Saturday, July 30, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, July 23, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, July 16, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, July 09, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, July 02, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, June 25, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, June 18, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, June 11, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Saturday, June 04, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.
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Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm (Wired Magazine: 16.05)
. . .
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. . . .
. . . [L]aws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. . . .
(Gary Wolf, The problem of forgetting, ¶¶6-7, 04.21.08).
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Friday, July 09, 2010

New Look and Old Look

This post, the first since a template update necessary to enable modifications such as the addition of a Recent Comments feed, displays the old look in a series of screenshots. These pictures show the previous home page layout and sidebar elements. Hopefully, as time permits, one or more of us will be able to restore other page elements, such as the LwC logo, to make the new look into a fair facsimile of the old one.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Personal Start Pages

pageflakes - teacher edition

Welcome to personal start pages for LwC! Over the next few weeks, we'll be exploring personal start or home pages, especially Pageflakes. With Pageflakes and similar online tools, you'll be able to create your own personal start page, bringing everything that you are interested in to one place! This makes it easy to see when your favorite blogs and sites have been updated, what your friends are saying on Twitter, or even what the weather is like! In order to get started, we'll review the very basics of RSS and then we'll get started creating our own personal, class, and professional pages using Pageflakes. As you'll see, you can easily customize your Pageflake to suit your interests and needs. Finally, in addition to Pageflakes, try out alternate tools, such as Netvibes and iGoogle, or even Protopage.


Week One Tasks: Personal Start Page Basics
1. Watch Nik Peachey's training video and/or read his post about start pages
2. Check out options for creating your personal start or home page, including Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle, Protopage;
3. LwC members who already have a Pageflakes or start page, please share your URL with the group, so others can peruse sample pages from LwCers who already using them
Optional: If you need more information about RSS, please see Common Craft RSS in Plain English video

Questions: Please post a comment here on our LwC Blog.
How would RSS be useful for educators?
What is a Start or Home Page and how would it help you?
What are your initial impressions of Pageflakes?
Which option for creating your homepage will you try and why?
Other comments or questions?
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Monday, March 24, 2008

Who are you online?

The question of anonymity on the Web seems to me a heated and
never-ending debate. Should we reveal our true identities online? Or
should we hide who we truly are and go around cyberspace as
anonymously as possible?


In favour of the first position, I've heard:

  • People like real names. It's much easier to trust content posted by someone you can track back in time, and this helps you get readers more realistic perception of the poster.
  • The more background information you give about yourself, the less likely your readers are to misinterpret your words.
  • For educators, addressing a group without introducing themselves seems unthinkable (at least in my culture). Conversely, I would personally refuse to teach someone who refused to identify themselves. Why would I do otherwise online?

Against revealing your true identity online, it's been said that:

  • The Web is the place for anonymity by excellence. (I do not support this view, I actually believe this idea goes against true communication)
  • You cannot control who has access to your information online. Therefore, it's wise to protect your privacy. (I do agree with this view to a point, though I guess it's time we started questioning how "private" our identity is even before we go online when so many sites can post about us!).

A solution reconciling all arguments (except perhaps the unlimited right to anonymity) could be the systematic use of aliases and an avatar instead of a photo.

In conclusion, I can certainly understand somebody's decision to use different aliases to post about their professional life from family news. What I find hard to deal with is somebody who asks for support from a community I belong to, and at the same time refuses to open any doors to collaboration with me by not revealing who they are.

In this video clip, Dick Clarence discusses Identity 2.0. Enjoy!

 

Can you add any arguments to the ones mentioned above? Would you like to share your views on our online identities? Post a comment below! (or write a post in your own blogs and trackback here).

Gladys

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Saturday, September 29, 2007

Speaking Activities

This month's focus is on sites that promote speaking activities. You can find hundreds of links that relate to this topic on my English For Beginners page under Audio Conversations and on my English Themes for Beginners/Early Intermediate page under Conversations.

However, since the best way to encourage speaking in English is by having students.....speak, I'd really like to highlight the hundreds of links I have on my Examples of Student Work page. There, you can find countless activities where students have to actively participate in speaking instead of passively listening. The best of this category include:

* Ones where students sing karaoke and record their masterpieces. Two of these site are Sims On Stage (formerly known as Singshot) and KSolo.

* Links where students record messages that virtual alter-egos of themselves speak, such as Voki.

* And, of course, there's Voicethread, which allows students to create narrated slideshows.

Larry Ferlazzo
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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Reading Treasures Show


This is a wonderful recording of an Alado session which took place some time in August 2007, called "Reading Treasures Show". Teachers from various countries talk about what they do to create reading opportunities for their students. I'd like to congratulate all of them on this wonderful work!
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THEIR DISCUSSION
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Friday, August 03, 2007

Developing Reading Skills


This month in Learning with computers we'll be sharing links to develop reading in English.


http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html (Gladys's suggestion)(Enchanting!)

Some of Larry's links:

http://professorgarfield.org/pgf_ReadingRing.html Put cartoon strips in order and answer comprehension questions. (Great!)


http://reading.ecb.org/student/index.html It's not fully ready yet but focusses on reading strategies.

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/onlinestory.htm#talk a collection of online reading stories.



http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/book_buddy/gr1_4lily/skill_ae.html Drawing conclusions. (simple but interesting)



http://www.dfes.gov.uk/readwriteplus/learning_material/portal/predicting-meaning_lit_e2/m01/t08/index.htm Predicting meaning



http://www.dfes.gov.uk/readwriteplus/learning_material/portal/checking-the-meaning-of-words_lit_e3/m01/t24/index.htm Using a dictionary



http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ela4/i/enviroprintp.cfm Reading Street signs



http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/stories_poems_archive_frame.html a collection of stories from BBC



http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-stories-archive.htm collection of stories



http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories.htm stories for kids



http://www.stories.org.br/ the same TRUE story in English and portuguese side by side.



http://www.indianchild.com/short_stories.htm SHORT stories.



http://www.englishclub.com/reading/short-stories.htm short stories graded by level.



These ones I found in Libardo´s blog:

http://www.zapdramatic.com/mod1.htm You can read, listen and watch a very exciting story. You are even asked to interact with the events. SUPERB!
http://www.3xplus.com/pasnet01/scrpasnet01US.htm another interactive DETECTIVE story.
http://www.kizclub.com/Sbody.html Different stories to read and listen, 3 different levels.
http://www.nwlg.org/pages/resources/owl/OWL3Book1/Book01/default.htm this story explains about opposites in an interesting way.
http://www.go4english.com/ffk/archive.php?lang=en&cid=10041002 Great stories.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/games/game2/game2.html The time machine. I had great fun travelling in time!

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Thursday, August 02, 2007

Using Computers To Teach Reading

I wanted to share a few of the favorite sites I use to help my English Language Learner students develop their reading skills.

They are basically divided into two categories -- sites that explicitly teach reading strategies and test comprehension, and sites that offer fiction or non-fiction stories that have text with audio and visual support.

For the former, my favorites include:

* Reading Ring, an activity on the excellent Professor Garfield site. In this game, players have to correctly unscramble a comic strip and then answer questions about it.

* Into The Book is a work-in-progress that will eventually have interactive exercises helping students learn multiple reading strategies. Right now only the one of "visualizing" is complete. It's extraordinarily well-done.

* There are two sites that have multiple activities to help teach reading strategies. I have links to many of these specific activities, and the ones I mentioned earlier, under the English For Beginners -- Reading section of my website. However, it's worth checking-out the two sites that host them all, too. They are Study Zone Test Prep Center of New York and the United Kingdom's Embedded Learning Portal.

I have links to thousands of online stories that offer text with audio and visual support on the English For Beginners- Stories and English For Beginners Non-Fiction sections of my website. My favorite, though, is:

* Woodlands Junior School in the United Kingdom. They have many of the same stories I have on my pages. However, there's is much better-designed and attractive.

Finally, I'd encourage people to read here about my school's use of computers to teach reading to English Language Learners, which was awarded the 2007 International Reading Association Grand Prize Presidential Award for Reading and Technology.

Larry Ferlazzo
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Thursday, July 05, 2007

Favorite Vocabulary Activities

I've sent an email to the group pointing-out the two links to hundreds, if not thousands, of vocabulary sites that I've linked to my website. In case you missed the email, the links are:

Vocabulary Sites For Beginners and Early Intermediate

Vocabulary Sites For Intermediate and Advanced

I'd also like to highlight a few of my favorites.

Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun has numerous games, including many with audio, which are fun and effective with my ESL students. Students don't learn the words in context of sentences, but you can't necessarily expect everything from one site.

The Language Guide is an extraordinary picture and audio dictionary that is organized well and covers the basics.

Basic Sight Words covers the most commonly used words in the English language. On particularly great element of this site is that words are taught in the context of sentences. You won't find this link in my Vocabulary sections, though. I have a completely separate category called Sight Words that has a zillion links about.....Sight Words.

Finally, I love a site called Willing to Try. It's hard to explain what it is. Try it out (be sure to have your pop-up block turned-off, though). I think you, and your students, will enjoy it.
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Summary: "Teaching Grammar".

A SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE "Teaching Grammar" by Larsen-Freeman.

To watch this presentation, FIRST click on the audio and THEN click to change the slides.



The original article can be found in the book "Teaching English as a Foreign Language" by Mariane Celce Murcia.
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Saturday, May 26, 2007

Grammar For Beginners

I've been asked to provide a "guest" post once a month. I understand that June's focus will be on grammar. Since June is going to be a bit crazy for me, I'm getting a little bit of a head start....

There are a ton of sites that focus on grammar. Many of them are mind-numbing lists of exercises and are almost as bad as the useless grammar worksheets that many textbook publishers put out.

Today I'd like to highlight two sites that I think are the best, especially for beginner English Language Learners. They stand-out for both providing text with audio support, and also provide a variety of different activities. My high school students here in Sacramento, California, seem to like them, too.

One is Grammarman Comics, which teaches grammar through the use of attractive online.........comics.

The other is Grammar Gold, which provides a series of fun exercises that teach and provide opportunities to practice English grammar.

For more grammar sites accessible to Beginner students, you can go to the Grammar section on my website's Beginner's page.

For grammar sites appropriate for Intermediate or Advanced English Language Learners, check-out the Intermediate Grammar category on my webpage.

I hope these are helpful links.


Larry Ferlazzo
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