Interactive Listening Mazes

I am presenting a session on Interactive Listening Mazes online on Saturday 19th November (17.00-17.50 GMT) as part of the Webheads in Action Online Convergence (WiAOC).



The Conference Moodle is now open to visitors, and there are lots of interesting things already starting to happen (including a schedule of pre-conference online talks - see the WiAOC portal page for details)



I am currently preparing the asynchronous materials for the synchronous text chat presentation (audio, text) which will take place at Tapped In.



So far, I have set up the blog for Travel, one of the Interactive Listening Mazes, and I am in the process of uploading the audio files, inputting the accompanying text, and reconfiguring the blog so that it acts less like a blog and more like a regular website.


Why use a blog for this and not a regular website? Well, basically because of the ease of use factor - it's so easy to set up blogs with Blogger, and once you know your way around the template, and if you understand a little about html and Blogger's codes, it's easy enough to adapt them to your needs.

Edublogs

I've signed up for a free edublog and am now wondering why I didn't do this a long time ago.


It's a joy to use, and I'm sure I'll end up switching from Blogger, but for the meantime I'll run this blog and the other one, which I've named Blog-efl 2.0 in tandem.


I've tried...



...out other blogging hosts before, and have always returned to Blogger, but this time I can not only see the advantages of using these free Wordpress blogs myself, but also encouraging students to use them too. They are easy to use and have features (categories, for example) which Blogger doesn't have that are great for organisational purposes.


I'd always heard people talk about Wordpress and how comfortable and flexible this blogging tool was. I'd never tried it before because it was a paid service, but now with James Farmer's kind offer of Wordpress blogs for school students and higher education students, I can safely say that I'll be moving away from Blogger in the future.

edublogs and elgg.

WiA Bridges Across Cyberspace

'Bridges Across Cyberspace', The Webheads in Action online convergence (conference) is fast approaching, and I'm really excited about the number and range of guest speakers. I'm also honoured to have been chosen as a speaker too, and am excited about preparing my own presentation, Interactive Listening Mazes.



The conference is free to attend and promises to be a really memorable event, so book a place in your calendar between Friday 18th and Sunday 20th November. I've just heard, however, that I'll be going to the British Council in Bilbao, that same weekend, and so will miss a lot of the sessions. I'm going to be giving a couple of f2f presentations on efl blogging, which I'm also really looking forward too.

I an just imagine the scene that weekend already

I'll be rushing home from my Saturday class to get ready for my online presentation and catch some of the others. As soon as it finishes, I'll be out the door en route for the airport.

the British Council ICT Co-ordinators Handbook

It's been my day for discovering past projects.



The British Council ICT Co-ordinators Handbook is a collaborative project that came out of work following ICT courses around the world. It's basically aimed at an audience of British Council ICT coordinators, and I had assumed that it would only be published on the British Council intranet, so am pleasantly surprised to see it on a public website.



Much of the content will only be of interest if you work for the British Council (and there are many links to private British Council intranet pages), but there are some sections that may be of general interest.



One of these sections is the glossary, although, sadly to say it's already looking outdated!

Newspaper article - blogging

A while ago I was interviewed for El Periodico, a Spanish newspaper, for an article on blogging. I'd forgotten about it until I came across this pdf copy of the article.

IWB articles

Different opinions about IWBs recently expressed in the Guardian:

1. Chalk one up to the whiteboard: "The drive to get interactive whiteboards into British classrooms could be missing the bigger picture."

2. Interactive whiteboards let them see the light is about the use of the IWB in EFL. This passage in particular caught my eye: 

"The advantages for students may be even more compelling. The board encourages an "eyes-up", rather than "eyes-down" culture. It helps me to see that my students are with me and not lost somewhere in their own world. This has proved particularly effective with discussion activities."

3. In this school, the classroom revolution is now a reality - all 360 degrees of it

"Teachers circle the room in an experiment that could change the shape of education. And the pupils love it." 

Two positive and one negative view.

IWB Activboarding

Graham Wegner's helpful email about dealing with comment spam led me to discover both his ActivBoarding blog and also his Teaching Generation Z site.



I've been using the interactive whiteboard that Graham's blog deals with, so it's of particular interest to me. I have found that IWBs are a fascinating way of integrating technology in the classroom, and are producing changes to the way teachers approach their classes and lesson planning. Unfortunately they are very easy to use badly, and need careful thought and a lot of training and extra time and effort on behalf of the teacher before they can be fully integrated and used well.



In our school, we only have one IWB equipped classroom at the moment, which makes it difficult to judge the impact they make on the students' learning and on the teaching. What is true, however, is that they do require the teacher to plan their lesson well beforehand, thinking very carefully about what the students will see on the board during the class. They just don't work well if a teacher walks into a classroom without having prepared the 'boards' (usually called 'flipcharts' when designed for the IWB)previously.

And here is the rest of it.