Playing with ‘photo’ type programs again

1 comment

Posted on 22nd April 2010 by Shaun Wilden in Teaching

Looking through recent bookmarks I notice that I seem to have accrued a lot of photo-related ones. Perhaps I am just obsessed with photo apps (see earlier postings on the use of jigzone and pixuffle)

Three that I seem to have been using most recently in training sessions and talks are :

Fotobabble, which has been blogged about quite a bit. I have been using it as a way to personalize training talks, snap a photo of the place I am in, record a description of it and use it to exemplify how this can be used for speaking and listening practice.   I see this is a great way for students to increase their own speaking and listening practice.  Students upload a picture, describe it and there are a number of ways they can use it  – exam students can get feedback on their picture describing skills, students can create listening exercises for each other i.e. create a set of questions they share with class mates which then listen and answer.  Though of course they could simply describe things for fun with no need for a task, just for sharing and community building.

This one I a made for a training session in Padova, Italy as an example:

I’ve also become a fan of blabberize.  This, for want of a better analogy is the photo equivalent of voki.  Basically any photo you upload can be given a mouth, you record what you want to say then when you press play it animates the photo. I think it can be a fun exercise for students to mess around with, a motivating way to get students to play with language. Here is one I made for my marmite metaphor in a recent talk.

Thirdly, there is befunky which allows you to edit photos, personally I enjoy making cartoons out of them and though there are plenty of sites for cartoon stories, I like the fact you can use this along with photo babble – go to Befunky first, make the alterations then upload that to fotobable and say what you’ve done and why. This is a photo from IATEFL that I turned into a cartoon.

Anyway since I am only training and not teaching at the moment I can only give reactions based on training but they have been wholly popular so I hope you can get as much fun out of them.

Shaun

My IATEFL Talk

1 comment

Posted on 14th April 2010 by Shaun Wilden in Teaching

This is a version of the talk i did at  IATEFL on Saturday. The powerpoint is the same, I just sat and screen recorded myself this morning. It is about 30 minutes long as I edited bits and could not include the video clips I had in the talk. There is also a bit of a clumsy edit in part three for timing reasons. The websites I used for the talk follow the videos. Enjoy and if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment.

Making Digital Sense in the Classroom Part One

Part Two

Part 3

References:
These are the references and websites referred to in the talk:
The quotes are from various blogs:

http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/content/seven-deadly-sins-e-learning

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/aninteractivewhiteboardwhatnext.html

http://shaunwilden.com/40-reasons-teachers-use-technology/

http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org/2009/11/28/dont-forget-the-peda…

The other quotes were taken from:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ (episode 2)

From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education by Mark Pegrum University of Washington Press

The Origin of the species by Charles Darwin

The Ray Clifford Quote is taken from a session title at the virtual rountable conference last year.

Websites used:

Wikipedia.org

Blabberize.com

Wordle.net

Xtranormal.com – the ‘interview’ is http://shaunwilden.com/?P3QYa01Z

Glogster.com

Superteachertools (for the ‘millionaire’)

Youtube.com – (The Ferris Bueller Clip is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWzMyKSIbFY&feature=related)

Finally the questionnaire results are from a survey undertaken by OUP in America

IATEFL – What I saw on day one

3 comments

Posted on 8th April 2010 by Shaun Wilden in Conference |IATEFL |reasons to use technology |Teaching |technology |twitter

Back at the hotel after a great first day of IATEFL. Apologies if you follow me on twitter and got inundated with tweets, I use twitter to collect my notes from talks (I used to simply type them in word but now I can type, collect and share.)

Just looking back over all the tweets now, there’s no surprise that most of my day was attending the tech-related talks.  However the day started with a plenary on The Professional Life Cycles of Teachers and this gave a insightful overview of the stages we go through from the initial enthusiasm of our career through to ‘serene and conservative’ latter stages and apparently in 4 more years I reach ‘veteran’ status.

The first of the tech sessions given by Nicky Hockley really brought it home to me how much kids have embraced technology (when they have access to it, of course). This was illustrated with videos showing how kids use their camera phones and windows moviemaker.  Other examples of showed how school kinds (of 8 years old) in the UK were using Ipod touches as part of their day to day learning – from accessing weather cams through to researching history. The motivation of the students was truly incredible. We also got to see how phone cameras were used by language learners to produce ‘tourist guides’ of their hometown. Again the results were simply stunning in the quality of language produced.  Unfortunately I am not teaching at the moment but as soon as I get the chance I want to try this out.

It seems that phones and mobile technology can be used to great affect both in and out of the class – from projects to iphone apps for more independent learning. You can access Nicky’s talk here.

Next up the indomitable Gavin in what was essentially a talk aimed at those who have spent the last year naysaying the use of technology and talking about it being simply faffing.  Since Gavin and I agree on most things when it comes to technology, I was never going to walk out with much new, but the talk did show the historical use of naysaying from people in the 1700s worried about the introduction of slates into the classroom through to those saying that the intro of the biro would have a damaging effect on learners.  The talk explored myths, criticisms and worries labeled at tech use. Concluding by making the point that technology in schools was often a top-down process i.e. coming from the school directors. In order for it to be smoothly integrated into schools more thought needed to be given to how it was going to be financed (why spend all the money on hardware if people cant use it), support how are people going to be trained and the realization that this training needs to be ongoing and therefore how much support would be given to encourage technology adoption. We also heard not for the first time (and surely not for the last – well I know its not the last cos I say it in my talk on Saturday :-) )– that technology IS only a tool and if used correctly is not the domineering white elephant in the room.

In the afternoon I attended the twitter focused talks  – Graham Stanley on how life has changed since twitter. How it has become an incredible resource for teachers for everything from a research tool to the often-quoted 24/7 staffroom. For me as a teacher, trainer and writer, twitter has become one of the most powerful tools at my disposal and it was good to see how many people felt the same. In a lovely juxtaposition my final talk for the day was Petra Pointer’s excellent talk on using twitter with students. She explored why the so-called digital natives that made up her students had not embraced twitter and showed how she cajoled and encouraged them to take part. Twitter has now become a way for her students to extend classroom work from further readings, to discussions, and greater class cohesion through sharing of information. Again I can’t wait to try her ideas out in the classroom.

Overall I have really enjoyed day one on many levels, IATEFL is always a good place to catch up with people. This year especially so as many of my twitter PLN are present. On top of that seeing and speaking to so many like-minded people and being able to extend those discussions out to the web 2.0 communities has been great. I have also been reassured that others think like me, learnt something new things’ I cant wait to try out and for the most part being thoroughly impressed with the professional presentations put before me.

Roll on day two but now time for a well-deserved beer and catch up with colleagues.

See you tomorrow.

IATEFL LT PCE – My take on the day

0 comments

Posted on 7th April 2010 by Shaun Wilden in Critical thinking |IATEFL |reasons to use technology |Teaching |technology

Today was the learning technologies pre-conference event  at IATEFL and hopefully the discussions we had there are an indication of the quality of the talks to come over the next few days. The event took place both f2f and in second life with excellent discussions in both environments.

We had three talks followed by discussions addressing the use of technology in teaching. Mark Pegrum started us off with a talk on Digital Literacies (you can see the slides here) where he posed the following questions:

1. To what extent is it our responsibility to teach these digital literacies?

2. Are there certain literacies we should avoid in the classroom?

3. Where, when and how should we start teaching DL in the classroom?

The discussion group I was in raised some interesting points looking at the need for students to understand such skills as being able to filter information, being able to summarise what they read (leading to a sub discussion of whether twitter helps you learn to summarise or do you need to be of a certain level of skill already?). We also discussed the need for students to understand the need for contribution not simply plagiarise what they find on the web by copying and pasting. We also explored the role of critical thinking, with claims that technology was eroding the need for CT skills.  In conclusion we seemed to agree that there was a need to embed the literacies across the curriculum  but it’s a question of time (what with everything else we have to teach). And in fact the more ‘traditional literacies’ still have a place (perhaps more so with the emphasis now being placed on technology).

Next up was Scott talking about how it was reasonable for teachers to feel threatened by technology (illustrating his point with stories from the web such as ‘robots to replace’ teachers)  as its application in the classroom can lead to fundamental role changes for the teacher. He then explored how technology might fit in with a dogme approach to the classroom.  Is it possible?  He made the point that here are two approaches

1. start with the technology and look for appropriate ways to use it – this would be tech driven not theory driven

or  2. Look for a theory of learning and for appropriate tools with which to apply it

The post- talk discussion centred around these ideas asking us to consider ease of use and availability.  The group summaries mentioned similar ideas  perhaps best summed up with a set of variables we need to consider:

The teaching context, resources you have, the curriculum and its flexibility, how comfortable you are with the technology, the number of teaching hours, the language levels of students and training provided for the teachers.

In conclusion Scott reminded us not to be glib about saying teachers need to be trained (though in my training experiences this is always what teachers say to me) and that teachers will only respond to training when they believe it works , the best kind of training is experiential if you have experienced it then you will  be brave enough to do it.

We were asked to remember that technology  is only a tool but tools come with a lot of baggage, they do need to be evaluated on their merits and there are some things that are pedagogically bad, driving people back to chalk and talk (or should that be click and drag) as they merely foreground the technologies

Which leads to the final talk by Steven Bax which looked at how technology can be a waste of time and money if employed badly and therefore what can we do to normalise technology. The talk started by asking to consider that normalised technologies are invisible to us (i.e. we don’t see them as we are so used to them). Normalisation was the topic of the discussion, looking at what is preventing normalisation and how we can move towards it (something I blogged about recently).

All in all it was an excellent day of discussions, valuable sharing of ideas and an impressive harmonisation of first and second life ‘conferencing’. If I have one small criticism, it’s that overall the discussion was very similar to those that many of us have been having for a couple of years – perhaps an indication of how unnormalised technology and teaching still is? Now bring on the conference proper.

Guest post on the OUP blog

0 comments

Posted on 1st April 2010 by Shaun Wilden in Teaching

This week I wrote the guest blog post on the OUP blog – you can read my post ‘Technology in the classroom – the teacher’s equivalent to marmite?’ here