alice’s posterous

What do I remember from school? a song by Sting we learnt in my English class,  a trip to Verdun during my history class. This trip made me understand the word "war" as well as this book our enthusiastic History teacher made use read A l'Ouest rien de nouveau by Erich Maria Remarque. Apart from that, I don't remember much. Why? maybe because lessons were boring. We never took an active part in our learning, most of our lessons were about listening to the teacher's monotonous voice and to take notes. I have found that since I have a PLN, Google reader, Twitter and Friendfeed I have learnt so much more than I did during all the time I spent at school!
Maybe because now I can explore and discover new things, whereas before I was just a passive learner. And maybe that's why many students are not involved in lessons.

This video I found on Shelly Terrell's blog shows what learning should be about: FUN!

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After an interesting week at my school, this video reminds me that I am in the right when I try to teach my students some IT skills!
First I found out that most of my students didn't know how to do a slideshow using PowerPoint or Open Office Impress, which is even better because it is free to download so very cheap for schools to use. I had planned for my students to do a presentation on a Latin American country and we spent most of the lesson learning how to do a slideshow on a computer. Then, some students asked me if they could use Wikipedia to research their countries. I told them that of course, it was ok to use it! They told me some teachers did not allow them to use it because most of the time the content was wrong as the contributors were not "professionals". I showed them the discussion page where people can discuss, alter some of the content and they were amazed to discover this page. Obviously some teachers are scared of the revolution going on and talk about things they don't even know (which annoys me the most!).

This video comes from a very good post about the mandatory Youtube videos to watch. I had watched most of them but not this one:

What about you? do you feel a "lonely web enthusiast sometimes"?

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I found this fab quote today:

"A few of my keener students have asked me to give them with advice and hints to help them keep their Spanish going over the summer, in anticipation of next academic year. Earlier today, over at http://www.asisehace.net/blog, I provided them with a list of websites containing audio and video resources that will help them keep their Spanish ticking over and, who knows? They might even learn one or two new things. The list is copied below:..."
from http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=1187
You should read the whole article.

What about you? Do you have a list of fun and engaging resources to learn a language?

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Today, I got very exciting when I checked my email box and found an email form one of my year 8 student (12-13 years old) saying:

Hello, miss, here is my montage. I would like you to know that I couldn't find a music that would fit in my presentation, I tried my best.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the presentation.
Take care
bye

See My Montage 5/25/09 online.

For the past few weeks, I have worked with my year 8 class on a project about holidays. I asked them to prepare a spoken presentation about what they usually do on holidays and to add pictures on One True Media. It allows you to create a presentation with pictures and sounds (a bit like Animoto). I recorded my students' spoken presentations on Audacity and saved them as mp3 files. They then added their voices to their One True Media presentations. All of this was class work and I never asked my students to finish the work at home. So I was very happily surprised when I received this email on a Sunday evening! This student had got to one true media on her own and finished the presentation on her own! This is the first time it happens to me and this is all due to the power of web 2.0!

What about you? Have you had students working on their own without you having "to bribe" them? Do you think web 2.0 tools engage our students much more?

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Last week, we finished the topic about school with my year 7 classes so I took them to the computer room and asked them to type some of the topic's key words on Wordle.

I had already tried this lesson previously in the year and it had been a success, and this time because my students knew the tool already, they enjoyed it even more ;)

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I am not the best at being organised, especially when it comes to paperwork (because I can't stand doing administrative stuff!). Usually, all the paperwork is left as a huge pile on my desk and then comes the day when I have to sort it all in one go!

To get over this paperwork madness and other tasks I have to, my sister (@astrinity on twitter) found this great web 2.0 tool  called Ta-da Lists which enables you to create to-do lists online. So even if you go away and don't have your computer with you, you just need an Internet connection to access your lists. You can make lists to yourself or share them with others.

So far, I have made several lists including paperwork! and posts I want to blog (because I will think of an interesting post I want to blog and then will forget about it the next day!). Now, when I have time I look at my list called "blog" and start writing a post on my gmail account. If I don't finish writing it, I save my email as a draft and continue later. I forgot to mention that my blog is on Posterous which allows you to send an email as a post. In front of each of your list names, they are grey circles which are bigger or smaller depending of the number of items you have on the list. When you are done with an item, you tick the box next to it to remove it from the list.

This tool helps me great deal getting organised in my life and updating my blog regularly.

And you? Do you use any web tool to get organised?

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I had a productive day today in the IT room. Because it doesn't happen that often (i.e. computers don't work, the Internet is off, this site is blocked ....), I thought I would blog about it ;)

I used an easy web tool called BOOKR. Again I read about this on Ana Maria's blog
Ana Maria is an EFL teacher and works at a language Institute in Brazil, she also played a big part in the online course Images 4 Education. You can follow Ana Maria on twitter @anamariacult

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