Monday 16 June 2014

Tricider

https://tricider.com/en/admin/1Q4fR/3NnHpJ

Voki- speaking avatar

Here is how I tried to use Voki as a post lesson activity. It is a fun way to incorporate technology into teaching English and shy students can take part in the activities by using Voki because it speaks on behalf of them. http://seldagumus.pbworks.com/w/page/79492343/Giving%20excuses%20for%20not%20accepting%20your%20friend's%20invitation

Wednesday 4 June 2014

WORDLE

I use it as an assessment activity at the end of a topic, alongside concept maps from all groups in a class.It's COOL! Good visual representation of themes, versatile Focus on key words, ideas, themes. Fun to play around with font, color, layout. Can use to check own work for repetition. Visual representation. Cognitive and Concept mapping. Makes the "difficult" manageable. Shows strength of words. I use Wordle to summarize texts and as an interesting way to present my class with keywords. As a starter for students to try and guess where we're going with our lesson and create their own learning outcomes. I use Wordle as warm up. I hate the question, "What are we doing today." I give word clues about what we are doing in class. Then I use it for discussions. Sometime it can be used for mind-mapping before introducing a new topic. Here are some examples:
This one was done while we were working on the topic "Education". Students tried to come up with a range of words related to education and then we created this wall together.

Padlet- A Wallwisher

Padlet which used to be called "Wallwisher" is a great application to create an online bulletin board that you can display information for any topic. you can choose from different colourful background options and then create a name for your topic. Students can get the relevant URL code and then as soon as they open the page, they can start writing comments and add photos. It can be used for different teaching purposes but I normally prefer using it as a revision tool after teaching one topic. It can be a vocabulary revision or a grammar production wall. You can even play games using it. Here are some examples:
As a post lesson activity, I asked my students to describe the best job and here is what I received from them. Sometimes they can add their own photos, which is humorous, but you can control what to include on your Padlet wall.
Here we did a kind of revision activity after working on Non-defining relative clauses. Students were given some time to think about a famous figure and then they started typing their sentences about these people. They also added some photos to make the wall more colourful.
Sometimes students think that they can control what they write and you may end up with unpleasant posts on your wall. For instance, here I asked them to write down why they learn English and we ended up like this.