Life Feast

I found this video via Carla Arena´s tweet about an Edutopia video "Welcome to the Digital Generation".



The video below is about a boy who shows what role technology plays in his life. It really got me thinking. Do we really know how our sts have been dealing with technology? Do we give them the tools to go after new knowledge they´re interested in? Have we taking digital natives for granted by not offering them the tools?

Digital Kids

I´ve already expressed here my love for dancing. I had dance classes for 8 years but life led me in different directions , however, dance still fascinates me. This week I fell in love with the work of a group which is touring Brazil at the moment. They make shapes with their bodies.

Watch and see how fabulous they are: Pilobolus

Fun time: Pilobolus

This is a video activity created /adapted by a colleague of mine, Luciana Paula. The scene is from the film "Just like heaven". The restaurant scene starts at 2:42 (2 minutes 42 sec)The hand-out is below.



Ib Nef 6a Reported Speech Film Act

Video Activity: Reported Speech

A friend of mine (Luiz Pedro) once said to me: "We might know what we´re teaching but we never know what our students are learning". This sentence came to me while watching this funny video.

Disengaged Students from jarrod robinson on Vimeo.

Disengaged students

This is a tool I´ve been using on a daily basis. It has helped me organize the stuff I find while surfing in a visual way (I´m extremely visual). It´s extremely easy to use and it´s very practical.

What you do is
1 open a free account at SimplyBox
2 use the SimplyBox (box and save) button to select anything you´d like to keep or have a look later.
3 after selecting the image you want to capture, you can drag it to one of the boxes you have created.

Interesting features

• you can integrate SimplyBox with your twitter account so that everytime you box something it´s sent to your twitter followers as a link.
• you can also share your box with other people, then many people can drag nice discoveries into the same box.

Something I miss in SimplyBox is being able to find other people´s boxes . For example: I know Nik Peachey and other teachers have simplyboxes. I wish I could send them requests to have access to their boxes. Can you imagine how much information I could come into?

I also use Diigo for bookmarking, but what I found in SimplyBox is the possibility of seeing images of what I have bookmarked. This way, I can recall what it is about without having to write a long description.

This is a great video which explains how it works

SimplyBox - Capture, Organize and Share

I just LOVE playing with photo editing tools.With Loonapix you can add effects to your pictures, add borders/ frames, trim the photo and also add your face to movie posters or to other characters.

But how can we use this in an educational context?

• well, first, you can use it to publish photos you´ve taken in the classroom for example.
• you can also have sts play with it and then describe the changes. Ex. He used to have short blond hair, now he has long black hair.
• You can use the images for teaching adjectives for describing people´s appearance.
• Any other ideas?
  

Playing with Loonapix

I came across this site via Nik Peachey and was planning to try it out. Next week, I´ll be talking about films with two groups of mine and decided to use http://wallwisher.com to have my students recommend films to the group.

Anyone can join us in our WALL by clicking on post a sticky and then double click with the mouse, write a description of the film and add the link to a youtube trailer. This is our FAVOURITE FILMS wallwisher.



Nik Peachey has also started a great wall about WEB TOOLS for teachers:



This is Nik´s wonderful post about WALLWISHER

An Interactive NOTICE BOARD - Wallwisher

I had always liked word cloud generators for pre-reading tasks. With WORDSIFT you can get much more than that.

gwientjes in Youtube has made a great tutorial explaining how it works and giving wonderful ideas about how to use it in class.

Exploring Vocabulary Clouds

Yesterday morning, we woke up and had no plans for the day. My husband, the adventurer in the family, proposed we travel to Batatais and Brodowski to see Portinari´s work there. So there we went. We set off in the morning, had lunch in Ituverava, visited the church in Batatais where Candido Portinari left several of his paintings, then went to Brodowski to visit the house where Portinari lived as a child.

For some many years, I had no idea there were so many of his paintings in small towns like Batatais and Brodowski. Both towns are BEAUTIFUL, the old houses still keep their original architecture and most of them are very well kept. The church in Batatais is unbelievably beautiful (outside and inside) and its garden is idyllic. The only thing that shocked me was a wonderful old building opposite the church which used to be the CASA DA CULTURA and has a sign saying FOR SALE. (?) How can a beautuful building like that one which used to be the house of Culture not be kept by the city?

The trip was really worthwhile. Instead of spending the day in the net, we had a cultural day with the family. FANTASTIC!

By clicking on the button below you can see a slideshow with pictures with the Portinari tag in Flickr.

Portinari is one of the most famous artists in Brazil. He painted, illustrated books, and wrote poems.

1st May TRIP - Portinari