Wow! What a wonderful tool! Very intuitive and user-friendly.
You just make a search, find your favorite songs, and the playlist is there for you. Also, the PodCrawler just keeps moving as people listen to music. Fun and with great potential for the classroom. There’s much more to it. You can easily grab the lyrics of the chosen song, among other features.
SeeqPod – Playable Search
Archive for the 'edutechbr' Category
When you are open to explore what out there, ideas, resources seem to converge. Coincidence, convergence, whatever…The fact is that for the past days I’ve been giving a lot of thought on how to best engage, hook students up front from the beginning of their e-learning journey. I’m devising an online course for Brazilian educators and the point is that if they don’t get excited with the possibilities ahead of them, how could they inspire their own learners? So, I’ve been reading, thinking and exploring a lot and just yesterday I read two interesting blog posts on how to use starters, grabbers, icebreakers in the beginning of a course. It doesn’t mean it needs to be online. How could we use attention grabbers to hook our learners, to have them motivated to take the risk, to collaborate, to inspire them to go beyond?
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.
Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:
Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.
Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:
Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:
I just tested Picwing to make a photo album.
Interesting tool for collaboration. Once you start the album, others can join you and send photos to it via email. For example, I created this album with Brasilia photos. If others have photos of Brasilia to share, they can just attach their photos in an email post and send them to brasilia at picwing.com . The photos will be posted to the album.
Possibilities: imagine a collaborative effort in a class on a specific theme? You can start the album and have students add photos to it. If they have a mobile with email, they can send it straight from their mobiles. How fun would it be to have something like that with photos of the “First Day of class”?
Interesting tool for collaboration. Once you start the album, others can join you and send photos to it via email. For example, I created this album with Brasilia photos. If others have photos of Brasilia to share, they can just attach their photos in an email post and send them to brasilia at picwing.com . The photos will be posted to the album.
Possibilities: imagine a collaborative effort in a class on a specific theme? You can start the album and have students add photos to it. If they have a mobile with email, they can send it straight from their mobiles. How fun would it be to have something like that with photos of the “First Day of class”?
This is the digital world. It allows me to be at home with my kids and still being in two other different spaces in different corners of the world with different groups I’m part of. And I’m just talking about UStream, didn’t even mention Twitter, blogging… Learning in a speed faster than light. It’s a quantic perspective of learning through the use of social media. Do I need to say something else?
BRAZ-TESOL Live, Ustream.TV: Live from the BRAZ-TESOL conference in Fortaleza, Brazil. Education via kwout
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Here’s Cheryl Oakes’s notes of the Edubloggercon East get-together.
Just came back from Martha’s Vineyard and was pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of using a mobile, taking photos and posting them straight to Posterous. It was simply incredible, mobile, capturing the exact moment and thought. I could post as I had fun. I didn’t postpone it from when I got back from the trip or didn’t have to write anything to remember. Just flashes from my mind and camera.
On a Bike Bus Heading to the Ferry
On the Ferry At Oak Bluffs Vineyard Haven At South Beach – Martha’s Vineyard Gingerbread Houses Leaving Martha’s Vineyard
Of course, Posterous lacks tags. I wonder if it is tracked in Technorati, for example. I’ll investigate that. Even so, it has RSS feeds and it’s a simple way to engage educators who have no clue where to get started and need something simple, efficient, and fast to be encouraged to take blogging seriously.
Here are the posts that make my first travel log in Posterous. Promising. I can think of many possibilities for a conference, the classroom and personal endeavors.
Travel Log
In Cape CodOn a Bike Bus Heading to the Ferry
On the Ferry At Oak Bluffs Vineyard Haven At South Beach – Martha’s Vineyard Gingerbread Houses Leaving Martha’s Vineyard
Of course, Posterous lacks tags. I wonder if it is tracked in Technorati, for example. I’ll investigate that. Even so, it has RSS feeds and it’s a simple way to engage educators who have no clue where to get started and need something simple, efficient, and fast to be encouraged to take blogging seriously.
I just tested Posterous. I heard about it from Ana Maria Menezes, but haven’t tried it before. Today, after Bee’s comment on the post about Google Docs and live blogging, I thought I’d test Posterous to see if it could be another option for educators attending a conference who have never blogged before. There are tons of options out there.
What I liked about posterous is that to start blogging, I didn’t have to set up anything. I just wrote a very simple post in my email, attached a photo, sent to post at posterous.com and this is the result:
http://carlaarena.posterous.com/my-first-blog-post-1078
Immediately after I sent the email, I got an email back with my first post and some editing options. I thought it would be a very, very simple way to get started. What do you think?
What I liked about posterous is that to start blogging, I didn’t have to set up anything. I just wrote a very simple post in my email, attached a photo, sent to post at posterous.com and this is the result:
http://carlaarena.posterous.com/my-first-blog-post-1078
Immediately after I sent the email, I got an email back with my first post and some editing options. I thought it would be a very, very simple way to get started. What do you think?
Now that BrazTESOL is about to start, and I won’t be there physically to attend presentations, I thought it would be appropriate to share with you what I just read. Interesting way to take notes during a presentation and share it with the world using Google Docs and live blogging.
I’d love to hear from you if you test it.
I’d love to hear from you if you test it.
