This is first promotional ETC one minute message on Twiducate. Watch it and find out why it's an amazing Web 2.0 tool to use in your class to engage your students and increase communication with parents. Enjoy!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
BP4_Twiducate
I have found Twiducate to be the perfect Web 2.0 tool to use for my AR project because it's a social network for schools. With this tool I hope to be able to motivate and increase my students English language fluency outside the classroom in a safe virtual environment.
Who are the developers of Twiducate? Teachers! Therefore, this social network gives you all the benefits of a social network like Twitter by allowing you to include discussions, pictures, and links, but it also allows teachers to post deadlines, homework, and surveys.
What are the benefits of Twiducate? One of the best features I have found is that it helps facilitate the management of all your classes, as well as, making it user friendly for both teachers and students. For example, teachers are able to add multiple classes in their page, navigate between classes, and add all their students names under the corresponding class. The system automatically generates each students' password or the teacher can create it. Therefore, each student is able to login to their classroom making it safe to use and easy to manage by the teacher. Although this is a great Web 2.0 tool there are a couple of downfalls.
First of all, it's important to keep in mind that Twiducate is social network for schools; therefore, it is limited in includes features that we are used to seeing in social networks. For example you can't add music or videos directly into your post, instead you would have to add it as a bookmark. You also can't add pictures from your personal file, you can only add pictures from a url link. As for your profile picture, you can only choose from the avatar pictures that the site provides. Further, Twiducate is a new Web 2.0 tool and is still being developed to provide teachers and students with all the necessary features.
Overall, Twiducate is a great educational social network tool that you can use in schools unlike other social websites that are blocked by firewalls and administrators. Despite the downfalls, it serves the purpose of collaborating into with your students outside the classroom and gives teachers control and easy management of their classrooms. I'm already using it to share information with my critical friends and I will definitely use it for my AR project.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
BP3_youtube or Ted?
The web 2.0 I'm choosing to research this month is Youtube or TED. I recently signed up for a Youtube account to share some of my students movie projects. I think it's an amazing web 2.0 tool and I want to continue using it for educational proposes. I also love listening to TED, I have been using it since March 2010 for my classes and now for EMDT. I have recently signed up to TED and have found it to be very useful for my students because they can listen and read a TED speech as many times as they want. Furthermore, it's easy for me to create activities from each speech using the four language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I also thought it would be a great idea to have them translate some of the TED speeches since it allows volunteers to translate a script in any language. Overall, both are a great educational tool, but I'm still deciding.
http://www.ted.com/
BP2_igoogle Screen Shots
I have been having igoogle has my home page for awhile now; however, I never really paid attention to the tabs option or the gadgets you can add. I'm loving it more and more, and am an even bigger fan of igoogle!
igoogle Home page.
FSO tab
AR/CBL tab
ETC tab
BP1_Google Reader
ePals
I'm following this site in my Google Reader because it's a site designed to connect classrooms or people who want to practice a different language through projects. ePals is connecting classes all around the world and makes learning a different language with other native speakers around the world more exciting. This upcoming school year I will be using this program with my students, so I will either create a project or collaborate in one.
TED
I'm following this site because it's full of amazing talks by remarkable people and I have used this site many times for my ESL classes. I like how many presentations are translated in many languages and have an interactive transcript, which is useful for my students reading and listening comprehension, and conversation.
Apple Learning Interchange
I'm following this great Apple site for educators. Here they have exchanged lesson plans and ideas using the Mac software. There are lessons plans for all grade levels and subjects. It's amazing what people have done in their classes with a Mac and itouch/ipod.
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