Thursday, 6 August 2015

Activities

The first item on the list of activities was quizlet.com. It is a tool with a wide variety of possibilities for producing flashcards, vocabulary cards and other helps for many requirements of learning processes.
In the afternoon, I gave a talk on some "preliminary" attempts I had made at Blended Learning.
Finally, it was blogging again and how to make and upload YouTube videos.
This is the video I produced:

Technologies

Quizlet is a website but also an app for the iPad (hooray!).  

It can be used for individual work in class or at home. Uses could be learning or revision of vocabulary. Quizlet can be a help in differentiation in that students (or the teacher) can produce individual sets of vocabulary. 

On the site, a huge number of sets are already available which other teachers have made. I even found some sets for coursebooks I am using. They may need some adapting, they are a good starting point nevertheless.

YouTube is well-known but has been completely untrodden territory for me so far. Still, here's a video of a few seconds embedded into the blog (Watch it. It got an Oscar nomination for most inspired foreign film.)

Thursday, 13 August 2015

Activities

A NILE tutor joined the group for the morning.
We returned to the case studies from the day before, reviewed them and discussed them in two groups along questions that Russell had provided. The discussion results can be found on Google Docs.
Russell then added some more comments on the matter (motivation; long-term objectives; how to keep web-based courses alive; teacher training)
In the afternoon we watched a YouTube video with 'guru' Sugata Mitra who is a staunch supporter of Self-Organized Learning Environments. Russell has found material that looks behind the stage of Mitra a bit and has shown that all is not gold that glitters here.
Erick gave a talk introducing us to www.goanimate.com, which enables students to produce funny little videos. Erick found that it helps students to overcome speaking inhibitions.
Finally, we learnt about a www.videonot.es. The site allows you to add notes to a video imported from YouTube. When you watch the video, you can jump to the place in the video that you have annotated.

Technologies

www.goanimate.com is the website that provides templates for animated short films. Click here to find an example called A Helping Hand. Adobe player is required to view it, so not for iPad ...

The link goes to a short attempt I made at annotating Branagh's To Be or Not To Be monologue in his Hamlet film: Hamlet monologue

Gurus

Russell listed the names of a few gurus on educational topics worth looking at.
Tony Wagner
Ken Robinson
Stephen Hepnell
Cathay Davidson
Clifford Nass
Nicolas Carr