HAPPY NEW YEAR

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Read and listen to classics - LOUDLIT

This is an interesting site to recommend to intermediate or advanced EFL learners. LOUDLIT.org has a collection of novels , short stories, poems and children stories you can both read and listen to. Besides enjoying the story you can also learn the pronunciation of words.

1. Select the story
2. Then look for the Read & Listen button

3. You'll be taken to a browser where you can Read the page and listen to the story being read.

What comes first , pedagogy or technology?

Many teachers when trying to integrate technology into their lesson plans, end up getting dazzled by the wonders of webtools and run the risk of forgetting their real focus, the lesson goals.

Watch this video where I talk about Technology Integration:
http://www.tokbox.com/vm/knpej4mthrio

TokBox - Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

Guide questions we can ask ourselves when selecting a webtool to use:

1. What are the aims of the lesson?
2. What kind of extra practice do I need my students to have?
3. Which is the best tool to achieve the goals?
4. How am I going to propose the webtool task?
5. Where will my students do the task, at home, in class or at the lab? (Plan the time)
6. How will the students share their work? In edmodo, in a class blog, via e-mail?
7. What follow-up activity (closure) will we have?

It's essential to point out that you can only decide which is the best webtool to reach a certain goal once you have explored as many tools available.

Visit Zarco English - fantastic source of practical ideas

I´d like to dedicate my post today to a very talented Portuguese teacher called Alexandra Francisco who started blogging in 2008. Although she says she´s not tech savvy, I dare deny her after seeing her work and reading her great posts.

• She shares webtools she discovers in her great blog written in Portuguese TOOLS OF THE DAY.
  

• She has proposed assignments to her students in the ZARCO ENGLISH BLOG .

• She has created a great example of a STUDENT SHOWCASE BLOG sharing projects her students have developed so far.

 Isn´t she something? She´s shared it all, the tools, the assignments and practical examples of what her students have been producing. 

Click on the image for the ZarcoEnglish site.

Why I like TOKBOX

Tokbox is a great tool teachers should explore. It's free and easy to use.




What can you do with TOKBOX?

• You can send video messages to your tokbox contacts or to anyone who has an e-mail.
• You can send video cards with pre-set backgrounds.
• You can have chats with up to 20 tokbox contacts and share youtube videos, pictures from flickr, picasa, presentations from slideshare .
  
• The video messages can be embedded or shared in facebook and twitter.
  

How can we use TOKBOX with students?

• You can send a LISTENING DICTATION to students' e-mails, then have them write down the text you've dictated and send it back to you by e-mail.
• You can send sts a set of questions they have to reply via video message or  sts can create sentences using target vocabulary and record it.
• You can have a live chat with your students.
• You can record explanations to your students and send it to their e-mails.
• You can record a message to parents introducing yourself and send to their e-mails.
• If a student is absent because he's sick, you can record students wishing recovery and send to the student's e-mail.

The possibility of sending video messages to e-mails is one you can't find in SKYPE, for example.

This is a video message I sent to students asking them 3 questions they had to reply to.

TokBox - Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

Nik Peachey has written a wonderful post about TOKBOX where he includes a tutorial and  wonderful ideas for classroom integration.

Interview with Camila Sousa

Camila Sousa is a Brazilian EFL /ESL teacher teaching in the US. Have a look at her blog.

Watch our interview



Originally, we tried http://wetoku.com for the interview but we had delay both in sound and image. The result was a catastrophe. Therefore, we decided to use http://screenr.com to record our interview in Skype and it worked beautifully.