ctkntk7JHu6j0lC7IhtnK9uNKte0x4ZH3oqdTSbM/edit?hl=es by Inma Alcázar

If there are students from different countries in your class, ask students to write five questions to know about how their partners celebrate Christmas in their countries.

TASK 4: VIDEO ACTIVITY: John Lewis Christmas Advert 2011 - This is a wonderful advert I discovered in Pilar's blog some weeks ago. I think it is great, not for listening but for developing their viewing and oral skills. There is not speech in the advert, just scenes which are part of the child's story.

Pre-viewing: create a series of screen shots using Vidinotes and ask students to predict what the story is about.

While-viewing: check that they have understood the ad with a series of questions about the video. The activity is corrected orally.

Why was the boy so nervous?
What was he really waiting for?
What activities did he do to kill time?
How did his parents feel?
What is the slogan for the advert?

Post-viewing: ask students what was the worst gift they ever received. Then in small groups (3-4 students) they read the description of some unusual Christmas presents and put them in order from the best to the worst explaining the reasons for the order they have chosen.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/essential-uk/christmas by Jo Budden

To all, my best Season's Greetings! Enjoy, dream and be happy!

Halloween Teaching Ideas and Resources

2011-10-20T13:49:00.086+02:00

The spooky, scary Halloween festival is just round the corner! These are some activities and ideas which came to my mind after reading The English Raven Halloween lesson materials design challenge. Are you ready to invite your students to plan your school Halloween party?

Open publication - Free publishing - More halloween

Activity D2

Verbling - Let's practice English with native speakers in real time

2011-07-29T19:17:00.011+02:00

The Internet has revolutionised not only the way people communicate but also the way we learn foreign languages such as English.

Gone are those days when learning how to speak this language in a non-speaking country was quite challenging. The only contact we had with English was through music, books or our teachers. There were like twenty-five, thirty students in my class so we did not have the chance to practice.

Nowadays everything is much easier and there are a lot of online alternatives to language classrooms to improve our oral skills. A long time ago Karen Schweitzer and I wrote about some online language learning communities we can join in to practice English with native speakers:

However, this year a new site, Verbling, has been launched. Verbling is a free live video service for chatting only available in English and Spanish at the moment, since it is in its beta test phase. Nevertheless, they will expand the possibilities soon.

Two of the great features of this new online language learning site, compared to other alternatives, is that it includes video and you can instantly connect to a partner. You do not need to spend time looking for a partner to practice since once you join the site, the system match you up to a parner taking into account your skill level and interests. Then you start chatting in one language around a topic for five minutes and halfway through the session a timer tells you to switch off to the other language. In this way both people get practice. All you need is a microphone, a webcam and an email address.

What is not so good about the site is that it does not include the option to disconnect the webcam just in case you do not want other people watch you. However, on the other hand, I think the webcam is a great option because it allows us to see the other person's reaction to our words, grasp new vocabulary easily and so on. And, finally, it would be great as well to have the possibility to choose your partner's gender and age.

The site is not meant for under 13.

More information about Verbling:

Más información sobre Verbling en español:

BAAM GAME

2011-06-30T16:41:00.001+02:00

Games are a great way to learn and motivate our students. I knew about this one just some weeks ago when I was looking for a cinema game on the internet to finish my didactic unit on Films and Passive Voice. I could not find the game but David Deubelbeiss from ESL Classroom 2.0 gave me the clue to create my own one.

Furthermore, you can use the template and adapt it to any vocabulary, conversation topic or grammar point you can imagine. If you like the idea, you can download the templates or other teachers' BAAM games from the following website. The idea is very simple and I think it really motivates students to take part in.

BAAM! Cinema Trivia Game

View more presentations from Inma Alcázar.

All the pictures on this powerpoint are not my property. They have been taken from different sources. Therefore, if any picture is under your copyrights please, send me an email and I will remove it within 48 hours.

Do you glog? Reinventing Posters with Glogster Edu

2010-10-01T21:21:00.036+02:00

Posters have always been considered a valuable resource to stimulate students' creativity as well as an opportunity for teachers to know what students' have learnt. Do you remember when we created posters using a cardboard, crayons, coloured pencils, pictures taken from magazines, and so on?

Much time has passed since then and with the revolution of technology we have "discovered" many useful tools which can make learning more engaging for our students. Don't our students spend most of their free time at their PCs? So, why not combine the effectiveness of web 2.0 tools to give them more autonomy to create their own projects in which they will be the speakers, the writers, the editors, and the introduction of interesting topics our students are interested in?

If you are curious to find out how technology tools can enhance your teaching and involve your students in their English learning process, you should use Glogster Edu:

It allows teachers and students to create digital posters.
It is free.
It is safe.
You can add pictures and graphics from the Internet or from your own computer.
It is possible to add videos from the Internet or from your own computer.
You can record your own voice, so it is perfect to record an interview, a speech, a recitation of a poem or a song.
You can write your own texts to express yourself.So, Glogster Edu is wonderful for creative projects but also for reflections on cultural and social topics.

I honestly think this is one of the easiest tools I have worked with and the possibilities to incorporate it in the English class are endless. In addition to this, as Glogster Edu was created with an educational purpose in mind, it ensures that all the content students view is appropriate. You can supervise our students' projects as well and both you and your students can comment on each other's glogs, print them and embed the glog in your classroom blog or wiki.

What are you waiting for using it?

TUTORIALS:

GlogsterEdu Video Tutorial by Copiague Middle School.
GlogsterEdu Tutorial by Traci Blazoski (Google Docs).

GLOGSTERS CREATED BY TEACHERS:

To introduce yourself to your students by Sean Banville.
To show your students's works - Ozge Karaoglu's kindergarten students telling their stories.
To create your own digital portfolio by Ozge Karaoglu.
To introduce grammar tenses by Sunrise651.
Lesson Plan on Food for primary students by Sunrise 651.

GLOGSTERS CREATED BY STUDENTS:

Advantages and Disadvantages of Mobile Phones by xoxoMadzxoxo.
Helping Family by s9sy2gh.
Portfolio by Nurin Adlina.
Create an interactive cookbook (Webquest final task) by Rubilime.
Greatings from the World Project
A Trip to London - Maria Markaki's Class.
The Airport Project by Mireia Molina (4º E.S.O.)

TEACHERS' NETWORKS:

Education Glogster - Ning Network.

MY STUDENT'S GLOGS

Ángela -6th Primary

Laura - 1st ESO

Lucía - 1ºESO

MY GLOG

This is a Glogster I created myself as an example for 1º Bachillerato students' project at the end of a didactic unit dealing with Rudyard Kipling, conditional sentences and the situation of people living in developing countries. The purpose of this project was that students wrote their own poems based on Rudyard Kipling's poem If and recorded them, and wrote a short biography of Rudyard Kipling.

CUADERNIA - an educational materials generator

2010-09-10T21:13:00.033+02:00

It has been almost two years since I started writing this blog and it is incredible how much I have learnt from many great teachers I have met on the net. Writing was not easy at first. What could an almost new teacher say? However, I have enjoyed a lot having "this little window" to share what I have learnt, my educational worries and tips to introduce technology in the classroom. After a long busy year without time to update the blog, I am back to introduce you a valuable tool to create educational digital books, CUADERNIA 2.0.

This fantastic free authoring tool, created by Oscar Guerrero Sánchez and his team Entornos Innovadores, is at teachers' disposal in the website of the Education Department of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Up to now, it is only available for Windows and is offered only in Spanish language. I hope there is an English version, as well, in the future so that teachers from all over the world can benefit from it.

Cuadernia is really easy to use, even for those teachers who do not have much computering knowlege, and it has real potential for helping to make our lessons more engaging and dynamic. You do not need to be a genius to create complementary material for your English lessons, you just need to know your students' interests, motivations and needs to generate activities which are relevant for them. Many times course books include many general topics and they may be useful for English teachers who teach in a big city, for instance, but not for teachers working in a village. This is just one of the reasons I believe that creating our own material or adapting it is worthwhile.

One of the tools you can use to create your own materials is Cuadernia 2.0 which allows us to create 21 different kinds of activities using a background, text, flash images, pictures, videos as well as speech bubbles, augmented reality objects and some free applications to change your archives to different formats.

The software is available in three different versions - an online version, a downloadable version for your PC or laptop and another one to save it in your USB. If you decide to use the online version, you have to take into account that it is not possible to save the digital version directly. You will need to export it to your PC to be able to save it and finish your digital book later.

Lorena Pinillos Chávez has published an easy to follow tutorial (20 pages) that shows you how to use Cuadernia. However, you will find a more complete tutorial (81 pages) in the website of the Education Department of Castilla-La Mancha.

Some of the main advantages which Cuadernia offers are:

It provides an attractive learning environment for students.
It is not just a tool for teacher to create their materials and share them with other teachers, but also a collaborative tool for students. Have a look at "Estrategia pedagógica con Cuadernia" by Eva M. Perdiguero Garzo.
It includes a broad range of resources to assist in the autonomous use of the programme (tutorials, videotutorials in Cuadernia Youtube Channel).
It includes a forum where teachers can express their opinions about the software and help to its improvement as well as a facebook group.
In the Educative Digital Objects Library (Librería ODEs) you will find some didactic units not just for the English Class but for other subjects as well.

What I do not find so easy using this software is:

Inserting the digital books in a blog.
using other types of formats, you need to change them using the applications offered.

You can download some EFL materials created with Cuadernia:

English Pronunciation Resources for Students and Teachers

2010-06-22T16:56:00.010+02:00

Given the many different places that "native" English speakers hail from, there is no such thing as perfect English pronunciation. That said, knowing how to pronounce words is an important part of learning any language. If you are struggling with pronunciation or know a student who is struggling, the following free resources may help:

SpokenSkills - SpokenSkills offers many different resources for ESL teachers, language professionals and students, including vowel sounds, consonant sounds, audio and video clips, and listening comprehension podcasts.

Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary - This online learning dictionary from Merriam-Webster provides 15 free sessions of perfect pronunciation exercises for ESL students. Each session includes practice with words, phrases, and sentences.

New English File - This Oxford University Press site offers pronunciation practice for beginner, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advance

d level English language learners. Students in each level can check their pronunciation of English sounds against audio files and play games to reinforce learning.

Fonetiks - Fonetiks offers comprehensive pronunciation guides for nine different varieties of the English language. Other site features include an online English dictionary with instant sound, minimal pair practice, an interactive reading course, a list of words that are difficult to pronounce, and a pronunciation guide for names of people and places.

Inogolo - Inogolo is an online American English pronunciation guide for ESL and EFL learners. The guide includes pronunciations for the names of people, places, and things.

Howjsay - Howsjay is a talking online dictionary that contains audio pronunciations for more than 130,000 English words and phrases. If the word you are looking for is not contained in the dictio

nary, you can post a question about the word on the site's comment board.

English Interactive - English Interactive links to a wide range of sites that offer English pronunciation practice. Other site features include interactive vocabulary practice with audio and conversation resources.

American English Pronunciation Practice - Charles Kelley, a textbook writer and ESL enthusiast, created this page for ESL and EFL students who need pronunciation practice. The page includes listen and repeat videos, tongue twisters, and game-like minimal pair practice using Flash and MP3 files.

Write Back Soon - Radio Lingua Network provides several different podcasts for English learners, including this phrasal verb podcast known as Write Back Soon. The podcast series consists of eight archived episodes that help ESL students understand and practice phrasal verbs.

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab - This online listening lab is great for students who need speaking, listening, and pronunciation practice. The lab provides short listening quizzes and activities for beginner and intermediate students as well as videos of long conversations and interviews for more advanced students.

Phonetics Flash Animation Project - This online project from the University of Iowa features animated libraries of phonetic sounds of English. An animated diagram, description, and audio file of the sound being used in context are available for each English consonant and vowel.

KanTalk - Created specifically for English students who need spoken English practice, this online community offers a space to practice conversations and share recordings and videos.

Busuu - Busuu is an international language learning community for people who want to practice English and other languages with native speakers. The site's integrated video-chat-application makes it easy to chat with anyone you meet on Busuu.

SharedTalk - SharedTalk is a free Rosetta Stone community that provides both voice and text chat for members who want to practice their language skills online.

Livemocha - Livemocha is a popular online language learning community that supports six different languages, including English. Students can use the site to find language partners, user-made videos, and other ESL resources.

AddLang - AddLang makes it easy for students to practice pronunciation with native English speakers over Skype. Students can also practice their English with other AddLang members using MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and AOL Messenger

UsingEnglish.com - The English Language Discussion Forum on UsingEnglish.com has a special section just for students who want to discuss questions related to pronunciation, phonetics, and other aspect of speech. The forum also offers an "Ask the Teacher" section for students who need additional help.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about pharmacy technician certification for PharmacyTechnicianCertification.com.

PLAYCOMIC, more than a simple comic creator

2010-06-08T19:37:00.012+02:00

It has been a long time ago since I wrote my last post, due to lack of time. However, today I found an incredible comic creator tool which I would like to share with you. It is called PLAYCOMIC and it has been designed and created by Antonio Muñoz Germán in order to help stu

dents to develop their writing and oral communication skills in English and in Spanish.

There is a great amount of characters and backgrounds students can choose from, so the possibilities to create different kinds of situational dialogues is almost endless. They will be able to create their own comic strips, finish one of more than 40 stories included, transform a comic into a narrative and viceversa, fill the balloons with their own dialogues and add as many pages as they want to.

Teachers will benefit as well from this software since it includes a didactic guide with a series of methodological principles, as well as educational suggestions for different kinds of activities using comics, and a detailed guide to learn how to use this tool.

Well, I hope you find time to explore and try this tool with your students because it is really worth it.

10 Learning Communities for ESL students

2009-12-19T02:10:00.008+01:00

Participating in an online language learning community is a good way for ESL students to improve speaking and writing skills. The average community provides language partners to chat with in addition to other learning tools. Here are 10 online learning communities that can be joined for free.

EnglishForums.com - EnglishForums.com is the world's largest EFL/TEFL social network. Students can use the site to learn English, meet new people online, and ask questions about grammar, vocabulary, letter writing, and essays.

SharedTalk - This Rosetta Stone site is a free language exchange community. Visitors can learn and practice English with various language partners via voice chat and text chat.

Unilang - Unilang is an online language learning community with many different free language resources. Members can learn, discuss, and practice English and other languages with Unilang's text and voice chat.

English, Baby! - This English language learning community makes it easy to learn English with downloadable audio lessons and other learning materials. Community members can also use the site to find pen pals and language partners.

Hello-Hello - Hello-Hello is a good place for ESL students to find native speakers to practice with. The site also provides free English lessons developed in collaboration with the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages).

Mixxer - This free educational website was created for language learners who want to practice their writing and speaking skills with other people around the world. Mixxer users can write a blog post and have their writing corrected or chat with other users via Skype.

MyHappyPlanet - ESL students can practice their language skills with native speakers on MyHappyPlanet. Other site features include free videos and English lessons.

Parlo - Parlo is an interactive language learning site that provides free resources in addition to fee-based courses. The site is a good place to find pen pals, music from the English-speaking world, and diagnostic tests to determine your skill level.

xLingo - xLingo is a language exchange community for people who want to learn and practice English and other languages. The site makes it easy to find a language partner and build skills with free online flashcards.

LearnHub - This site offers several online learning communities for ESL students. LearnHub visitors can join an existing community or become a community leader and start their own.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degree reviews for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

20 Free Online Libraries and Reading Rooms

2009-11-14T00:15:00.010+01:00

Reading online is a great way for students to practice and improve English reading skills. There are many free libraries and reading rooms that allow you to read books, articles, historical documents, and reference materials online. Here is a list of 20 online libraries worth exploring:

The Free Library - The Free Library by Farlex features over 5 million articles and books that are viewable online. The site provides literature for business, health, humanities, law, recreation, science, communications, entertainment, social sciences, and general interest.

Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg is the largest single collection of free ebooks on the web. Within this site, browsers can find and read over 30,000 online books.

University of Virginia Library - The University of Virgina Library provides more than 2,100 ebooks that are available free to the public. The ebook titles include classic American and British fiction, children's literature, American history books, Shakespeare plays, and other documents.

The Online Books Page - This library, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, provides access to free books around the web. The site houses listings for over 35,000 books that are readable online.

Bibliomania - Bibliomania offers over 2,000 free fiction books. The site also features reference books, quotations, dictionaries, nonfiction, and biographies.

Baen Free Library - This online library features a number of free online digital books. The books are viewable in a variety of ways, including HTML download, Microsoft reader, Rocket ebook, and Rich Text Format.

Bartleby.com - This site provides free online readable books for reference, verse, fiction, and nonfiction. The literature on this site is searchable based on type, author, subject, or title.

Internet Public Library - The Internet Public Library offers links to catalogs of books that are free to read on the Internet as well as magazines, journals, and newspapers from around the world.

ReadPrint - ReadPrint is a free library of books for teachers, students, and booklovers. The books are completely free, easy to read online, and feature thousands of stories, novels, and poems.

Stanford University - The Stanford University HighWire Press features a large archive of free full-text journal articles dating back to January of 1994.

Free Online Books - With over 5,000 free ebooks, Free Online Books is a good place to find the books you're looking to read. This online library of books features many genres, including children's, fiction, autobiography, nonfiction, and much more.

Online Books 4 Free - Online Books 4 Free features over 9,200 free ebooks for students, researchers, or just enjoyment.

PublicLiterature.org - PublicLiterature.org offers a way for users to read a collection of public domain books, poetry, audio, and tutorials. This site also features a modern book blog with sample works form great authors around the globe.

Page By Page Books - This free online book site features hundreds of classic books that are accessible free online.

Historical Text Archive - The Historical Text Archive features hundreds of high quality articles, books, and links to a wide variety of historical subjects. Founded in 1990, Historical Text Archive is among the oldest history sites on the web.

Questia - Questia offers free book profiles, encyclopedias, journals, magazines, newspapers, and books that can be read online.

Free-eBooks.net - Free-eBook.net provides ebooks, magazine articles, and other resources for download or online viewing. The categories featured in this digital online library range from advertising to youth.

ChestofBooks.com - This free online reading room allows you to read books online. The books can be searched or users can simply browse through the titles.

Many Books - Many books provides more than 24,000 free ebooks that are searchable by author, title, category, and language.

DOAJ - The Directory of Open Access Journals is dedicated to increasing the availability of scholarly and scientific journals. The site has over 4,000 journals that cover a wide variety of languages and subjects.

California Digital Library - The California Digital Library features over 8,000 journals, databases, and other online resources. The interface is a little difficult to maneuver through but once you get the hang of it you can find links to all sorts of free online journal articles.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online classes for OnlineClasses.org.

Virtual Social Networking Conferences in November 2009

2009-10-21T16:49:00.013+02:00

From November 5th to 8th, 2009, there will be an open-knowledge event, Social Networking, organized by AVEALMEC and ARCALL, two LatinAmerican associations, one based in Venezuela and the other one in Argentina, interested in promoting the use of ICT in the language classroom. It will be completely online and free, and its aim is to encourage practioners to reflect the role of communities of practice as social networks in ELT.

Many of the best ESL/EFL teachers and ELT professionals from different parts of the world have been invited:

George Siemens -Canada

Etienne Wenger -U.S.A.

Vance Stevens - United Arabic States

Nik Peachey - United Kingdom

Charalambos Vrasidas and Maria Solomou - Cyprus

Nicky Hockly - Spain

Erika Cruvinel and Ronaldo Lima -Brazil

Rita Zeinstejer and Paula Ledesma -Argentina

Nellie Müller Deustch -Israel

Carla Arena -Brazil

Graham Stanley -Spain

Jennifer Verschoor, Evelyn Izquierdo and Erika Cruvinel -Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil.

All of them will be sharing their experiences and expertise with participants and will help us grasp abetter picture of how social networks can be used in the language teachingand learning field.
I think it will be a great experience to have the opportunity to discuss about the concepts and theories around social networks, communities of practice, the Web 2.0, experiences in the classroom, as well as about the use, advantages and drawbacks of social networking tools.
DON'T MISS IT!

Docking at the Right Harbour

2009-10-21T00:01:00.025+02:00

Have you ever had problems to find useful resources on the net for teaching English? Have you ever wonder what are the best ESL/EFL resources, the best Edubloggers in the English teaching field? Many times when we want to use Internet as an education tool, we get lost due to the great amount of information contained on the net. In order to avoid this, Gorka Palazio, professor of the University of the Basque Country, has developed two great sites: English Harbour and English Tube.

English Harbour, a RSS website where you will find a selection of the best content for English teachers and students. This tool captures the last posts of top English edubloggers. Therefore, you can be up to date with these teachers' experiences in the classroom and with advances in new technologies applied to English teaching. But the advantage of visiting English Harbour is not only to read interesting post written by other ESL/EFL teachers or ELT proffessionals, but also to interact with those teachers who are interested in the same topics that you are. In this way, we are contributing to create a real learning virtual community, which can be expanded Twitter. The URL of Twitter is English Harbour.

However, if you are looking for new resources, English Tube can add visual spice to your University lessons mainly. After class, your students can continue learning English at home, in a cyber café or wherever they wish, watching videos on this site. The videos, which have been taken from the major video services such as Youtube, Blip, Vimeo, Veoh or Metacafe, are organized by level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and by skills (grammar, listening, speaking and writing).

One thing I love about English Tube is that its content is really well-organized. Besides, it is an interactive site in which students can leave their comments on the videos they have watched. I hope that this is only the first step to expand and create a bigger English Tube full of videos for primary and secondary students, as well. A great idea would be that all those useful videos included subtitles, and there was an option to show or hide them depending on the student's English level.

Expocampus 09 Palazio

View more presentations from palazioberri.

20 places to study english grammar online

2009-10-03T10:04:00.015+02:00

If you are looking for a fun and interactive way to study English grammar, you can find almost everything you need on the Internet. There are exercises, tests, study guides, quizzes, and many other materials that make studying English grammar both simple and entertaining. Here are 20 resources to try:

Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) - The Purdue OWL offers a wide variety of exercises in grammar, punctuation, and spelling for English students. The exercises cover everything from basic grammar rules to advanced grammar understanding.

Daily Grammar - The Daily Grammar site provides grammar lessons and reviews that make it easy to study English grammar. Reviews cover parts of speech, parts of sentences, and mechanics.

GrammarBook.com - This free online site for English usage rules has fun and interactive quizzes and videos for reviewing grammar rules. This is the perfect way to learn and refresh your English grammar skills.

FlashcardExchange - The FlashcardExchange provides several pre-made flashcard sets that grammar studiers will find extremely useful. This site can also be used to create and share original English grammar flashcards.

Chomp Chomp - This free grammar site provides interactive exercises for testing your grammar knowledge. The exercises include accompanying handouts to increase retention.

Online English Grammar - The Online English Grammar site provides a list of free online tests and games for practicing grammar. Most of the grammar tests and games are designed for intermediate to advanced users.

HyperGrammar - HyperGrammar, a University of Ottawa site, has free grammar lessons with an end-of-lesson review test for testing knowledge and finding the weak spots in your grammar knowledge.

Newroom 101.com - Newroom101.com provides thousands of free exercises for writers, students, editors, and other people who want to study or review grammar.

English Exercises Online - English Exercises Online has a collection of online grammar quizzes that can be used as study aids. The quizzes are mainly fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice and offer a guide for difficulty.

Oxford University Press - The online practice grammar guide from Oxford Press University features free online practice tests for basic to advanced studiers. The tests make it easy to figure out the grammar skills you have perfected versus the skills you still need to improve.

The Online Grammar Guide - This free online study guide is specifically designed for advanced English users. The guide, created by Jack Lynch, covers all grammar subjects from A versus An to Who versus Whom.

SpeakSpeak - SpeakSpeak provides advanced English grammar practice exercises for learning or studying grammar. Simply review the exercises and take the online tests to find out what skills you need to review.

English Grammar Exercises - These online exercises were written by an English teacher at College Claparede to provide grammar practice for advanced students.

Guide to Grammar and Writing - The Guide to Grammar and Writing features interactive quizzes and overviews for advanced English grammar study. The site also contains college level vocabulary lists and quizzes.

Quizlet - This free online flashcard site features 74 pre-made flashcard sets for studying English grammar. Users can use the flashcards to learn, familiarize, and test terms and usage.

Cengage Learning - This online study center features practice tests for learning and reviewing English grammar rules. Within this site users will find free practice tests for everything from apostrophes to subjects and verbs.

Learn4Good - Learn4Good, a free English study and exercise site, features grammar practice for SAT, PET, FCE, CAE, and more. The site lists and explains some of the more difficult grammar concepts and allows you to put your knowledge into practice with review tests.

Nonstop English - The Nonstop English site features advanced exercises for ESL students who are preparing for the TOEFL.

Activities for ESL Students - This site for ESL students provides a large collection of self-study grammar quizzes. Users can simply browse through the quizzes and pick the level that will challenge them.

The Tower of English - The Tower of English is a site created for ESL students to study and learn every aspect of English.

This post has been written by education writer Karen Schweitzer. She writes the Business School Guide for About.com and has been serving as an advisor to Business School as well. She also writes about online courses for OnlineCourses.org.

SpellQuizzer - Help your students master their spelling

2009-08-12T23:14:00.023+02:00

Today, I was contacted by Dan Hite, a corporate software developer, who talked to me about his useful educative programme for Windows, SpellQuizzer. SpellQuizzer helps students that need help learning their spelling and vocabulary words and it has very nice features.

SpellQuizzer was not designed with any one spelling curriculum in mind. In fact, it should compliment virtually any spelling curriculum since you create your own custom spelling lists. Teachers can enter their students spelling words into the software and record them by speaking into a microphone. After that, the students can listen the recorded words and type them. The software has a built-in spellchecker that recognizes both US and UK English spellings.

Another great feature is that the spellchecker warns the user when creating a spelling list if they enter a word that appears to be spelled incorrectly. Because of this safeguard it's reasonably safe to let students create their own spelling lists guided by the curriculum they are working on. If the teacher or parents creates the lists in SpellQuizzer, it's always a good idea to try to make the sound recordings amusing for the child. Funny phrases or voices make this tool funnier for the child and help to keep them engaged.

There is a video demo you can watch, click here. Besides, you can also find a page of free downloadable spelling lists with audio recordings for use with SpellQuizzer, click here. Finally, you can belong to the community web site which has discussion forums and a place where SpellQuizzer users can upload and download one another's SpellQuizzer spelling lists, click here, I mean, SpellQuizzer users can easily export and import SpellQuizzer spelling lists to share with other SpellQuizzer users. Because of this members of homeschool groups can share their lists rather than everyone having to record their lists individually (assuming everyone is on the same curriculum).

This software is not free, it costs $29.95 to download the software, but the creator has generously offered Sharing Learning readers the opportunity to get a free copy of the software to the first five people who contact him referring to my blog. To get your free copy of SpellQuizzer fill out the contact form, click here. Be sure to mention that you are a Sharing Learning reader and educator and use an email address associated with an education institution when requesting a free license. You have also the opportunity to download a 30 days free trial to know how the software works. After this time, you have to pay for the service. It costs nothing to try out SpellQuizzer and once you have purchased you can still request a full refund if you are not completely satisfied during the first 60 days after purchase.

I don't earn any money spreading this information, I'm just passing along this information for teachers who are interested in getting this useful software with their students or children.

Speak N' Spell

2009-08-11T17:27:00.018+02:00

If you students need help with pronunciation, listening and writing, Speak N' Spell can be the perfect software to recommend them and use in the classroom. How does it work?

The first time you open it, if you want to add a specific word list for your students you have to open the Word Maintenance, clear the table and add your own words saving your own list. Doing this, they can revise this dictionary (add or delete words), use their own set of words (clear the table and add words), or load a plain text file with words. They can also save the word list to a plain text file. Make such a file one word per line and save the file with a ".txt" suffix."

There are several levels of difficulty in which your students have to guess the word they hear:

Easy: words with three letters.

Medium: words with four to six letters.

Hard: words with seven to ten letters.

Hardest: words with more than ten letters.

Mixed: any word included in the dictionary can be pronounced.

How to use it in the classroom? An Speak N' Spell Game

1. You will need the Speak N' Spell Software, a computer or laptop and a projector to play this game with your students.

2. Divide your students into two groups and explain that they are going to play Speak N' Spell game. First, they will hear a word and then, they have to guess what word is it in turns.

3. The teacher, then, presses the new word key to listen it. The first student who guesses it correctly has to raise his hand, spell the word and make a sentence with it. This depends on your students' level. Sometimes it is difficult for beginners to create a sentence, therefore, you can give them the chance of just spelling it.

4. If the student's answer is right, his team win a point.

5. The winner is the team that get the highest score.

To Teach or Not to Teach Grammar? - That is the Eternal Question

2009-08-11T11:49:00.012+02:00

This morning, while browsing around the net, I stopped on an ESL forum post that called my attention and made me think:

"I think that grammar is useless for learning to speak fluently...what do you think?" someone said.

This topic has been quite controversial for decades. Should or shouldn't we teach grammar? If the answer is affirmative, how and when should we teach it?

In the late 1970s, Chomsky, Krashen and others pointed out that the learning of a language should be like a child ´s natural acquisition. I mean, when we start speaking our mother tongue, we don ´t think or care about grammar rules. Besides, it has also been documented that teaching grammar step by step has had little effect on speaking production, that is, many people who have studied English learning grammatical rules, can ´t communicate effectively. We are not allowed to teach English to children at school because there is an age, until nine years old more or less, in which language is acquired in a natural way. But, does it work with adults who start learning a foreign language?

In the late 1980s another approach appeared, the Communicative one, which made emphasis on authentic materials instead of "traditional textbooks". This new approach, which was the product of the dissatisfaction of many educators and linguists with the audiolingual and grammar-translation methods, emphasized other really important disciplines like Pragmatics (negotiation of meaning, social context, interaction...) or cooperative learning. This is because learning a language is much more than communication, it also represents a cultural background. What is the role of grammar in this approach, then? Grammar plays an important role, as well,within this approach, but it is learned into a context, not explaining grammatical rules, since students motivations to learn the new language come from their desire to communicate in real life (travelling, at work, etc) fluently. Teaching is not essential any more, but learning. A strong point of the Communicative Approach is that it focuses on the student's process of learning and this is a great advantage. However, as the other teaching approaches and methods, it also has its disadvantages.

The Communicative Approach developed into the Task-based Language Learning Method (1990s), I mean, this method was within the framework of the Comunicative Approach and focused in the use of real language, allowing students to do meaningful tasks, like buying flying tickets in a travel agency, conducting an interview, etc., using the target vocabulary and grammatical structures. A task is " a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end." (Professor David Nunan) Is it possible to integrate grammar in this method in an effective way? It is, but not focusing on form but inferring the grammar rules from the context.

There is not a "perfect method" for teaching or studying a foreign language. However, I think it is very important to give our students as many opportunities as we can to use the new language but without avoiding grammar all time since different people have different learning styles at different times. Therefore, as there are not quick recipes, why not to use the best of each approach or method to engage our students? We learn languages listening but we learn to improve our level, our communication style also via grammar. And what is the point of fluency if we do not set a context? How would you explain these situations?

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Listening, writing, speaking, grammar, pronunciation, meaning, context... Everything is important when teaching or learning a language.

My English Images - when a picture is worth more than a thousand words

2009-08-10T17:00:00.014+02:00

A lot of researches have been done over years on the importance of using visuals in the ESL/EFL classroom for our students' learning process since images allow them to infer, deduce and provide the context to clarify the meaning of written texts.

A great resource for teachers that I discovered three days ago is My English Images, a website created by F. Michael Kloran, an English teacher and illustrator living in Japan with a very personal style who has decided to create this site to make other teachers' life easier.

In this site you will find a collection of ESL resources, mainly pictures and worksheets to spice up your classes, which have been grouped into different categories:

Conversation

Grammar

Vocabulary

Pronunciation

Games

Images

All the worksheets include and introduction and clear explanations about how to use them in the classroom. These materials are copyrighted but you can download them for free in PDF version. Beside, if there is something you cannot find here or you would like to make the author some suggestions, you can contact him in the e-mail address provided in the site.

Language Social Networks - Don't Stop Learning!

2009-08-01T21:33:00.015+02:00

Due to the globalized world we live in, many people decide to learn a foreign language for different reasons and purposes. The best opportunity to learn it is being immerse in the context the language is spoken but not everybody can afford to live in a foreign country. However, learning English has never been so easy, interactive and social since social networks appeared on the net! ESL/EFL students spend a lot of time surfing on the net, maybe more hours than they do studying therefore, why not provide them with opportunities to practice and learn real English with native English speakers or ESL/EFL students from other countries in a communicative setting?

Social networking can be an excellent reading and writing practice which can be completed with other communication tools like Skype, since Skype allows you to speak in real time. This is a great way of producing fluent speakers! Besides, with social networking students can learn more about English culture since they can be in touch with native speakers who can share photos, videos or audio files with them.

English Social Networks

Babbel: it is a language learning social network where you can improve your language skills chatting with other Babble users, many of them native ones. As it is said in this website "Babbel already has more then 250,000 users from over 200 countries that learn English, Spanish, French, Italian and German." You only need to register in order to start communicating with other learners. Besides, you can also choose an online course if you are interested in learning grammar or vocabulary.

Busuu: it is a free online community for learning languages where users have access to more than 150 highly audiovisual leaning units covering a wide range of day-to-day topics. The language material is currently available in French, Spanish, English and German but further languages will be added soon. Additionally, the users have the possibility to directly improve their language skills with other native speakers of the community. Via an integrated video-chat, users can practice their skills while being at home. They are a Madrid based start-up and launched the website in May 08. By now, more than 100,000 users from over 200 countries have joined this great website and they have been nominated Official Project of the UNESCO during the International Year of languages.

Italki: is a social networking site that helps people learn languages in a fun and interactive way by connecting members for language exchange. The site initially went live in December of 2006 (making us one of the earliest players in this space), and has experienced tremendous growth such that we now have about 440,000 members from more than 200 countries, speaking over 100 languages. One of italki's earliest and most popular features is "Answers", where members can ask questions about learning languages and other members of the community respond. Many students have used italki to get help with their homework and to find recommendations on textbooks and other study materials. In May of 2008, italki added "Knowledge," a publicly editable wiki of language learning content, which we hope over time, will become just like a free public textbook.

Livemocha: Livemocha, with more than 2 millions of members offers a great number of languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Japanese and it is the most popular language learning site! Students can write or speak about a topic and receive feedback from native speakers on the network. According to Shirish Nadkarni, chief executive of the company, the name Livemocha refers to the relaxed atmosphere of a coffee shop, the perfect place for chatting with native speakers while drinking a cup of coffee at home.

Palabea: it is another social network for practicing, communicating and learning foreign languages which uses audio and visual tools as learning aids (podcasts, videos, etc). Palabea has created virtual classrooms where all users can upload or create content, I mean, if you are a teacher you can record videolessons, podcasts or create documents. However, if you are a student, you can search for a language course or communicate with speakers from all over the world in audio or videoconferences.

However, if you are interested in creating and customize a free social network for communicating with your student, Ning makes it easy. You can create your own social networks just in a few minutes, adding the content you want and have your students participating and learning. In EFL Geek 3.0 blog you will find very useful information to know how it works.

20 Websites to Practice and Learn the English Language

2009-08-01T20:10:00.008+02:00

Some students need extra practice outside of class. Fortunately, there are many different websites to practice and learn English online. Here are 20 free sites to recommend to your students:

Learn English

Livemocha - Livemocha is a popular language learning site used by millions of people around the world. Students can learn from online language lessons and chat with other language learners.

VerbaLearn - VerbaLearn is an excellent place to learn and practice English vocabulary. Students can customize the way they learn and receive mp3 study lists.

English as a Second Language - This About.com site provides thousands of free ESL resources to help people learn English. Resources include free English courses, grammar and vocabulary practice, tests, quizzes, and other English learning tools.

Transparent Language - Transparent Language offers a number of free resources to students who are trying to learn English, including an overview of the language, learning software, and online quizzes.

The English Club - This site offers free lessons, videos, games, stories, quizzes and other helpful resources to students who want to learn English for free. Students can also chat online and practice their English with other club members.

Learn English - Learn English has been a valuable resource for EFL/ESL learners for more than ten years now. The site teaches students English vocabulary, grammar, and conversation and then tests their knowledge with quizzes and games.

Learn English Online - Learn English Online offers a free 52-lesson EFL/ESL course for beginners. Each lesson includes writing and pronunciation practice.

Fonetiks - This site offers free audio pronunciation guides for nine varieties of the English language, including American English, British English, Irish English, Scottish English, Welsh English, Australian English, Indian English, and South African English.

Merriam-Webster - The online version of Merriam-Webster is an excellent place for ESL students to learn new words. The site offers a search feature, a "word of the day," and fun word games.

Babel Fish - This free online translator from Yahoo! can translate single words, a block of text, or entire web pages--a great way for ESL students to learn new English phrases.

Practice English

ManyThings.org - EFL and ESL learners can practice their pronunciation with the free audio games on this site.

ESL Fast - Digital robots help ESL learners practice their English on ESL Fast. Visitors can practice conversations for hotels, apartments, college, transportation, travel, employment, entertainment, shopping, and daily life.

ESL Forum - This online forum is the most popular ESL forum on the web. It can be used by both students and teachers who want to practice writing and discuss ESL learning.

Dave's ESL Cafe - Dave's ESL Cafe offers a wide range of resources to ESL students and teachers. Students who want to practice their English writing and communication skills will especially enjoy the large student forum.

ESL Flashcards - ESL students can practice their English with this enormous collection of free ESL flashcards and printables.

Online Books Page - Students can practice their English reading skills with the free books found on the Online Books Page. There are more than 35,000 books to choose from in all.

Bibliomania - Like the Online Books Page, Bibliomania offers a large selection of free English literature. The site also provides study guides to popular books as well as other learning materials.

IPL - The Internet public library is another good place to practice English reading skills. This online library offers free books, magazines, newspapers, and other reading materials.

Ohio University Department of Linguistics - Ohio University has assembled a nice collection of links to online English language tests. ESL students can use these tests to assess their knowledge level and determine where they need practice.

Peterson's TOEFL Quiz - Students who want to practice for the TOEFL can take this quick online quiz from Peterson's. The quiz tests reading comprehension and can be scored with the click of a button.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes for the Online Colleges Database at OnlineColleges.net.

Improve your English and be supportive!

2009-06-07T02:13:00.014+02:00

Today, David García, from Aprende Inglés Online (Learn English Online) sent me an e-mail inviting me to participate in the great campaign he is carrying out to fight hunger through FREE RICE. Freerice is a simple and well-designed website where you can practise English vocabulary and grammar but also other subjects such as Art, Geography, Maths, Chemistry, French, German, Italian or Spanish.

Each time you guess a question, the UN World food program donates money to buy 10 grains of rice. Up to now, we have got 65,230,828,950 of grains. Your time can save lives, don't forget it!!

Did you know that, according to the United Nations, 25,000 people die from hunger every day, most of them children?

These news are not on TV every day, politicians haven't been able to solve this problem up to now, but people together can do much more to help solving this terrible situation. Do you think that you can donate a bit of your time for a good and worthwhile cause? How much rice have you donated today? Let me know!

Considering ESL teaching in Asia? 3 great places for ESL teachers

2009-05-14T10:11:00.021+02:00

The need for ESL teachers is growing throughout the world, particularly in Asia, as English is quickly becoming the international language of choice; if you’re interested in pursuing this profession and moving abroad, check out these three great places for ESL teachers:

1. Hong Kong

Although Hong Kong can be one of the most difficult ESL teaching markets to break into, the rewards are great—particularly financially. Hong Kong offers some of the best ESL teaching wages in Asia; monthly stipends can reach upwards to $5,000.

Not surprisingly, many of the highest paying positions require previous teaching experience, but there are also spots open for beginning ESL teachers as well.

Hong Kong also offers a unique cultural experience, seamlessly blending East and West from exotic foods in street markets to excellent public transportation.

And if you’re worried about not speaking the local language, you shouldn’t be. As an official language of Hong Kong, English is widely spoken and understood, so you’ll have plenty of time to adjust to Cantonese if you so desire (and as someone who has moved to a foreign country, I highly suggest you do so!).

Teaching English in Hong Kong

2. South Korea

South Korea is another Asian country that offers great ESL teaching opportunities, but note you will be required to provide proof of a four-year degree from an accredited university; English must also be your first language.

Many new ESL teachers in South Korea find work in “Hagwons,” private schools that cater to kindergarten and elementary students, but there are also opportunities for teaching at the university level and for private lessons.

South Korea offers competitive pay within great compensation packages, which often include airfare and lodging. Moreover, since the cost of living and tax rates are relatively low in South Korea, you can feasibly even pay off student loans and save money while teaching there.

When choosing a location in South Korea, remember that the country is more than just Seoul—there are several major cities that can offer the teaching and cultural experiences you seek.

English isn’t widely spoken throughout the country, but grocery stores and public transportation usually have signs in English.

Teaching English in South Korea:

3. Taiwan

Just as in South Korea, ESL teachers in Taiwan are required to be native English speakers and to have university degrees—be sure to bring your actual diploma (not a copy) with you in order to get your work visa.

ESL teaching positions are available in all levels of education in kindergartens, chain schools, international schools, and universities; many teachers also take on private lessons and easily manage to save money while teaching in Taiwan.

Again, the cost of living is relatively low for the potential monthly earnings of an ESL teacher, so if you work hard, you’ll also be able to afford to enjoy all the cultural offerings of Taiwan and still live comfortably.

Main stops for ESL teachers in Taiwan include Taipei (the capital city), Kaohsiung (southern port city), or Taichung (third largest city); English is spoken in some parts of the country, but, again, you should definitely take the opportunity to learn Cantonese while you’re there. Not only will you learn an increasingly useful language, you’ll also feel more connected with your surroundings.

Teaching English in Taiwan

A Final Note on Choosing a Location

In choosing where to go to pursue a career as an ESL teacher, remember there are ESL success stories and tales of horror just about everywhere. You should always be honest with yourself about your own qualifications and personal and professional needs when choosing where to work before picking up and moving abroad; moreover, some schools require year-long contracts, so be completely sure about your decision before signing anything.

Guest post by Michelle Fabio, experienced ESL teacher in southern Italy, who also shares online education tips at OnlineEducation.net.

Top Ten for Education. Number 3 is for Voicethread

2009-05-09T19:43:00.010+02:00

How many times have we listened that a picture worths more than one hundreds words? What about using pictures and words thanks to a great tool like Voicethread?

Voicethread is a great tool for collaborative projects since it joins picture and voice in slideshares, it is like an interactive media album. Students can leave comments using voice, text or video if they have a webcam, therefore it promotes asynchronous discusion about the topic which is being discussed. Besides, teachers can decide if they want to publish their Voicethreads presentations to share them with other teachers or keep them private.

This web 2.0 tool allows teachers to know better to their students, interact with them in a lively way and learn about their interests, hobbies, worries, etc. And, on the other hand, students can practice the language, discuss about interesting topics with other students and teachers, contrast opinions from different perspectives and enrich their learning experience.

If you would like to know more about this tool I recommend you to watch the following Voicethread:

What is Voicethread anyway?

Some ways to use Voicethread in education.

If you are interested in knowing more about using Voicethread in the ESL/EFL classroom I recommend you to visit the following Wiki where you will find really useful examples as well as the Webheads and friends at TESOL 2008.

Top Ten for Education. Number 2 is for Blogs.

2009-05-01T14:24:00.023+02:00

As Tiscar Lara says in "Cuadernos de Comunicación e Innovación" magazine, 'Weblogs have a great potential as a tool in the educational field since they can adapt to any discipline, educational level, or teaching method'. Besides, what makes weblogs attractive for ESL/EFL educators is that students can take control of their learning process, express their ideas and interact with their teachers and other students in their same class or in English speaking countries. Therefore, students are exposed to real language what is really stimulating for them since they feel English is something real and not something they can only use in the English classroom.

But, what is a weblog or blog?

A blog is a free personal website where a person or a group of people usually write posts, include videos, personal opinions, slideshares, links, photos, gadgets, news, I mean, it is like a personal online diary. However, blogs were not created for education but they give teachers a great amount of possibilities to interact with the students, to motivate them with activities the teacher adds to the blog. Blogs have become a collaborative tool for information exchange and reflection on the topics studied in the classroom.

Nevertheless, a blog should not be just something for students to do when a teacher doesn´t know what to do in the classroom but a tool for achieving the persued learning goals. Effective teachers have to give simple and clear explanations if they want their students accomplish the activities in a successful way.

Teachers can use all kind of resources for the activities: videos, photographs, comics, website links for carrying out a researching task, etc. However, teachers have to organize, categorize and order resources to avoid "cognitive overflow". If we ask our students to search information for an specific topic on the net they can get lost since they can find a lot of information on the net but they cannot distinguish between high quality and low quality sources. A blog allows teachers to organize information through categories, structure information in an easy and quick way.

Advantages of using a blog with your ESL/EFL students

1. Teachers can interact with their students in the target language outside the classroom in an easy and fast way.

2. It is a way to give voice to your students to express their opinions, ideas and upload the work they have done in class, for example.

3. Students are actively involved in their learning process.

4. Teachers in non-English speaking countries, thanks to the net, can have access to real material for their classes and include it on the class blog.

5. Teachers can expand their classroom boundaries and their students can go on working wherever they want.

6. Students can get 'feedback' on their works from the teacher.

Ideas to use a blog outside the classroom

1. Divide your students in small groups (3-5 students per group) and ask them to create a blog for publishing the project they have been working on. Create a questionaire to know how your students have worked, if they have enjoyed the activity, what they have learnt, etc.

2. With adult students, you can organize and international classroom language exchange with other English teachers to know cultural similarities and differences with British, French, American or Portugues people, for example.

3. After a reading and discussion in class you can ask your students to create a new story using stripes, they can draw the story or use Toondoo for doing this task. After that, they have to publish them on the blog and other students have to decide which story is the best.

4. After introducing a reading about London city, you can tell your students they are going to London only for three days in July. They have to work in small groups. London is a very big city, therefore, they cannot visit all the interesting places there. They have to decide when are they going to visit London, what kind of clother are they going to take in their suitcases (you can include a link to a weather report website from U.K), what places are they going to visit (include a London guide website), where are they going to stay (bed&breakfasts, hotels, hostels, Inns, etc). They have to interact with the other students to take all these decisions. When they have finished the research, they have to publish a summary on the blog. With this activity they can review vocabulary (clothes, weather) and grammar (going to).

5. You can provide your students with a reading from the web uploading it to the blog and ask them to write a summary.

You can find more information in More Blog Ideas.

Disadvantages of using a blog with your students.

1. Not all students have internet access at home.

2. Not all students have a homogeneous NTIC knowledge.

If you are interested in this topic you should visit this Web 2.0 in the Classroom Blog entry called "Using Blogs to Promote Authentic Learning in the Classroom"and "Blogging for ELT" by Graham Stanley. They really worth!

You are always welcome to contribute with your ideas!!

Next: Top Ten for Education. Number 3 is for Voicethread.

Top Ten for Education. Number 1 is for Wikis.

2009-04-30T19:57:00.021+02:00

Today, surfing on the net I have found a very interesting article in the 'Transforming Education through Technology' journal, called Top Ten Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners written by Chris Riedel. My aim with this post is not making a list of Web 2.0 tools but giving some ideas to use them in the classroom since we, teachers, need to share new pedagocial ways to introduce technology into the curriculum.

I would like you to contribute with your ideas as well.

1. How can we use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom?

2. What projects or activities have you developed with your students using them?

3. Have they enjoyed them?

4. What has been the impact on your students?

5. What problems have you found to adapt them to the curriculum?

Thanks for your help!!

What are Wikis?

A wiki is free software which allows you to create a website in a simple way for you and your students. You and your students can edit text, links, powerpoint presentations, multimedia content, videos, photos... since it is mainly a collaborative tool. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia where people from all over the world edit information about everything you can imagine (literature, science, biographies, history, cities...).

How can we use wikis in the classroom?

1. A wiki can be a great tool to collect all your students class works, similar to an electronic porfolio.

2. You can upload a video about the topic you have introduced in class and write some questions about the video. The students have to write their answers in the wiki. You can use the "To Do" feature in the wiki if you want they work in pairs.You can use the forum to communicate with your students. Interaction is an important part of the learning process, if you don't interact with your students they can feel themselves isolated.

3. If your students are adults you can set up an online discussion about culture (a film you have watched in the classroom, food, a book they have read...). After that, they can work in a webquest about the same topic and complete a task such as a short video with their vision about the topic the video deals with, a film summary with their point of view, a multi-cultural recipe book...

4. You can contact other ESL/EFL teachers in a different country and start a project to know cultural differences. Your students can learn to value other cultures or the culture of the language they are learning, English.

5. Students can collaborate in small groups (4-5) on reports, presentations, sharing links for a related topic, writing a story, etc.

Interesting: ESL/EFL Wikis on the net.

Movie Reviews (For students)

Connecting Across Continents. Implementing Collaborative Projects in Your Classroom.

ESL for primary. (For teachers).

Let's TIC English (In Spanish).

Daniela Munca's ESL Funland.

Miller's English. A wiki used for assignments.

Isabel Perez's Students Wiki

British School, Primary, New Delhi

Wikigogy. A wikispace for ESL/EFL teachers to share lesson plans, activities, ideas, etc.

TEFLpedia. A wiki for EFL teachers.

Article about using Wikis: How to use a Wiki? (In Spanish).

Video: 'Wikis in Plain English'

Tomorrow, next Top 10 Web 2.0 tool: Blogs.

Youtube Edu - Open Culture and Education in Youtube

2009-04-02T23:58:00.014+02:00

Last 26th March, Google launched a new sub-site called Youtube Edu which was released in Youtube Blog . According to Youtube Blog, "YouTube EDU is a volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. We'll feature some of these videos on the home page on Friday and elaborate further in a separate post on that day. "

This project is very similar to Academic Earth one. There are more than 20000 videos about lectures, full courses, etc, on Youtube Edu and growing each day! Now, you can go on learning anytime and anywhere browsing videos by college or university name in the Directory.

Youtube is a tool which many teachers like using in their classes, however, this sharing site is blocked in many schools around the world and in many countries. Therefore, has Youtube developed this new sub-site to avoid sutting the site out?

There is no doubt this has been a great idea, but when is Youtube going to launch a sub-site for ESL/EFL teachers full of teachers' classes, activities, projects, experiences,etc to know what other teachers are doing all around the world in just one website?

30 Websites with Free ESL Teaching Resources

2009-03-21T13:13:00.010+01:00

Yesterday, Karen Schweitzer, an experienced freelance writer and copyeditor who also writes for About.com and other education companies, sent me this article with very valuable information about Free ESL Teaching Resources.

Every teacher needs a little help now and then inside the classroom and out. Fortunately, there are plenty of free ESL teaching resources that can be found online. Here are 30 useful sites worth checking out today.

General Teaching Resources

Education World - Education World is one of the best online resources for teachers. This site hosts information about professional development, lesson planning, and other resources that educators can use.
Teachers Network - This non-profit organization was created by teachers for other teachers. The Teacher's Network offers up-to-date research, news, lesson plans, videos, and much more.
Teacher Magazine - This online magazine provides news and a collection of blogs for teachers. Other features include polls, interviews, and interactive forums.
GEM - The Gateway to Education Materials (GEM) is brimming with free teaching resources and tools. Teachers can choose from more than 50,000 free resources.
Teacher Planet - With more than 350 theme based resource pages, Teacher Planet is a good place to come up with ideas and information for themed activities and lessons.

General Lesson Plans

PBS Teachers - This PBS site is an excellent place to find free, standards-based lesson plans for a wide range of subjects.
Discovery Education - The online lessons library from Discovery Education includes hundreds of free teacher-created lesson plans.
Scholastic - Scholastic provides a number of timely, thematic lessons for teachers. Many of the lessons are free. An additional 10,000 lessons can be accessed for a small fee.
Thinkfinity - Sponsored by the Verizon Foundation, this popular site includes free lessons, interactives, and other useful resources for teachers.
Lesson Planz - Lesson Planz is an online directory of lesson plans. Using this Internet directory is a great way to find free lesson plans without going from site to site.

ESL-Specific Lesson Plans

The Internet TESL Journal - This site has thousands of free resources for EFL and ESL teachers. Some of the best resources include lesson plans, classroom activities, games, and articles on teaching techniques.

Using English - Using English is an excellent source for free ESL lesson plans and printables. The site also hosts forums, articles, and useful links.
English as a Second Language - English as a Second Language is an About.com site with free lesson plans for students of any level. The site also includes printable quizzes, tests, and English learning tools.
ESL Galaxy- This site provides nearly 3,000 free worksheets that can be used in ESL lessons. New worksheets and activities are added on a weekly basis.
Read Write Think - Although this site isn't aimed at ESL teachers, it does offer reading lessons and materials for English readers at almost every reading level. Read Write Think also includes the IRA and NCTE's standards for the English Language Arts.

Worksheets and Worksheet Generators

Educational Press - Teachers can make and print all of the free educational worksheets, flashcards, game boards, and quizzes they want with the Personal Education Press.
TEFL.net - Created specifically for ESL and EFL teachers, TEFL.net has more worksheets, lesson plans, activities, and quizzes than one teacher could use. The site also has a worksheet generator so that teachers can create their own worksheets.
Teachnology - Teachnology offers more than 6,000 printable worksheets sorted by category. The site is also a good resource for lesson plans and other printables.
Family Education - Family Education is a great place to find printables for almost any reading level. This site also includes a number of other resources ESL teachers can implement in the classroom.
Super Teacher Worksheets - This site is an excellent source for ELA worksheets. Specific topics include grammar, printing, cursive, phonics, reading, reading comprehension, and writing prompts.

Flashcards and Flashcard Makers

ESL Flashcards - ESL teachers can download hundreds of free flashcards from this site. Flashcards come in three different sizes.
Flashcard Exchange - Teachers can make, print, and exchange flashcards on this easy-to-use website. Flashcards can also be studied online.
Scholastic - The Homework Hub Flashcard Maker from Scholastic is great for math and word flashcards. The flashcards you make are printable. Make up to four cards at a time.
Kitzkikz - This no-frills flashcard maker is great for making versatile flashcards. Just print, cut, fold, and study.
Flashcard Machine - Teachers can create web based flashcards using this free web app. Flashcard Machine also hosts more than 10 million ready-to-use flashcards.

Teacher's Blogs

TeacherLingo - TeacherLingo is a blog community for teachers. Educators can create blogs, read blogs, and network with other teachers.
Edublogs - Edublogs hosts thousands of blogs for students, teachers, librarians, and other educators. The site is great for teachers who want to introduce blogging to their students.
So You Want To Teach? - This teacher-run blog is a great place to find motivation, teaching resources, and information about classroom management and personal development.
My ESL Corner - This teacher-run blog is a wonderful place for ESL teachers to share resources, news, and teaching tips.
Online Teaching Degree - The TeachingDegree.org blog is a good place to learn more about teaching education and degree options for ESL teachers.

Internet4Classrooms

2009-03-12T17:52:00.011+01:00

What is Internet4Classroom? A long time ago two enthusiastic American proffesionals, Susan Brooks and Bill Byles, began a collaborative project to help teachers to integrate New Technologies in the classroom in an effective way but it was so great that it arrived to the net for all of us in 2000.

What can we find on this wonderful site?

1. A site map with all the site items organized alphabetical order.

1. Online tutorials to help teachers to use programs such us Work, Powerpoint, etc; pedagogical tools such as Webquests; multimedia authoring tools such as Hyperstudio, a tools which allows you to integrate text, voice, pictures... and others.

2. In the same section, there are lessons as well which include useful examples and tips about how to use them in the classroom and many resources you can find on the net.

3. Resources classified by level and subject.

4. A great list of Web 2.0 tools (podcasts, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, etc).

This is a great project on how teachers can take advantage of New Technologies in an easy and educative way.

WEB 2.0 TEACHERS?

2009-03-09T17:15:00.030+01:00

Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Mark Prensky.

Many things have been written about how Web 2.0 tools can increase opportunities for learning in a cooperative way, improving critical thinking and communication between students, and between students and teachers.

Nowadays, competent teachers in the New Technologies usage are needed in Education in order to make a difference in the classroom. We should not forget that our students are “digital natives”, therefore, as Carina Grisolia and Claudia Marisa Pagano says in their article “WebQuests, Wikis y Blogs un trío que se las trae!” –“chalk and blackboard are not enough for teaching” (la tiza y el pizarrón no son suficientes a la hora de dar clases). However, teachers have to rethink the learning process introducing new learning strategies and methods based in New Technologies to motivate our students.

Technology by itself doesn’t change and improve the way our students learn; we can have classrooms full of computers, with the most innovative programs, and go on with the methods we use in face-to-face classes, I mean, magisterial classes. Therefore, we need new pedagogical approaches in order to our students learn in a cooperative way, and this is just possible if teachers learn to think web 2.0 networks educatively. This means, as well, to change the teacher’s role.

The teacher is not an "encyclopedia" anymore, but the person who helps students to achieve their goals teaching them to work in a cooperative way (webquests, wikis, blogs…). Cooperative learning is just possible with WEB 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 has expanded the class boundaries to create social and educative networks on the net where teachers and students work together to create and share knowledge, whereas Web 1.0 was about passive viewing of content. Students love project works in which each one has a role, since they feel they have a responsability. They enjoy and learn doing things and strengthening bonds with their classmates and teachers!

If you are interested in this topic, you should read these articles and book:

CSCL, Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm by Timothy Koschmann.

Cooperative Learning in Foreign Learning Teaching

Cooperative Learning from Journal of Vocational

and Technical Education

This lovely picture has been taken from Rachel Smith's presentation Digital Natives and Visual Practice at the 2007 IFVP Conference.

Curriculumbits and Ziggity Zoom - Resources for Learning in a Funny Way

2009-03-08T17:09:00.016+01:00

A long time ago, I wrote a post about the best site for finding ESL resources for all levels,ESLPrintables. Today, I would like to recommend you other two great sites full of resources: Curriculumbits and Ziggity Zoom.

Curriculumbits is a site which was launched in 2006 full of free interactive multimedia resources not just for ESL teaching but also but also for Bilingual Schools since it includes materials for subjects such as Geography, Biology, Art & Design, Maths, PE or Physics. As it is said in the site "Resources have been produced according to key stage 3 and 4 of the UK National Curriculum for students aged 11 to 16. All resources are produced by elearning multimedia specialists in collaboration with every day teaching staff as a direct solution to their classroom requirements."

The Teaching Resource Library includes games, quizzes, interactive animations and videos to use in the classroom. There are not many resources for English yet, but it worths visiting it!!

However, if you are looking for a great site full of ESL resources for preschool and primary (first cycle) the alternative

is Ziggity Zoom: a place where children will get excited and have fun playing games, colouring pictures, reading and listenting stories about different characters, watching vid

eos and more.

Life-long Learning

2009-02-04T13:49:00.016+01:00

Life-long learning is an important part of us as teachers. Teachers are constantly learning all their life because it is very important for us to recycle ourselves, we have to become non-stop learners, to know new pedagogical strategies, how to motivate our students and adapt to their different learning processes...

In my opinion, a good teacher is a good life-long student. Therefore, some books you shouldn't miss are those found in Cambridge website, a great pedagogical free e-books collection from Cambridge University Press which has been designed for ELT professionals who wish to know more about language instruction. There are some topics like:

1. Teaching Listening.

2. Teaching Listening and Speaking: from Theory to Practice.

3. Teaching Pronunciation: Using the Prosody Pyramid.

4. Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom.

5. The Student-Centered Classroom.

They are not long books, you can read them in a few hours. Therefore, you have any excuse to read them, have you?

But what else is Cambridge University Press setting up for teachers? As Holly S. Longstroth, one of the organizers, told me, there will be an online conference called Exploiting Dynamic Content in the Professional English Classroom by Brendan Whightman on 6th March.

"This presentation will explore the varying types of materials that are now available to professional English teachers through the Internet. These include blogs, podcasts, infoquests and hot-off-the-press lesson plans that probe the latest issues wiht the immediacy that onyl the Internet can facilitate.

Referencing the free resources on Professional English Online, we will consider the advantages and the disadvantages of the Web's dynamic pedagogical content and how it compares to, differs from, and 'ultimately' can be integrated with traditional teaching materials.Brendan Whightman taught General and Business English in Poland and Italy for seven years before moving into technology-enhanced learning. He is an expert on blended learning and instructional technologies and his experience with e-Learning includes course design and software development for ELT, project managing interactive whiteboard CD-ROMs and teacher training. He now works for Cambridge ELT as Commissioning Editor for e-learning".

You will find more information about it in the following link.

Get Fun with Your Digital Camera in the ESL Classroom

2009-01-29T15:35:00.023+01:00

Not only is technology fun and motivating for our students, but also a powerful tool for learning. Teachers in schools and high schools should give their studens as many chances as possible to use technologies integrating them into the curriculum because they would get better results than with traditional methods. One of these opportunities could be using digital cameras in class.

Ideas for using them in your ESL classroom:

1. For the first class or when teaching Countries and Nationalities, you can ask your students to divide in groups of six people. Then, tell them they have to imagine they don't start school in Spain but in England where there are many students from other countries. They have to write a short play with questions for the first class day, such as "Hello, how are you? My name is... And I come from ... Where are you from?" "I am from... but I have lived here for ..." "Oh, that's great! Are there many shops, museums or theatres in the city?". Then, they have to record their play with their cameras, using imagination.

2. Another idea is to do the same activity but collecting friend's photos, England photos, looking for information about England, timetables, subjects, food... and make a presentation in class. For this task students can use Movie Maker to create a slide show which they will use in their presentation. After that, they have to talk about their first day of class in a British school or a trip to London. Here you will find an example made by university students, you can adapt to your students level.

3. Students can also use digital cameras for creating TV commercials. Two students are the reporters, others the Sports journalist who has to talk about sports and interview famous players; the national reporters who have to talk about events in the country; the international reporters in different parts of the world; culture journalists to tell about cultural events, shows in the world and interview famous writers, singers..., and the weather reporter who has to talk about the weather in the world. They have to write the stories, try to memorize them and create a short play to recorded later.

4. If your students are beginners, you can help them to perform a song. Watch here a cute example.

You will find more ideas in the following link. I hope these ideas are useful for motivating your students to learn English.

Web 2.0 tools for ESL/EFL teaching

2009-01-29T09:42:00.010+01:00

Nowadays, our students are digital natives, that is, "children who were born into and raised in the digital world", children who spend a lot of time surfing on the net, chatting with their friends, playing computer games... This is not learning, but what about changing this? What about teaching them to use the tools they can find on the net to learn English?

I am sure that if every student could use these tools in order to learn English and acquire knowledge, not only at school but also at home, anywhere, his language would improve very quickly. The teacher's role is to help students to be more independent, to reach their goals in their learning process and this can be done teaching them to use web 2.0 tools in an appropriate way because this is the new 21st century literacy.

web 2.0 tools for ESL/EFL teaching (how to become web literate)

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: 2.0 web)

MOODLE, WIZIQ and more- new ways of expanding your physical classroom boundaries

2009-01-16T21:32:00.013+01:00

Nowadays, we are exposed to a wide range of Information Technology in our homes. Citizens of the future who lack technology skills will be at a severe disadvantage since confidence with Information and Communication Technology is part of the New Literacy for the 21st century. Teenagers spend more time surfing on the net and are fond of it. Therefore, teachers has to rethink their ways of teaching and adapt to the new social changes because Internet has brought a revolution to teaching and learning.

But, how can technology help in the learning process?

One of the possible answers is through Moodle. Moodle is one of the most used "virtual learning environments" to teach online courses or as part of on-site education all over the world by 1.851.889 and 26.745.838 users. It was developed by Martin Dougiamas to help to create a social constructionist approach in education and a new way of learning. This platform, which has be

en used since 1999 can be useful to interact with your students who live in the same place or who live in different countries. Besides, Moodle is an open source course management package that is free.

What are the advantages of using Moodle?

I have not used Moodle as a teacher but I discovered its advantages as a student, in one of my literature subjects at the University last year, and it helped me a lot in my learning process.

1. The teacher can enroll all here/his students.

2. He/She can upload tasks to develop in groups or individually at any time and in any place. You can choose the last date to upload the task to the platform. For example, in my class, the teacher uploaded some poems and the students had to write a literary essay about it. I think it is very comfortable since when you have finished it you can send it to the teacher in just one click. Besides, students can access safe materials in a personalised environment.

3. He/She can include a chat to discuss some topics explained in the class, wikis, podcasts or group discussions for collaborative activities.

4. He/She can upload documents or videos to help students in their learning process.

5. A forum can be also included for different questions. The whole class had to create a glosary with 18th century literary terms.

6. Students do not feel so shy, at least in Spain, to contact the teacher as they do in class.
7. Students can contribute to whole class initiatives.

8. Teachers can also include news about interesting topics related to the school, high-school, university or to the subject.

9. Teachers can follow their students' progress, how much time do they spend on the platform, what places have they visited in the platform, when they upload an assignment or post a comment on the forum.

10. Moodle offers students the opportunity to instant message other friends in the class, edit their own profile, add their photos, create their blog.

In this

link you will find moodle tutorials to learn how to use it and a book called Using Moodle written by Jason Cole and Helen Foster.

But what else can Moodle offer to teachers?

As Manish Verma said "Moodle is an asynchronous tool", I mean, Moodle is a platform where the teacher can u

pload Word, PDFs documents or online learning resources to make easier to the students the information access. However, there are many other tools, like Wiziq (free software), which allow synchronours cooperation, that is, which allow teachers to share text, audio and video with the students in the virtual classroom and viceversa.

These tools provide integration with moodle and this is what makes moodle to be a real VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). One of the advantages which Wiziq provides to Moodle is that you can "use features like live audio and video communication, text messaging, whiteboard with drawing and writing tools, PowerPoint, PDF and Flash file sharing and privileges to transfer control to any participant independently"(1) what can be more interesting for younger students. Learn how to do it!

What are the advantages of using Wiziq in the Moodle platform?

1. You can use it to view public sessions given by experienced teachers on a great amount of topics or interact with other teachers or students in a live discussions via online conference.

2. You can upload your own Power Point presentations.

3. The sessions are recorded, therefore if you cannot be on time you can follow them later.

4. Teachers can view other teachers lessons to know what other teachers are doing and take ideas to improve their own ones.

But there is also one disadvantage since using just the Moodle platform you do not need to be on the computer at a particular moment but with the Wiziq tool you have to be there. Besides, it is only in the beta version.

For more information about Wiziq you can visit its blog or watch this video:

As for Moodle, there are also tutorials for learning to use Wiziq. Another live e-learning software is Elluminate which was created in 2000. Here you will find information about how integrate it into the Moodle platform .

But there are more tools like DimDim (free web meeting service based on the open software platform is another web 2.0 launched one year ago). Here is the guide to integrate it with Moodle.

If you are interested in similar tools: tutorom, iknow (for languages) or Yugma (not free).
Some teachers are still reluctant to integrate new technologies in their classrooms? Why is so difficult for some teachers to accept this change?

ESL UNITED - A Great ESL, EFL Community

2009-01-08T21:07:00.005+01:00

Today I got an email from Chad DeBolt, the creator of the ESL United website. This amazing site is a mixture of Facebook and Monster, that is, an ESL social network where you can upload your curriculum, write blog posts, upload photos, videos, chat with other ESL community members, participate in the forum and groups, create your own group to interact with other peers. Therefore, teachers, schools, associations... are welcome!!!

Here, you will find everything you need to know about the ESL world. In addition, as it is starting volunteers are needed and you can contribute to make this site your own one. If you miss something in the site you can join to the ESL United Website Volunteers and make your proposals. Therefore, what are you waiting for checking out the site?

Perfect English?

2009-01-02T23:23:00.007+01:00

For more than two decades academics and publishers have propounded theories on pronunciation acquisition and training since in a global world, communicating properly with other people from all over the world has become a must.

The communicative approach is a product of the dissatisfaction of educators and linguists with the audiolingual and grammar-translation methods since these methods are not useful for learning the whole language, the real one. With the communicative approach students learn to communicate in nearly real situations, or through games and other communicative learning activities in lower levels such as dramatizacion, singing songs, tongue twisters and so on. Everything sounds great, but when you put this approach into practice there are some problems.

One problem is, how and when to correct our students mistakes? What mistakes should be corrected? If we correct all our students mistakes, we run the risk of our students do not want to speak anymore. What is more important: preserving the communicative process of the interaction or providing corrective feedback? These are difficult questions which depends on many different consideractions related to the learner.

Besides, I wonder how perfect pronunciation sounds like. Does it mean that the persons sounds like a native speaker? If the answer is affirmative, what kind of speaker: American, British, Australian, South African? What is more important: speaking like a native who makes grammar mistakes, inarticulate some sounds and make themselves hard to understand or a non-native speaker who has a lack of vocabulary but can express his/ her ideas in a clear way? Is there a 'perfect' pronunciation in any language all around the world?

Watch this video called 21 accents and think about it.

An interesting article about this topic Study Calls For New Approach To Teaching English As A Lingua Franca (July 20, 2009)

YAPPR - A new way to learn English

2008-12-17T13:51:00.007+01:00

How many times have you tried to learn English or other languages with videos but you could not understand anything? Now, it is possible to improve your language with Yappr, a new free tool developed by Patrick Nee to learn languages in a funny way with entertaining videos which you can choose from different categories such as Christmas, comedy, music or cartoons. Therefore, if you are learning English, this site can be a very useful tool since it avoids the problem of not understanding because the videos have subtitles in English and Spanish. Besides, the videos are short and you can use them in the classroom to do other kind of activities.

Many students prefer watching interesting and funny videos to reading books because videos have sound and images. The advantage of this site is that with the subtitles, the videos can be understandable for beginners or intermediate students. Youtube videos are good for advanced learners but not for beginners of intermediate ones, since sometimes they do not have subtitles. Users can also upload their videos and even contribute with their translations to their own videos or to others ones. Besides, there are also games and a chat to talk to people from all over the world and practice English. What are you waiting for joining to it and sharing with your students and friends? There are fourteen languages available in Yappr, therefore you have no excuses to learn languages.

A similar website is Dot Sub. If you want to know more about Dot Sub you can read Nik Peachey's Blog, he has an interesting post about it with some ideas to use these videos in class.

Lexipedia, where words have meaning and sound

2008-12-08T14:25:00.006+01:00

If you teach Languages like English, Spanish, German, French, Dutch or Italian this is the educational tool you and your students need.

Lexipedia is a visual tool for learning languages, a mixture of a dictionary and thesaurus, which provides a visual net of semantic relationships and it is free. Besides when you introduce a word it doesn't give you only the meaning but you can also listen that word pronunciation. Therefore, what are you waiting for enriching your vocabulary?

Are you ready to teach?

2008-12-06T01:53:00.007+01:00

Are you ready to teach? Would you like to practise without any risk to your career? Then, you should know Virtual School.

Virtual School is a tool which presents environments where the teacher has to take decisions. There are not right or wrong answers but, be careful because your decisions can have consequences for the school environment.

The project has been developed by NCSL (National College for School Leadership) and BBC and I think it worths visiting it!

When you enter you have several options, I mean, you can choose between managing a primary school, a secondary school or a special one. But if you are a new user you only have one option, "New School". The school secretary will guide you through the school. The next step is choosing the virtual environment where you want to work. For starting the simulation you have to guide with the buttons which are above on the left side of the website (similar to a DVD player buttons). Are you ready?

Tools for Teaching English

2008-11-29T12:59:00.004+01:00

It's no wonder the growing interest of teachers in using tools like Youtube, Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis or other web 2.0 tools in the language classes since NTIC are having a huge impact in education in the last recent years. But what benefits can NTIC provide to our language classes? You will find the answer in the following video:

In my opinion, using Youtube in class can be very effective since students are exposed to real English, I mean, to English in real situations; or they can also use this videos to reinforce some English points they have not understood in class (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation...). They can watch, listen, and even take ideas to make their own videos for the ESL class. For example, the teacher can organize a TV News programme, a play... with his/her students, record them and after that create a blog or website to upload the videos made by the students. This can be a way to motivate your students since they feel part of the learning process and can express their own ideas.

However, if you want your students learn English at home by their own, some useful videos I have found on the net are Jennifer ESL ones. The explanations are really clear and they also include exercises with explanations. Besides there are many topics on it (grammar, vocabulary, intonation, pronunciation, typical mistakes...). This is an example about 'Prepositions in the context of meals' :

Youtube is not a useful tool in itself but with the teacher guidance can be very effective. I also posted an entry about how to use ESL videos in class and PhD Cristóbal Suárez Guerrero has also an interesting post about Educative Youtube (in Spanish). Another example is Teachertube full of videos for education and lesson plans although they are not just for English but also for other subjects.

Funny ESL Writing

2008-11-28T22:05:00.014+01:00

Writing has never been easy, particularly in a foreign language. They find it difficult and boring. Therefore, why not to ask students to share their own stories through comics and make a class books with their comics, instead of asking them to write boring summaries? Getting students to write personal stories, anecdotes, creative stories or adapt fairy tales to modern times motivates them to make an effort to use English. Writing stories and comics is a great way to reinforce grammar and vocabulary.

Some appealing tools to enrich your writing classes are:

FODEY which allows to create your own newspaper, or a comic with talking tomatoes, squirrels, flowers, cats or owls. You can add your own text like this:

It is very easy, you only need to write your text in the box provided in the site and your students can use it for expressing their opinions, creating a short story or posting the images in the blogs they have created.

One of my ESL printables colleages , Kriszti, has shared another new useful tool to create comic strips called Strip Generator which is also very easy to use. There are some characters, beings, objects, shapes and bubbles you can choose.

I also recommend you Make Beliefs Comix. However, my favourite one is Comeeko because it allows you to be more creative, to upload your own pictures and add effects. You have to register but it worths doing it!!

The last one I have discovered is Toondoo , a social networking comic strip, which lets you create your own 1, 2, 3 panel cartoons, choose backgrounds, characters, add text bubbles, read comics made by people from all over the world or even create a "book" to make a bigger comic. Besides, your students can share their strips or just to keep them private. In the following slideshare you will learn how it works:

How to create a Toon Doo

View more presentations from jfljunk. (tags: 2.0 dooweb)

Other great sites for creating comics are Gardfield's Comic Creator or if your students are fans of the famous science fiction TV programme Doctor Who, they can also create their own comics with this comic maker. Pikikids is another site to create comic strips which allows to embed the comics you create into a blog or website.

Webquests

2008-11-14T09:49:00.009+01:00

What is a webquest?

The word webquest is really two words "web" and "quest" (search), that is, "searching on the net". It is a learning activity in which students have to learn to cooperate to solve different kinds of tasks. In this way they learn in an autonomous and funnier way. What is more, it is also a way to integrate technology and problem based learning.

Bernie Dodge, the webquest developer defined the webquest in 1995 as "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet . . ."

Therefore, students have to use the acquired information to create something new (a blog, a newspaper, an advertisement, etc). In this process, the teacher is just a guider who has to set the frame, a webpage, in order to design the whole project. The following step is to create the webquest.

How to create the webquest?

The teacher introduces the topic in an interesting way to motivate their students. This topic should be based on a curriculum area.

Then, students read that introduction. Depending on the webquest you can assign them different roles as well.

The teacher decides how he wants the students to complete the webquest, I mean, the tasks. To help them to complete the task, the teacher has to include website links with a short description about the information they will find in those sites. It is very important that the teacher sets clearly the steps the students have to follow in order to complete the tasks.

After that, the students read and collect the data from the links, videos, online resources the teacher have carefully chosen.

The teacher should also specify how the students are going to be evaluated. There will be as well an evaluation of the group itself, I mean, the students will think carefully on their own working process, on what they have learnt and on the outcome.
Finally, the students make the tasks and submit them to the teacher for approval.

What are the advantages of using webquests in class?

In my opinion, using webquests in class has many advantages:

1. They are exposed to a more interactive way of working in class and with materials, ideas that they will not find in the curriculum.

2. They can learn and think by themselves, the teacher is just a guide. Therefore, it is a model centered in the student's proccess of learning.

3. WebQuests are a great way to foster collaboration and critical thinking.

4. Webquests are an organizational tool which offers an organized approach for using the web. Therefore, students do not waste time searching on website which can be really useless or offer faked information.

5. Students learn to work in groups.

You will find many examples of webquests on the net. One I love is Mystery in the Middle Ages from a Catalonian teacher. But there are many examples such as A Family Trip to London or Shakespeare from Isabel Perez website, Dear Agony Aunt designed by Anna Morales or Recycling by Cristina Arnau or Miguel's ones.

An interesting directory which contains a lot of Webquests made for the ESL/EFL classroom is the following one WebQuestcat

For those of you who are not familiarized with Webquests and want to know more about what they are, how to create them and the beneficts these activities bring for our students, I provide some interesting references:

Dodge, B. (1995). Some Thoughts About WebQuest.
Lamb and Larry Johnson (2002-2007) Internet Expeditions: Exploring, Using, Adapting and Creating Webquests.
Susan Brooks and Bill Byles Using a Webquest in Your Classroom
Nancy Pickett and Bernie Dodge (2007) Rubrics for Web Lessons

Please, let me know your webquests experiences in class or leave a comment. I would like you make this blog with your comments. Thanks a lot in advance.

NEWS: Education for citizenship in English

2008-10-30T19:37:00.006+01:00

Everybody knows that "Education for Citizenship" is the name of the subject designed by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for ESO and Bachillerato students, in Spain. In this subject students learn about how our society works, to respect the others, about human rights. I mean, it promotes human values. However, not all society sectors are happy with the introduction of this subject in education, among them the President of the Valencia government, Francisco Camps, who has decided that all high schools teach this subject in English. Therefore, there are two teachers in the class, one Philosophy teacher, and an English one, but the students have to express their ideas in English. This is meaningless since 12 years old children, for example, has not a so high English level to express complicated ideas. In my opinion, they are victims of an educational system ruled by political ideas. Teachers, students and students parents are really angry because of this Francisco Camps decision. They have done an exam and 199 of 201 students have failed it in three high schools in Valencia. This was the exam (Taken from El Pais Newspaper):

1. Read this tale carefully. What is it trying to tell us? Do you think that human life can be limited to this? Why? Establish an imaginative relation with G. Klimt painting. What does it mean? What does it mean to you?

“A young king of ancient Persia ascended the throne full of great wishes. Willing to learn, he summoned the wise men of the Court and asked them to write a summary of the history of humanity. This took them thirty years. Once they had finished it, they loaded their five hundred volumes onto twelve camels and went to the palace. But the king, who was already in his fifties, said: “I won’t live for long, I will die before having read it. Write a shorter version”. The wise men started to work again. Ten years later, they brought the summary to the palace. This time they only needed three camels to carry the volumes. But the king, who was already in his sixties, did not feel like reading so many pages and asked them to write a shorter version. This new version took them ten years, and they needed just one camel to carry it. However, during this time, the king’s sight had been getting worse, so he needed something even shorter. After five years of work, the wise men reduced the work to one volume. However, by then the king was ill in bed. He told them sadly “Am I going to end my life without having learned the history of humanity?” The eldest wise man leaned towards the headboard and whispered “Majesty, the history of humanity could be summarised in three words: Humans are born, suffer and die”. Then the king nodded and died. A Persian tale.

Translation
Lee este cuento cuidadosamente. ¿Qué nos trata de decir? ¿Crees que la vida humana puede reducirse a esto? ¿Por qué? Establece una relación imaginativa con la pintura [Die drei Lebensalter der Frau] de G. Klimt. ¿Qué significa? ¿Qué te dice?

Un joven rey de la antigua Persia ascendió al trono lleno de grandes deseos. Deseoso de aprender, convocó a los sabios de la corte para que escribieran un resumen de la historia de la humanidad. Les llevó 30 años. Una vez lo hubieron finalizado, cargaron los 500 volúmenes en 12 camellos y fueron a palacio. Pero el rey, quien estaba ya en la cincuentena, dijo: “No viviré mucho. Moriré antes de haberlo leído. Escriban una versión más corta”. Los sabios empezaron a trabajar otra vez. Diez años más tarde, llevaron el resumen a palacio. Esta vez sólo necesitaron tres camellos para llevar los volúmenes. Pero el rey, que estaba ya en la sesentena, no se sentía con ganas de leer tantas páginas y les pidió que escribieran una versión más corta. Esta nueva versión les llevó 10 años y necesitaron un solo camello para llevarla. Sin embargo, durante este tiempo, la vista del rey había ido empeorando, por lo que necesitaba algo aún más corto. Después de cinco años de trabajo, los hombres sabios redujeron el trabajo a un volumen. Pero, para entonces, el rey estaba enfermo en la cama. Les dijo con tristeza: “¿Voy a acabar mi vida sin haber aprendido la historia de la humanidad?”. El hombre sabio más anciano se inclinó al cabecero y susurró: “Majestad, la historia de la humanidad podría resumirse en tres palabras: los humanos nacen, sufren y mueren”. El rey cabeceó y murió. Cuento persa.

Would your 12-13 years old students be able to do this exam? Not mine. It is clear that Camps purpose was that this subject was a spectacular failure. He is not really interesting in the students learning process. I don't know if this is happening in other Spanish communities or European countries but it is really sad to see how Politics can be a tool to manipulate Education. In the following link you will find the didactic units for this subject. There is no reference to the level.

You can also watch this video about the topic but it is in Spanish.

What activities would you like to organize and participate in at the school Halloween party?
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	The 50 Word Fright Contest
	Traditional Halloween Games
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	Jack O'Lantern Workshop

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