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.

Personal Start Pages

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?

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

PROJECT: Listening Sites

This is an e-mail written by Mary Hillis suggesting a project we could develop with our students. Read her e-mail and leave your comments.


Hi LwCers!Jen made a good point that many schools don't have the necessaryequipment to do activities with online listening sites. As this is often the case, I would like to propose two assignment ideas:

Extensive Listening Journal Students choose an appropriate listening site, then create a journal about their experience. For instance, they should write a short report detailing the name of the site, the date, the topic of the listening, a summary of the listening, a list of new vocab plus meanings, and a reaction to the listening. I've done the extensive listening journal before, then had students share their reports with others, discussing listening sources, etc. It was a good way to encourage students to listen to materials of their choice outside of class.

Oral Presentation on an online listening site. Students choose an appropriate listening site, analyze it, and give an oral presentation on their findings. Analysis of a listening site can be based on criteria such as interest, difficulty level, visual appeal of the site, available exercises, links provided, etc. (In this way,evaluating a listening site is kind of like writing a movie review,which many students are already familiar with.) Another plus-- after finishing this assignment, you'll have a clear idea about which types of listening sites are useful and interesting for your students!!

Sorry for the long post! I'm looking forward to hearing other members' ideas on how to use these fabulous listening resources we've found!!

Hugs,
MaryH

LWC YACK PACK group

Would you like to join our Yack Pack group?

With Yack Pack, Learning with Computer members will be able to have synchronous meetings and also leave each other written or voice messages. We know there are other tools that offer the same thing but this time we´re trying Yack Pack. If you´d like to join us, post a message in the Yahoo LWC community and we´ll send you an invitation. Hope you can join us.

TEACHING LISTENING

We´ve barely started the topic and we already have a long list of suggested sites in our WIKI. Wow, it´s sure overwhelming! We´ll try to organize a list of special features from some of the sites in order to guide us through this discovery.

Let´s start with ELLO, my favourite. It offers interesting activities I haven´t found anywhere else, for instance:

• Interviews : The interviews integrate image which is known to help understanding.
  
• Mixer: Six different people talk about the same topic. It also offers comprehension questions at the end.
  
• News game: A news programme in cartoons.Great for beginner levels!
  

Free online EFL listening exercises has other interesting features:

• Beginners Dictations
  
• Video Dictations ( elementary to intermediate)
  
• TV commercials (ads from the 60s/ intermediate level)
  
• Movie trailers + dictation (advanced level)
  

Manythings.org is also interesting.

• Listen and read along (interesting lay-out)


• English Listening room (cloze exercises)
  

Breaking News English

• lesson plans for current events . (Fantastic!)
  

Literacynet.org

• news stories (advanced level)
  

Wordchamp

• Verb DRILLS


• Picture FLASHCARDS (picture + sound)
  

Lingual.net

• Learning English through MOVIES (check out the tri-view method clicking the "How to use button")

Anglesonline.org (wonderful template) (beginnners/ intermediate)

• lessons, movie trailers and music clips with activities.

Carla Arena´s del.icio.us page for listening activities.

Let´s leave our impressions in the comments area.

Larry Ferlazzo´s blog is amazing. These are some of the sites I selected from his suggestions.
LISTENING DICTATION (movie sounds and clips) (really good!)
Listening to different speakers This is from Tokyo International University and has faculty members talking about themselves, followed by questions that need to be answered by students.(very good!)
ESL VIDEOS is incredible. Not only does it offer video with quizzes at various levels but also offers us the opportunity to create quizzes for videos of our choice.

One Thing You've Learned from LwC

This week as we "Look Back, Look Around, and Look Ahead", let's reflect on what we've learned over the past month and throughout our experiences at Learning with Computers. How have the tasks, discussions, and fellow members impacted your teaching or other areas of your life? Please reply by posting at least ONE thing you've learned from the group!

FEEDblitz email subscription added!

Elizabeth picked the idea from one of Gladys' posts. I saw it in her blog (Virtual=Real: FEEDblitz email subscription added!) and decided to add e-mail subscription to this blog and my own. Now you can enter your e-mail address and be notified every time a new post is added. You can also open an account with FEEDblitz and add as many subscriptions as you like, by simply entering the URLs of all the blogs you would like to get an update from.
So have a look at the sidebar and subscribe to Learning with Computers blog NOW!

Adding multimedia content to your blog

• Now that you have created your blogs, you will want to explore different tools to make them more attractive. You've seen some webtools that allow you to create slideshows. Some other sites provide videos that you can post in your blogs. Let me introduce now a couple of websites where you can create voice posts.
  
  powered by ODEO

While Odeo provides a choice of some different players, this other tool, Podomatic, gives you a link to your recording.

Both tools are free and easy to use. So why not trying them?
http://odeo.com/
http://www.podomatic.com/

Blogging safely

Why are netiquette and security important issues for teachers dealing with blogs? How can they be dealt with?
Students should be warned against using offensive language or content and should become familiar with basic netiquette rules. They should be aware about cultural differences. Anonymous posting should be banned. On the other hand they should be aware that anonymity is not absolute on the web and that they may be held responsible for whatever they write.
These are some of the things teachers can do to keep their blogging environment safe:
Set yourself as blog administrator for your students' blogs. This way you can edit or delete offensive content.
Enable comment moderation in the class blog and encourage your students to do the same in their own blogs.
Set up a "comment notification address" to be sent comments by mail as soon as they are posted. (Comments tab)
Set up a BlogSend Address (E-mail tab) to be notified when someone writes a post in your class blog.
There must be other tips more experienced bloggers can suggest.

by Claudia

Are blogs similar to portfolios?

Why can a portfolio be compared to a blog?
A student's work can not only be collected, edited and assessed in a blog (the same as in a student's portfolio), but it can be instantly published.
The blog develops reflectivity in learners through peer- viewing because peers' comments and criticism can foster students' revision of their own work.
by Claudia

The Blog Audience

Can you explain why the article refers to the blog audience as anticipated, expected, multicultural and responsive?
Someone who writes a blog is conscious of his/her target audience and not only presumes his/her writing might be read, but expects it to be. This presumption affects the blogger's writing style.
Blog writers are at the same time blog readers. This duality pushes them to write comments to other people's blogs.
by Claudia

The Filter Style Blog vs The Journal Style Blog

Comparing the filter style blog to the journal style blog
A filter style blog is based on creating links with interesting websites and other blogs, thus building a network of multiple voices and perspectives.
A "journal style blog" is motivated by a need of self-_expression.
by Claudia