Max My Dream - writing tool

This a BEAUTIFUL site suggested in a tweet by @evab2001.
http://www.maxmydream.com

You can write your dream in a 140 characters and then see it animated.
What I liked about it? The idea of making you think of your dream, the beautiful background music, the  imaginative way of representing our dreams, EVERYTHING.

After typing in your dream, you can share it via Twitter, facebook or even embed it, like I did just below:

My dream was: I wish one day all nations would be united in peace, helping each other overcome their difficulties and learn to respect their differences.

HOW CAN WE USE THIS SITE WITH STUDENTS?

• have students talk in pairs about their dreams for the world or fot themselves, then ask them to write about their dream in a maximum of 140 characters. They use the site and share the link or embed their dream in a class blog below the original dream they wrote.
• You can also have students write their dreams show the video to sts in class, and have sts guess from the images what the original words were.

*** If the music disturbs you while reading the blog, click on the SOUND ICON to turn it off.

Your Hybrid Classroom - Will you change your Paradigm?

While browsing through my diigo bookmarks looking for an article this morning, I had the chance to watch this amazing presentation by Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

Your Hybrid Classroom: Will You Change Your Paradigm? social media, 21st century skills, web2.0

View more presentations from Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Letterpop - create cool newsletters

Click on the image to see the newsletter FULL SIZE

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.
  

Picks of the week

Sharing interesting sites I've come across this week.

Click on a letter of the ALPHABET and watch the letters turn into an animal. Cute, great for teaching animal vocab.

Watch video summaries of various famous books. EFL teachers can use the videos as a preview to reading or for listening comprehension.

Learn idioms in English. Definitions and examples.

Type a verb and see it conjugated in various verb tenses.

• Personalized meeting rooms
• Use any presentation: yours or someone else's
• Streaming live video
• Group chat
• No downloads
• Unlimited meetings & participants
• Private or Public

How to find ALTERNATIVE tools

It's amazing how many tools cease to exist the moment you're planning to use them. :)

How can you find alternative tools? Use SIMILARSITESEARCH

SimilarSiteSearch.com - The Best Place To Find Similar Websites via kwout

Yesterday I was looking for an alternative to http://www.pageflakes.com/ 
and found another interesting tool for organizing feeds http://www.protopage.com/