EdTech Avenue

Monday, 2:00 p.m.
Juan Camilo Rozo

live blogged

Presenter is from Bogota, Columbia, and is giving quite a bit of background about the city, society, economics and education. He teaches in an international school.

Using Blogs

• Have a class blog to post assignments, deadlines, information, etc.
• Create a “summary blog” and have students take turns posting a summary of what was covered each week.
• Have students create individual blogs and post their work there (use the comments section to give students feedback).
• Create a “best productions” blog to display the best work you receive. Not sure if I like this for my school. I can predict lots of parent complaints of favoritism.
• Use as a journal.
• Have students find blogs about their hobbies and interests to practice reading English. Not intended to be used as educational classroom material but good practice. Write a summary of what they read and include a link.

Using blogs instead of written journals is motivating to students - they are more willing to do it when they will be published and out there on the web.

List of examples presented. I won’t list them here - see the conference session information for links.

Challenges may be that students will begin chatting online and posting in a more informal language, but it is part of the teaching process to remind students that they are being published and should use formal language.

Using Podcasts

Benefits: can listen to it while doing other things, adds a new dimension and learning style, and has efficient access to hundreds of topics in one application. Other benefits would be the passive download and free subscriptions.

Creating a podcast is simple and free. Need only a computer and a microphone to record. There are free podcasting websites and free software (Audacity is a popular one in education right now).

• Spice up your lessons with surprise activities and listening activities (example was for students who thought they “knew everything” about English; he recorded samples from various dialects and styles of English, as well as foreigners speaking English, and these students could not understand any of it!)
• Communication with school community
• Book discussions (students take turns talking about what has happened in the book thus far) help students review at the same time as they hear English and practice speaking.
• Book reviews
• Post assignments to review what has been done over the week or post student work or presentations, etc.
• Interviews
• Student audio plays

Presenter giving examples of podcasts his students have created. Students had to write scripts, choose which one was better, choose music and sound effects. There is an English podcast published weekly for ELLs by someone from England and someone from the U.S. living in Japan. Has examples of English spoken by these two men as well as recordings of other dialects and accents - “The Bob and Rob Show.” There should be a link on the conference resource page.

Using Wikis

Open content management system - anyone can edit it.  It tracks who made what changes and when because users are required to log in.  Different from blogs, wikis are edited, not commented, and organized by topic rather than date.

Presenter used example of wiki pages created by users of the ePC including information about how to do lots of things with this computer.  It’s a community of people with a common interest creating their own reference desk!

Lots of free sites to create wikis are available on the session information page.

• Movie/Book reviews
• Collaborative stories about a topic
• Classroom reviews - tests or what was done that day/week
• Tips
• Write a novel

We didn’t really get to video production, but the presenter is very excited about it because of new accessibility of good tools for video.  Very motivating for students and requires them to use many skills (write script, read and review, listen, cooperation and collaboration, multiple intelligences).  Can use cell phone, digital camera or actual video camera.  Software - Movie Maker (Windows) or iMovie (Mac) are both free.  Videos can be made using still images, text, motion video, or a combination of any or all of these.