1 minute recording… lots of learning and fun!

Hello friends!

I’ve recently tried at home with Andrea (my elder daughter/guinea pig)  , and thought it worth sharing here, as I believe it might work for all ages and levels.

“Lend us your ears!” via kwout

Basically, it goes like this:

SETTING: a radio programme in which  a guest must answer 10 questions in a minute.

RESOURCES: in the classroom: an audio/video recorder (students may be asked to share their MP3s, MP5s or mobile phones). For publication: access to the Internet (1 computer – less than half an hour). For the extension: pendrives or CDs + audio player in the classroom.

Software required: Web browser. Depending on the format you record files in, you may need an audio converter (recommended: convert to MP3 before uploading to podcast). An HTML Online Editor is advisable if you plan to beautify your entry. To check your final product is OK, the computer you’re using should be able to reproduce audio (i.e. you’ll need speakers or headphones too!)

1. Preparation: In pairs, students plan 10 questions (personal, or on a given topic) that can be answered briefly. Alternatively, you may draft the questions yourselves (suggestion: allow for, at least, some personalization). Then they rehearse as if one was the radio speaker and the other the special guest.

TIMING: in class, or at home, between 5 and 20 minutes (depending on how much thought is given to the questions, and how much they need to decide).

2. Recording: using MP3s, MP5s or even their mobile phones students record their dialogues. Alternatively, they may want to video themselves!

TIMING: 2 minutes at the most (not taking into account time at the beauty parlour if they go for video, that is! !!!).

3. Publishing: get the recordings uploaded to a school/class podcast or blog. Tag the entry in ways that can attract potential listeners. Post a poster in the classroom (or just give them the link on a slip of paper), and share the news via institutional sites you may have available. Use your networks (Facebook, Twitter, CoPs you belong to, email) to promote it. Encourage everybody to comment!

TIMING at the computer: 15 minutes to post the episode to the podcast (make sure your recording is in the right format before you get started, and if you want to beautify your entry with some glitter text, images or bold/italic fonts, prepare your HTML in advance, to avoid frustration). Remember you can ask volunteer students or parents to do it for you (just make sure they all have posting privileges at the podcast or blog in advance.)

4. Extension: download a couple of recordings onto your pendrive(if you have a recorder with a USB port in class, or the cables to connect them to the TV or player in your room) and play them in your class or to other classes. (NB: you can also ask your techie sts to do this for the class). Recordings may also be downloaded onto a CD. You can give the class a listening task (e.g. anticipate the answers / complete the qs / T or F) or just do it for fun! (and ask them to rate the programme, or whether they’d like to be the next guests!)

This frame can be used to practise:

• SYNTAX: asking questions; auxiliaries; question words; answering yes-no questions; any given tense; indirect questions;
• LEXIS: any given lexical area;
• PHONOLOGY: intonation of short and wh-questions (BTW, I was quite concerned about mine when I listened to this recording!:-(!); weak and strong forms (auxiliaries and pronouns);
• SKILLS: listening and speaking

Just make sure the questions follow some thread, and the whole thing sounds more like a radio programme than a test on questions!

If you have already tried something like this, why not post a link to your final product under the “Comments” below? If you try it after reading this, please come back and share how it went with your class!

Peace,

Gladys

Social networking: sorting the wheat…

I’ve read many colleagues’s concerns about who’s following whom on Twitter, and how seriously all this networking can be taken at the end of the day. In other words, does “n followers” necessarily mean better if higher? I’ve just learned about Twittersheep, and how by just entering my Twitter username I can find out what kind of followers I have:

TwitterSheep via kwout

Just took me a second, and has definitely helped me see what kind of “tweet”my followers would be interested in! And there’s no doubt of this: the better you know your audience, the more motivated you’ll feel to write for them, and the more effective your writing will become!

Here’s the article that taught me about this tool:

What Kind of People are Following You on Twitter

- written by Amit Agarwal on Feb 1, 2009

If you try Twittersheep too, let me know what you think of it!

And now that we’re at this, see what you can get by entering your twitter name at Twitter mosaic (also reviewed by Amit Agwaral, this time on Jan 29, 2009 – here):

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Unbelievable to me!

Gladys

Pageflakes for Educators

Last Jan 23rd, thanks to a kind invitation by Vance Stevens and Nelba Quintana, I had the chance to share an informal discussion on the potential of Pageflakes for Educators with colleagues who were attending the “Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments” workshop during TESOL EVO 2009. This was my first online presentation, and I felt naturally nervous, but my hosts’ incredible support, and the warmth of those who made a special effort to join us certainly contributed to making it a memorable experience for me! Basically, the discussion turned around 3 main ideas, namely, how educators can use Pageflakes (and similar tools, such as Netvibes or Protopage) for three different purposes: as a startpage, for lifestreaming or as an incredibly easy tool to create personalised sites for different classes.

You can now re-live the session (slides, audio and text chat, all synchronized) here:

http://tinyurl.com/090122baya

(thanks, Vance, for sharing this recorded version!)

Or simply watch the slideshow below:

Pageflakes4 Educators

A few afterthoughts:

• Pageflakes seems to outdo other options in terms of customisation options (themes and layout) and widgets available. It also allows us to create as many private pages as we need, whereas other tools apparently limit this to just one.
• On the dark side: Pageflakes team have been very quiet lately… Apparently, they started twittering on Jan 11th,  2008, but they never updated their status after that. I sent them a direct message just before the presentation, but got no reply. Perhaps it’s just someone using their name? Besides, their Twitter flake has not been allowing signing-in for weeks… just a sad coincidence???
• More worrying: while I was AFK, on a citybreak, Pageflakes was reported to be down for over 3 days. A member of WebheadsInAction mentioned twitters they were moving servers, but rumours went around they might be closing down soon. I hope it’s not true!!!

Once again, thanks everyone for sharing our learning!And a biiiiig hug to the inspiring teachers (esp. Nina Lyulkun and Mary Hillis) who encouraged me to look further into this tool by leading an enriching discussion at Learning with Computers during 2008!

Gladys

Ah! Of course, you’re all invited to visit my Pageflake: http://www.pageflakes.com/gladysbaya.

A case for social networks (Facebook)

I was surprised to read today in “Next” – Clarín’s issue on new technologies- Tom Hodgkinson’s strong rejection of social networking (actually, I read the Spanish translation by Cristina Sardoy of his article in The Guardian last Jan 14 ; see the original version in English here).
Though I quickly scanned the article online, and am not quite sure the translation (clearly much shorter than the original) totally respects his ideas, but there are some points I’d definitely like to disagree with:

Hodkinson writes:

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us…?

I think this argument is as old as the question of computers dehumanizing social relationships… to me, just fear of the unknown. What happens is that the Internet has allowed us to choose who we want to have “around”, making geographical location quite irrelevant.

Hodkington goes on:

since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image.

Now, there’s no reason why your writing on the Web has to be ungrammatical when your usual writing isn’t, is there? Like all the communication we have, you can choose what to show others… Now, if his friend chooses to stay at home “plugged to the computer” when he does have something to share f2f with friends who are nearby… I’d say he either needs therapy, or is time both of them looked for new friends!

He adds quite a lot about the philosophy and policies advocated by Facebook’s founders and sponsors, an arena where I’m really ignorant and so I’d better not discuss… In favour of objectivity, I must say it is there that Hodkington gave me some food for thought, and started me wondering w”ho is favoured by my practices” (paraphrasing Paolo Freire).

However, it is his conclusion that makes me dismiss it all:

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. … And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.

Now sir, maybe the things I am interested to read are suggested to me by my friends at Facebook? After all, by linking to the “right” people, and then to the friends of those friends (carefully selecting who to add as “my friend” according to my criteria). And in my case, my interest in educating with new technologies is much better fed by browsing websites (like The Guardian’s, which made your opinion available to me!), as the only books in the field are not easy to get and more often than not beyond my budget.

As for nature, maybe it’s the other way about. Maybe the time I spend at Facebook saves me hours of browsing for the links I want to find, and the time and money it’d cost me to travel all around the world to meet the teachers at Webheads in Action and Learning with Computers, among so many who help me keep developing professionally every day!

That’s all for now… It’s not I’m mad about Facebook (as I’ve said somewhere else, I only joined it after Mary Hillis’s kind insistence), but I do believe it’s not more than other tool… It’s the way we use that will make the difference!

BTW, if you want to find me on Facebook, I’m “gladysbaya”… And if you’ve never watched this excellent video yet, do not put it off any longer! (watching it takes just under 5 minutes, I won’t take any responsibility for how long it keeps you thinking about it!):

And now you all know why I’m not a regular poster… I can’t keep my opinions short!

Thanks for your attention,
Gladys