Project: Hello, there! (Brazil + Argentina)

I'm very excited to share a new class project which is about to start. It's going to be a collaboration Brazil + Argentina. After contacting my PLN friends from our neighbour-country, Argentina, Jennifer Verschoor accepted the challenge.

We both have teenage students who are going to be in contact during 4 weeks.

What's the project about?

PROJECT: Hello, there!

TYPE OF LEARNING: Language

GOAL: participants will be able to develop communication skills in the English Language.

TARGET AUDIENCE: a group of teenage students (14-16) from Brazil and Argentina.

TECHNOLOGY EXPECTED: students will be using their own devices (cell phones, tablets or computers) to communicate in Edmodo.

STAKEHOLDERS: teachers, parents, directors.

DEADLINE: project will be developed during four weeks.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

18 students from Brazil will be paired up with 18 students from Argentina to communicate during 4 weeks.

Objective:  to learn as much as they can about the other student and the place where he/she lives during this period of time. At the end of the 4 weeks, each student will write a report to the teacher expressing what they have learned.

Platform: students from both countries will join an Edmodo group. Both teachers, from Brazil and Argentina, will be the managers of the group. Students will be divided in small groups in Edmodo (pairs) where they can develop a conversation. Their communication can be via text, audio files, videos, photos using any kind of file they wish to attach to their messages. Teachers will have access to their communication the whole time.

Teachers' role: to get students in contact, divide them into pairs and manage their conversation. Students' messages don't need to be corrected by the teacher beforehand as the objective is not accuracy but the development of a conversation. However, the teacher can prepare activities to be carried out in class with some common mistakes observed (without identifying students).

Final Task: by the end of 4 weeks, each student should publish a report to their teacher, explaining how the communication took place and what he/she learned about the other student. The final report should contain at least 200 words and images/ videos to illustrate it.

The reports will be posted on a common wiki: http://projecthellothere.pbworks.com/  which will then be shared with parents.

Our students are joining the Edmodo group this week, so let's see how it goes.

Written feedback via EDMODO

This is why I like Edmodo so much.
It's a free platform for educators which makes our lives so much easier.

 I'd like to share some video tutorials, a dear friend from Goiania (Brazil), Edmilson Chagas, has created to show other teachers how he's been using the site to give feedback to his students.
                                                                                 

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3 

Thanks, Edmilson, for taking the time to create these tutorials and show us in detail how we can annotate using Edmodo. This is certainly a feature I'll be using A LOT this semester.

Using EDMODO with Students: 20 IDEAS

I've been using EDMODO for some years now and every year I discover different things you can develop with students using the platform. I work at Cultura Inglesa Uberlândia and the coordination team has managed to involve the whole staff in using EDMODO as our virtual staff room, a space where we share material we've prepared, ask each other questions, help each other and so on. It's become a bank of resources to the whole school.

Last week, at our TDC (Teacher Development Course) I decided to talk about other interesting ways to use Edmodo with students. Now that most teachers are fairly familiar with the platform, it is a logical step to take advantage of all of its potential for language learning.

This is the presentation I shared with the teachers:

Wiziq session - EDMODO in Depth

Yesterday, February 06, I gave one more online workshop to a group of teachers I've been training at the Cultura EDtech online course. I talked about Edmodo features and how some teachers have been using it with students.





You can view the RECORDED session by clicking on the links below:

Part 1 - http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/252851-edmodo-in-depth
Part 2 - http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/254296-edmodo

The session is part of the Cultura Edtech  Course, an online course for EFL / ESL teachers who wish to begin exploring blogs and  webtools with some help. It's a 3-month course where teachers carry out weekly tasks in order to learn about technology integration with classroom activities.

If you're interested, the next group starts in March 2010. Send me an e-mail to anamariacult@yahoo.com.br and I'll send you more information.
http://anamariacult.glogster.com/cultura-edtech/

SCREENR - screencasts for Twitter

It's never been easier to create tutorials like now with SCREENR.

This is how to do it. Sign in with your TWITTER account, then click on RECORD. Resize the shooting screen to focus on the area you would like to record on your screen. Click RECORD and start speaking. It records everything you say and do with your mouse. When you're done, click DONE , write a text to go with your tweet and wait a while (about 2 minutes). After it's been tweeted, you can also grab an embed code to publish it in your blog, have a URL address, publish it in youtube (if you have a youtube account) or download it as an mp4 file. The quality of the image is superb.

It couldn't be easier!

This is a screencast I made to show two colleagues how to remove a student from an edmodo group you've created.



This is my screencast in twitter

anamariacult (anamariacult) on Twitter via kwout

Edmodo tutorial

I was meaning to make a tutorial in order to help colleagues to see how edmodo works and I tried utipu but unfortunately I couldn´t manage to see the video I had recorded. The feature from utipu which interested me is the possibility to easily send the video to youtube. ADVANTAGE: can send tutorial to youtube. DISADVANTAGE: have to download program to your computer and :( couldn´t see the video I recorded.

Then, I decided to try screencast-o-matic to make the tutorial.
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cjlqhcnBd

Pownce X Edmodo

I´ve already written about Pownce and how I loved the possibility of easily sharing files with a group of people but after I got the message that Pownce would be closing I decided to give http://edmodo.com a try. Carla Arena was the first one who talked to me about it as she used it with a group of teachers during a course.

These are some of the features which I found in common with Pownce and some differences as well.
*Both in pownce and edmodo you can easily share files (pictures, songs, videos, links, documents) with a group of people or with an individual. An advantage edmodo has is the possibility to share any application which has an embed code, like the examples below.















sharing a slide show sharing a video sharing a voicethread



*Both offer you the possibility of creating groups to aggregate the people you want to share with. If you are the creator of the group (instructor) you get a code you give to the people you invite to join the group. The code feature makes edmodo much safer than Pownce, in the sense that you have the control with whom your students will be in contact with. As the manager of the group you also have the power to select the messages you find adequate for the group (clicking in public). Another positive point is the possiblility of filtering the incoming messages by groups or reading all the messages together. Something I miss in edmodo is the possibility of filtering the messages per person by just clicking on their picture as I could do in Pownce.


Great advantages for using edmodo with students:
- you can have a quick channel of communication with your students.
- language students will have plenty of writing and reading practise using the tool.
- you can send assignments to the group and grade them.
- you can send alerts.
- you can share a course calendar with the group.
- you can put your students in contact with other groups to develop joint projects.

Another thing I miss in edmodo is the impossibility to customize my layout, but nothing is perfect, right? I´ll definitely use edmodo with my groups next term.

This is a tutorial Carla Arena has made about edmodo

TUTORIAL