Habits

The groups in the virtual campus I’m using at school are environments to interact with students. For every update, you can get an email notification provided you’ve configured that in your account.
Some of my students claimed they were never notified. I tried several things without being able to work out what was going on.
I eventually asked them:

Do you check your emails?
No. Never. Occasionally, they answered.
How do you communicate?

Young people in Argentina still use MS messenger, not useful for my purpose. But they also use Facebook.
I remembered iftt. It just didn’t make much sense the first time I tried it. Now it does.

It’s quite interesting to see to what extent new practices trigger new tech developments.

Campus

Same post in Spanish.

Song Challenge

When classes started this year I asked my students if they ever got engaged in activities which were not class related but helped them learn English. They all agreed that listening to songs was a great contribution to their learning. However, when I asked them to be more specific and explain what they learned and how, they started to doubt.

Some days ago I found the 30 day song challenge on Facebook thanks to a video posted by Graham Stanley. I though it would be a great idea to challenge my students to complete the daily tasks. Why?

I think songs help you learn new words, remember passive vocabulary, maybe even improve your pronunciation. But songs are much more than words + music. They come to life in particular contexts and they are also the feelings, memories, opinions they trigger. All that can be expressed through language.

We are going to work in the school campus and as this is school work and I’m a teacher (not just a social media user), I’ve written down some rules and suggestions. I especially hope they follow my suggestions.

A side note
One of my favourite social media sites is Blip.fm. It is as simple and effective in fostering communication as twitter is. The difference is you communicate just through music.

Photo Credits

Evolution

Winco