Connect Me to Education

I'm starting 2015 with the project of my dreams!

If you read Life Feast and know a bit about my work, you might also know I've been involved with teacher development in the virtual environment since 2009. I started moderating my own online course "Cultura Edtech" to share a bit of what I had been exploring on the web with fellow teachers and to feel less lonely during a difficult time in my life when I had to stay home (You can read about this story in my M.A. thesis - text in Portuguese). The virtual world was my bridge to being in contact with other people.

Since then, I've never left the online world and the online world has never left me. At that time, in 2009, little research had been developed about digital technologies in education and online learning. Most of us, teachers who ventured teaching online, were following our instincts and trying out different ways of teaching and learning. After many years moderating courses, I felt the need to go back to university and develop a research in this area which fascinates me so much. A question that puzzled me was: Why do so many people see the online environment as a cold place and I feel the complete opposite?

For me, learning is a fascinating experience which can be more pleasurable when we are in contact with other people. 

Connectme Education is the result of these years of experience and a wish to reach teachers I haven't reached yet. 

Our aim is to organize online courses, in Portuguese or in English, for the continuous development of professionals involved with education. We want it to be a space where teachers can feel at home and comfortable to learn with each other. Each month, one-month or two-month courses will be proposed to small groups of teachers. I can't wait to start!

I have great joy to invite you to come and visit us at our brand new website created with great care. I'd also like to thank my dear friends and colleagues who have joined me on this project: Roseli Serra, Márcia Lima, Jennifer Verschoor , Cecília Morais and Camila Borges for her professional help with the website and social media.

We hope you enjoy it!

Our first online course is going to be about FLIPPED LEARNING. How about joining us?

Our contact info: CONNECTME EDUCATION

linkedin twitter facebook

Teens and Tumblr: a writing digital portfolio

The objective of this post is to share a writing project I've been developing with EFL teenage students this semester. At the end of each unit, the course book we've been using suggests a writing task for a portfolio.

I've always been bothered by the way teenagers generally handle their written assignments at the school where I work. It usually goes as following:

• Students write a text on a piece of paper which is given to the teacher for correction.
• Teachers correct the mistakes by underlining, crossing out and sometimes providing a better word for a sentence. The pieces of paper are handed back to students with a mark.
• Upon receiving their text back, students check their marks and quickly check what the teacher has corrected.

I frequently asked myself: What do students do with this piece of paper? Do students understand why they made the mistakes the teacher marked? How much do they learn from the feedback?

Considering the scenario shared above, I decided to propose a change to my students. First, I elicited from them what usually happens when they have to write texts for homework. And then I presented the idea of a Writing Digital Portfolio to be developed by each student throughout the semester.

The idea was to implement the following changes for the writings at the end of each unit. First, students would write a draft on a piece of paper and bring to class. During one of the class activities when students are busy writing, I would check all the drafts, underline mistakes and leave hints about what is wrong with what I underlined. I would focus on underlining mistakes which I believe my students would be able to identify themselves if pointed in the right direction. Second, students would edit the text marked by the teacher, try to identify and correct the mistakes and publish the final version on a public portfolio. As a tool, I suggested TUMBLR as students could easily publish texts and images either from their cell phones or their laptops. Finally, I would evaluate the final version.

My aim was to try a simple version of process writing, invite students to reflect about their writings, to collect each student's writing on a single page and have something tangible of what is produced by students during the semester.

We've been working together for 2 months and a half now and students are about to publish their third writing. The texts are fairly short (about 100 words), but they have been of great help to me as evidence of what my students have learned and what they haven't learned yet.

Screenshot of a Protopage with the Portfolio being developed by students.

In order to see the portfolios, you can click on the image above, and then click on the names of the students. Or you can click on the links of some portfolios I bring below:

• HELENA: http://helenacampoli.tumblr.com/
• RAISSA: http://ayeitsraissa.tumblr.com/ 
• THIAGO: http://thiagofcm.tumblr.com/

Helping students develop speaking with Whatsapp

I normally teach teenagers and this semester I wanted to have students record  the mini dialogues they normally create in class. These recordings apart from being an opportunity for students to practise speaking and listening could help me observe their progress.

I've been focussing on CAN DO objectives, so close to the end of each class I ask pairs of students to create a mini dialogue using the topic of the lesson. In pairs, they write down a mini dialogue of about 6 turns. I have a quick look at the dialogues checking for mistakes related to the topic of the lesson and then students rehearse it. When they feel they are ready, they can make the recording using their own cell phones.

As we're using EDMODO to post homework, to do quizzes and share extra material, I imagined they could use their own cell phones to record their dialogues and then send it to our Edmodo group. When I suggested the recording for the first time, students were a bit surprised because they had never recorded themselves using English. One student then asked if they could share the recording via WHATSAPP, considering the fact that all of them have the app on their cell phones and it's possible to record within the app. I accepted the idea and one of the students volunteered to create a group for sharing the recordings.

After students upload the recordings, I usually ask them to listen to other dialogues created by their classmates. At home, I listen to all the recorded dialogues and take notes of mistakes related to the target language which  I share with the whole group in a following class without identifying anyone. I've been truly happy with the opportunity to see my students using their creativity to practise the language and to have "palpable" evidence of what my students seem to have learned or not.

This screenshot shows a conversation between a student and myself. I was happy to see they are enjoying listening to themselves and their classmates.













And this is a sample of a dialogue created by two of my students. Can you identify the target structure they were trying to use?

listen to ‘Mini Dialogue created by students’ on Audioboo

What about this one?

listen to ‘Dialogue 2’ on Audioboo

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.

#365grateful

I've always liked ideas which in a way connect us to what is really important in life.

In this world of snapshots and selfies, I find myself many times overlooking little things in life which brighten my day. While reading my Facebook feed, I noticed a link my friend, Daniela Pesconi-Arthur shared about the 365 GRATEFUL PROJECT. I just loved it!

The idea is pretty simple: you take a photo a day of something you're grateful for.

According to the 365grateful website,

 "The project was created by Hailey. In early 2008, in an effort to fight depression, Hailey started a year long photographic project which involved taking one Polaroid photo a day of something she felt grateful for. Initially this was a chore but eventually it became a delight."

Watch Hailey's inspiring video:



 My friend, Daniela, has started her #365grateful project here: http://365reasons-mywritingshed.blogspot.co.uk/

I'll be posting my photos and posts using instagram plus the hashtag #365grateful and will be collecting them all at my Tumblr http://anamariacult.tumblr.com/

This was my first photo

Wouldn't this be a great idea for a writing project with students?

Coincidentally, this same week, I read a post by Vicki Davis about writing a Joy Journal which kinds of reinforces this idea of being positive about life.
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com.br/2013/04/9-fine-reasons-to-keep-journal-and-how.html

Tell us more about Brazil

Weeks ago, I was contacted by Larry Ferlazzo about having our students collaborate somehow as his students have been studying about Brazil. We exchanged a few messages trying to decide how this collaboration would take place and this is the result.

First, Larry's students recorded videos asking questions about Brazil.

http://sacschoolblogs.org/larryferlazzo/2013/10/07/questions-for-our-sister-classes-in-brazil/

Wow, there were many questions to be answered!

I asked my students if they accepted to collaborate with them and assigned a video to each student. The student would watch the video at home, select 3 questions to answer and write a draft on a piece of paper. 

In class, I had a quick look at the texts, helped them with the pronunciation of some words while they practised reading their texts to their classmates. To make the recordings, I took a digital camera, my smartphone and an ipad to class, divided the students into 3 groups and asked them to record themselves. Although some of the video recordings have a lot of noise in the background, I believe they did a great job. They talked about  our typical food, carnival, our schools and much more.

TEACHMEET Int'l : Even Beginners Can Write

If you've attended the TEACHMEET International 2013, this post is dedicated to talk a little bit more about the project presented this morning.

Many beginner students of English tend to learn isolated words and sentences and that's all they seem to use for the first years studying English. These students have very little opportunities for expressing themselves a bit more using the target language.

This semester, I'm teaching a group of beginners which have studied English for 5 months only (classes are twice a week). I asked them what sort of writing they did last semester and I was told most of what they wrote was in their workbooks and the few times they wrote short texts the only person who read it was their teacher.

Well, aiming to provide opportunity for this groups of students to develop their writing skills in English to express themselves I proposed the following project using the EDMODO platform.

Each week, I would share a bit more about myself by writing a short text using language learned that week. Students then would try to do the same over the weekend. But this time, they would be writing about themselves, we would be reading everyone's text and would be able to learn from each other. I mentioned to them, my objective was to give them further reading and writing practice , to learn more about them and to see from their language use where they needed further help.

This is how we started:

Then, it was my students' turn to write their own texts.

I tried to respond to the content of the text and not use the replies for correction purposes. This way, I intend to make students feel more confident in using English to talk about themselves.

After reading several texts written by the students, I took notes of the most COMMON MISTAKES and in the following class, without identifying who had made the mistake, I tried to elicit from them how to make the sentence grammatically correct. 

A big challenge I've been having is to get students to keep the conversation going, like I did with Talita, in the example above. They say they don't have enough time to go back and do more reading. Let's see how it goes.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE:

These were the slides used to present.

Teachmeet anamariacult from Ana Menezes

The LIVEBINDER with resources

Resources TeachMeet 2013

PROJECT: Describe someone in your family

So, what do we need to know in order to be able to describe people in our family?

After brainstorming different adjectives of personality students knew, we focusssed on the vocabulary suggested by the book which is adopted by the language institute I work at. I used this image below, to introduce the words for the first time. Students would come to the board and click on a word they would like to know and read the definition for the rest of the class. The same image was shared in our Edmodo group for students to go back to it if they wanted to.

 

We also used some QUIZLET FLASHCARDS to help students learn the meaning of the new vocabulary as well as play the games for recap.

 An important moment in class was a discussion students had in pairs after listening to an interview where a psychologist talked about how your position in the family can affect your personality.

The CHALLENGE for the lesson then was to DESCRIBE SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY.
The instructions were:

I gave students the option of using a tool for recording or a tool for using text and image. The tool my students liked best for the task was BUBBLESNAPS as can be seen below.

PROJECT: A memorable moment

Telling other people about memorable things that happened to us in the past, in my opinion, is one of the most challenging things to do when you're learning another language. Depending on what tense you use, the person listening to your story might not understand the sequence of events you're trying to tell.

I remember very clearly the first time I tried to tell a story to some American friends of mine at a slumber party and they kept asking me so many clarifying questions that I noticed I wasn't THAT successful in telling my story.

Last week, I presented the challenge for unit 1B which was  to record yourself talking about a memorable moment in your life.

First, I asked my students to tell each other about something funny that happened to them in the past.
Then, I asked them what verb tenses they had used and it was no surprise that most of them had used ONLY the Simple Past. Well, it was clear we had to learn some more possibilities.

As some students were absent that day, I shared the GRAMMAR VIDEO CLASS below (a screencast created by me) with the whole class in our EDMODO group.

 

Then, I showed them my example recording and asked them to identify the verb tenses and the situations I talked about. After doing lots of exercises and practicing in class, at the end of the third lesson it was their turn to make their recordings.

These are some of the recordings they produced:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1259269-my-audioboo

listen to ‘My audioboo’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘A nice surprise party’ on Audioboo

After listening to their various recordings, I wrote down the most common mistakes and brought to class so that we could discuss them.

For this specific project, the SUGGESTED TOOLS were:

• AUDIOBOO  http://audioboo.fm/
• VOCAROO http://vocaroo.com/
• CROAK.IT http://croak.it/ 

PROJECT: My eating habits

A new semester has begun and here I am trying to rethink my role as a teacher and how I can help my students learn English in a different way.

Well, I've been reading and reflecting a lot about collaborative / cooperative learning and self-directed learning in search of ideas for my classes.

But, changing your ways IS NOT EASY. I have to think of my own reality, with certain limitations as  the methodology adopted by the school and my own beliefs, of course.

This semester, I have a beautiful and very enthusiastic group of teenagers with whom I'll be experimenting new ways of being in a classroom. Taking one tiny step at a time, we're going to follow a kind of a "project-oriented approach", in which I propose a challenge for students at the beginning of a lesson, we discuss what kind of knowledge we need to accomplish that goal and after 3 or 4 classes working with the content, students have to present a final product using one of the suggested tools. http://culturainglesaudi.wikispaces.com/Inter+A+Challenges

These past weeks, students brought to class VOCABULARY related to kinds of food they like and we complemented it with vocabulary from the coursebook which we're supposed to cover. If we were to talk about our habits, we had to know how express them in sentences, which led us to the GRAMMAR TOPIC (Present Simple and Present Continuous).

Yesterday, students started sharing their final presentations in Edmodo, which I then assembled in the school wiki page so that we can share it with parents as well. I was extremely happy with the results. From their presentation, I was not only able to learn more about my students but I could also  observe how well they could express themselves.

THIS WAS ONE OF THE PRESENTATIONS SHARED


The other presentations can be found at
http://culturainglesaudi.wikispaces.com/1.+My+eating+habits

 I prepared an activity with the most common mistakes I noticed from their presentations, we discussed them and then my students asked me to show some presentations in class to the whole group.

Like I said at the beginning of the post, these are just baby steps aiming for more meaningful learning.

PROJECT: An image a week (with EFL learners)

Let me share a project which has  started this week, the "AN IMAGE A WEEK " project.

An image a week PROJECT - An image a week via kwout

Some weeks ago, while reading about the 365 Project  I started playing with the idea of having my students share images and write texts about them. However, I thought a photo a day would be impractical for my reality. Then, why not AN IMAGE A WEEK? 

Each student would take a photo to represent their week, write a 50-word text about it and send it to an assigned e-mail. My second thought was: why not invite other teachers from different countries to participate as well? I wrote some messages to teachers I know who teach students of similar ages and was thrilled all of them accepted the challenge.

We'll have two groups from Uberlândia (Brazil), a group from Croatia, two groups from Italy, a group from Belgium and a group from Chicago. Click on the play button to watch the presentation Daniela Tomatis has created to introduce the project to students.

The first step was to set up the main page (a posterous blog) for the posts.Then, to help our group work develop better I created a facebook group where teachers involved have been exchanging ideas.

The project will take place from the 8th February to 22nd June, which make 20 weeks altogether. Therefore, by the end of the project each student will have shared 20 images along with 20 short texts.

If you're interested in following our project this semester, please visit the AN IMAGE A WEEK page and leave us comments; every week lots of different posts will come to life.

Thank you, Guido , Daniela Tomatis, Camila Sousa, Grace, Daniela Becchio and Arjana for joining the project.

Task Challenge #9 - Using VOKI to make comparisons

Close to the end of the semester, the aim of a lesson was MAKING COMPARISONS.

Ex: way bigger / a great deal bigger / not any bigger / considerably bigger / no bigger , etc.


I decided to ask my students to use the new language learned to compare two items of their choice: two people, two places, two sports ...

These are some of their avatars and their recordings:

More recordings can be found at the SCHOOL WIKI

Task Challenge #7 - Dialogue with Phrasal verbs

We're close to the end of our semester and about to finish our Tasks Challenge. During this semester, I've proposed different challenges to students asking them to create animations, comic strips, audio recordings using content recently covered in class.

CHECK OUT CHALLENGE #7

`












This is the example I showed them


GoAnimate.com: Challenge 7 by anamariacult

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Here are some of their animations, CAN YOU IDENTIFY WHAT PHRASAL VERBS THEY USED?:

GoAnimate.com: excuses by Júlia

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!
GoAnimate.com: Challenge #7 by juliana-pst

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

More animations can be found at the SCHOOL WIKI.

Task Challenge #6 - Dialogue (Agreeing and Disagreeing)

The aim of the lesson was to help students create dialogues where they would discuss a topic and agree/ disagree with each other. (Book used: Face2Face Upper Intermediate)


The proposed task

I was amazed at the number of cell phones which could record audio in class. I'll definitely use them for recording more often. My students created the dialogues in class (in pairs / trios), I had a look at it for more serious mistakes and then they practised reading the dialogue, trying not to speak too fast and to sound as natural as possible. Students then used their cell phones to record their dialogue. Many of them had to record themselves 7 or 8 times before they were happy with the result.
Isn't it wonderful? Which other way would students read the same dialogue 8 TIMES.

These are some of their recordings:

Topic: Friends give the best advice


Topic: 20 is a good age to get married


All their recordings have been shared in the SCHOOL WIKI

Task Challenge #5 - Picture Description with FOTOBABBLE

Picture Description is a skill our students need to develop for the Oral tests at our school and for the Cambridge exams.

Challenge #5 asked students to choose an image and record a description for it. This way students have plenty of examples of what is required of them.

These are some of the descriptions created by them at home.

All their FOTOBABBLES have been published in the SCHOOL WIKI and shared with parents.

Task Challenge #2 - Creating a comic strip

Last Thursday, I proposed challenge #2 which involved students creating a dialogue with vocabulary from the previous units (EDUCATION)

Students were asked to use http://writecomics.com  and use a minimum of 5 new words.


This is a sample created by one of the students.

All the comic strips are being shared at our school wiki (for projects) and will be shared with parents.


How will I give them feedback?

• Well, I've decided to write down some common mistakes and then talk to the class as a whole not mentioning names.

• Common mistakes noticed: some students don't know the right collocations for scholarship, lots of students forgot to use DID in questions in the past, and some of them invented some expressions using literal translation from Portuguese to English. All in all, I guess they did a good job.
  

The 10 tasks CHALLENGE

With the beginning of our semester, we've already started developing little projects with our students. I've got 4 groups of Upper Intermediate students ("I'm the queen of Upper As!) and this semester I plan to propose 10 challenging tasks for them to develop at home apart from doing their traditional workbook exercises.

The tasks aim to help students practise LISTENING, WRITING and SPEAKING. Students will also get the chance to learn how to use different webtools to create content, a skill I believe all our students need nowadays.

As a plus, students will get  to watch tutorials , in English, to learn how to use the tools.

This is what I have in mind:

•  All tasks involve uisng language learned during that week.
• The platform used for sharing is EDMODO and a school blog.

These are the webtools we're going to use:

• VOKI
• WriteComics
• Audioboo
• Fotobabble
• Stixy
• Typewithme
• LiveTyping
• Fodey
• BitStrips

Monster Project

Sharing a project developed by a friend and a Cultura EDtech member, Roberta Righetto. She invited her beginner students to create their own monsters , write a description , recorded each student and shared the project in a glog.

Grammar topic: it's got .....  / Vocabulary topic: parts of the body.

Amazing WEB 2.0 projects

I've been meaning to share the wonderful e-book Terry Freedman has put together and now at the beginning of a new semester I believe it's the perfect moment.

I strongly believe DEVELOPING PROJECTS is the way we can make learning meaningful and give our students the chance to discover, interact, produce and learn.

Terry Freedman gathered 87 projects developed around the globe with WEB 2.0 applications.
http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/web2_2010/Amazing%20Web%202%20Projects.pdf

Free Stuff - Educational Technology - ICT in Education via kwout

Celebrating MOTHER'S DAY

These are some ideas for projects to develop with students to celebrate MOTHER'S DAY.

• Use GLOGSTER to collect writings or drawings made by students. You can also record students singing and add it to the glogster poster. The poster below was a collection of writings which were scanned and pasted into the poster by the teacher (Lívia Fernandes).

• Record students singing a song or reading a beautiful poem and share with the mothers. You can use VOCAROO or record it an mp3, host the file and then use of the cute players from MYFLASHFETISH

• Make a bookr with the whole class where students write about their moms. Ask students to write the sentences for each page and then share the link with moms.

• Make a WALLWISHER wall for your students to add messages for their moms with beautiful images.

• Ask students to record a VOKI reading a beautiful message to their moms.