What a day today!

I started classes at school, woke up at six for the first time since December (except for a couple of days in February), met my students, oh, new paragraph.

The first group, 14 and 15 years old, inspiring group. Love at first sight. But that deserves its own post, not just its own paragraph.

Second group, a challenge.  Not now, please.

I forgot to say it’s been raining since I got up. The rain revealed a leak in my son’s bedroom!

Well, I left school, went to psychoanalysis session, that’s something we do here in Buenos Aires, came back home, worked on a project, chatted with Daniel, couldn’t talk, his mic? my headphones? his connection? my connection? his computer? my computer? this country? who knows?, electricity cut off. Yes, just like like. It was raining, I told you. When it rains I don’t know what it is that gets flooded and the electricity suddenly disappears. I cooked, candlelight. Romantic? No, undeveloped.

Clap, clap, electricity is back. I turn on my PC. Yes , no mobile, no laptop. A comment to moderate . An ex student, well, a student. She blogged with my class in 2007. She’s back. On her own.

I forget about the rain. About the leak. About the electricity. About living in the third world. I even forget about the things the institutions stubbornly deny.

Welcome, Renata .

(Ah, the title, should I have said consumer? Citizen is quite a dated word, I think.)

Update (a couple of seconds after posting and re reading). Mind you, I’ll not forget forever.

No matter what your teaching objectives might be, a class activity is always addressed to a certain group. Consequently, it’s usually difficult for me to design an activity when I’m on holidays.

Our task for week 3 was to create three slide shows using three different tools: Animoto, Slideshare and the slideshow in Big Huge Labs. As there were no students around to bring some inspiration, I decided to build a slideshow for me. Poetry was already in my mind when I read Sandburg meets Flickr, by David Jakes.  Poems and images go naturally together.

I like the brevity of Pound’s In a Station of the Metro. The brevity, the lively description and most of all the beauty he discovers in a scene which is, for me, quite ugly.

What I did was very simple: I replaced adjectives and nouns by images.

Animoto is so easy to use, it gives you immediate satisfaction and the outcome is always attractive.

I also prepared a presentation and uploaded it to Slideshere. There I could include the photo credits. You can add a youtube video to slideshare presentations. That’s how I managed to include the Animoto show in the presentation. (The image quality is lost when you send your show to Youtube.)

Pound first published this poem in 1913, and I wondered if I could get some photos from The Commons. I thought it was great to see those pictures in the BigHugeLabs slideshow as the photo information appears as the slides play.

Here it is, you’ll have to follow the link: it’s not possible to embed a BigHugeLab show.

This last one was an interesting photo search. And it was then when I could place my hypothetical students. Digging into the past, not through history books, but through pictures showing everyday life.

My thoughts a month ago.

I already had the suspicion I was a a member of too many nings. In fact, I couldn’t even remember which ones I had signed up for. I accidentally found my Ning profile: 16. Impossible to participate, even impossible to read. Lurk? How would I lurk if I didn’t know where…

This time I lurked, I didn’t research, I just had a quick look. Which Nings are active? I concluded:

• The ones that have reached a critical mass. Self feed.

• The ones with an active creator that starts most of the discussions, sends messages to members, has enough energy and time and a clear objective to keep it alive.

• The ones that in spite of not having reached a critical mass, still work due to community contribution. Those are the ones I love. They seem to cover a very specific need.

So, what to do with my own memberships? Just let them die at the bottom of those social networks? Conclude Nings are not for me and never join one again? Visit them all again and see if I get hooked?

I was in the middle of those musings, when something showed up: I registered for images4education. How to register? Join a Ning! Another one?, I thought. Well… so once more the paper work, your name, your website, your interests. Don’t they know all that?! They have myNing profile! Old Ning friends appeared on my page, I was not alone.

My thoughts now.

Ning was a good choice for the EVO session. Why?

• You don’t need any special training on how to use Ning.

• Everything is there, neat and clear. You just need to be ready to click.

• Being able to add external links on the tabs is a great possibility for a course which is using other sites as well.All you need to access is just there on top, on a clean line.

• The Group feature contributes to the organization of activities.

• You have your own page, which you can even modify.This helps to create a sense of belonging.

• There are different degrees of possible participation. One to one interaction through comments, and also private interaction through messages. Group discussions in the forum or groups.

Is that all? Of course it isn’t. That’s just the description of the tool. The most important thing is participants leaving their traces on that environment. Modifying it. Building new short-cuts.

If we were interacting through a mailing list, would the session atmosphere be so friendly, supportive, encouraging? I doubt it.

If participants and moderators weren’t ready to socialize, to add their 2cent worth, to respect each other, would Ning be fostering interaction? I’m sure it wouldn’t.

OK. But now I don’t know whether to wear that shirt or not.Photo
by davitydave

Technorati Tags: EVO09 images4education ning

I loved one of the tasks for last week. We had to write a poem about our origins. I had never written a poem, the first time I saw the task I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’ Then I forgot the I can’t, I never, no way and got to work on it.

Several things helped:

• No experience as a writer, but loads of experience as a reader.

• The topic was highly motivating.

• I immediately knew what picture to choose.

• I made a point of connecting to my past through the senses, one connection brought lots of other sensory associations to my mind.

• When you use your senses to connect to your past (I’ve also experienced this in drama classes) the scenes come so vivid.

• I had a lot of fun choosing just a few words to try to make those scenes vivid. The result was lots of other not taken photos.

I published my poem on flickr feeling lucky no eye contact was necessary.

Technorati Tags: EVO09 images4education flickr i4eorigins

Learning environments

Wiki

• The whole session is scheduled on a wiki.
• The sort of organization wikis allow make them easy to navigate.
• It ’s great to know all the syllabus in advance. It allows you to get organized and reduces anxiety.

Ning

• The place for sharing, socializing, making suggestions and looking for help
• It’s easy to use, quite intuitive, really.
• The pages and external links are easily visualized in the tabs.
• You can connect at different levels: private, personal, groups.

Flickr
Flickr is an excursion. It’s one of my favourite sites, the one I’m always reluctant to leave. (I’m even considering getting a pro account, I’m tired of having to delete photos.)

Week one was about getting acquainted with participants and with the different session environments. When I teach (face to face) I always privilege personal contact. I need my students to get involved with each other. I need them to develop a sense of belonging. I make this clear the very first class. No. I don’t speak about this. I develop activities that make them get involved, show them as individuals and visualize themselves as part of the group.

I know some (a lot of) people might think it is impossible -in only one week- to create a feeling of belonging in a virtual environment with 350 people taking part, people scattered all over the world. Well… believe me… it’s not impossible.

And in this case, the same rule that works with the physical world works with the virtual world. Don’t speak about it it, do it.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, just have a look here or here.

Technorati Tags: EVO09 images4education

Registration for EVO sessions has just started.

I’m about to sign up for two of them:

Collaborative Writing

Why?
Last year I explored (or rather attempted to explore) collaborative writing with my students. Some questions have not been answered yet:

• How to break the “group work” tradition which always results into a sort of Frankenstein piece of writing.

• How to facilitate CW. What could be done before. Activities? Warm up activities?

• How to help students assess their result.

Bonus motivation: WiZiQ sessions will be held.

images4education

Why?
Well, just because I love images.

• My flickr account is one of my favourite ones.I would love to explore it further.

• Images make me think, dream, create, imagine…

• However, I cannot say images are part of my class.
  

Bonus motivation: Mary Hillis and Joao Alves are among the moderators.

Finally…

I hope to learn a lot, come across old friends, meet new colleagues and have fun.

I feel tempted to sign up for the drama session. I’m in two minds right now. I don’t know whether to follow the organizers’ advice (warning?) :

We strongly recommend that you sign up for no more than two sessions.

or Oscar Wilde’s:

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

What to do?

The school year is over.
I haven’t written here for a long time.
This blog was meant to record my experience with social media in ELT. There are no records, there’s no experience.

The second part of the school year was characterised by a deep crash into reality.
First of all, a continuous succession of private non desirable affairs drove all my strength into my family life.
Second, I sort of surrendered to my school reality: no computers.

It was a difficult semester. My mind urged wandering. Reality urged being present.

In that messy state of affairs something was a great aid to stick to what should be done: the wiki.

(I should have started a wiki for family stuff, it might have helped)

The class wiki was the place to set my mind at ease. I usually hate planning; when I plan too much, I know I’m not at my best.

In this second semester I needed planning: I knew I was not at my best. The wiki supported this planning, helped me plunged into class reality. The wiki and google docs.

Photo credits:
b-nik

Related post in Spanish here.

Stephie was my student last year. She started posting as a class activity, but she took her posting further. Now blogging is not part of her class, it’s part of her life.
She posted her concern about whaling and friend Nadine – a really enthusiastic girl from Australia, answered immediately. In the meantime, I observed them. Loads of comments here and there and even here. I thought they could open a wiki to get organized more easily. They adopted the idea right away. You can pass by, read and even join in.

What I love about them:

• They don’t demand help, they are autonomous. However, they appreciate suggestions. Great balance!

• They’re good at combining action with reflection.

• They are great at conversation. Have a look at the comments on the blogs and the discussion pages on the wiki!

I also love the fact that the web provides a territory for them to grow up and for me to watch them taking the lead !

My students have finished their second wiki assignment.

They had to write application letters -something I hate teaching, and students hate writing. They are 16 and 17 years old, all of them university bound, and consequently applying for a job is not among their needs. I asked them to move to the future (not all them have tagged their pages), imagine themselves in 2014 and search for a job that person they imagined they were would be qualified for.

It’s difficult for teenagers to know what they would like to do the rest of their lives. It was difficult for my students to imagine themselves in the future, this is the reason why some enjoyed doing the exercise and others didn’t like it. I loved what they wrote, I had fun reading about their lives in 2014 (I still don’t know why I chose that year). However, it was a bit worring to see that most of them were living in Europe, as if there were no chances for their professional development here (perhaps I should erase the “as if“).

Enough. Let’s concentrate on my job.

They had to collaborate correcting language mistakes, writing suggestions in the discussion pages. This didn’t result in good quality writings, I think they didn’t take this task seriously. It was just an experiment and I have to admit that our common errors collection (don’t follow this link) grew up more than expected. When they had finished I copied the mistakes and they corrected them in class. They were able to correct most of them. So why didn’t they see them before? All of them visited their classmates pages, wrote something about language mistakes; they participated, but didn’t contribute.

Technorati Tags: wikis social_media ELT EFL ESL

One of my groups is going to work with Headway Upper Intermediate. Yesterday I had the first chance of having a look at the book. As soon as I saw the first unit was about people missing home, I thought: What a great path to get away from the book! Sorry OUP.
While I was engaged in typical Saturday activities, I listed the people I know who are living away from home, started to think how my students could contact them, thought that VoiceThread could be a good choice. However, I was faced to a limitation -all my online contacts are adults. I thought it would be more interesting for my students to get information from teens. The thing was… where to find them, how to contact them.

I had been trying to work this out the whole Saturday afternoon. Going shopping; young people far away from home. Planting parsley; young people far away from home.. Having lunch; young people... Even, talking to my husband; young … At night I got to know someone new was following my tweets; well, not a person, Youth Tweets. Of course, there is someone who started Youth Twitter. After overcoming that forever present first techimpact of idontunderstandwhatthisis, I knew I had finally got to the place I’d been racking my brain to find.

Isn’t it great (at my age) to register to a site called Youth something?

Technorati Tags: youth twitter, ELT, EFL, social networks