marina’s posterous

A reflective space on a online journey of an EFL teacher to become familiar with webtools 



October 30, 2008

RSS in 100 words!

    RSS is an easy way  to keep up with news and information that are important for us. What makes it easy is that it  helps us save time, because   instead of  browsing and  searching for information on many different websites, this information, called feeds, are sent straight to us, and all we have to do is open an account at google reader and then subscribe to the sites which we want to receive information from.  I feel I still have a lot to learn about RSS, but just having all the information aggregated is already a big thing for me.

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October 12, 2008

Blogging-week 3 reflection

Well, I have had different types of experiences with blogging. Before we started this course, I tried to make a blog with My juvenile 7 students, unfortunatly I didn't get them to participate a lot.So, the rabbit saying "hi loser" expresses my first feelings about this blogging experience. Well, when we had to create a blog as a task I decided to give it a shot and try it with my adult students. So far, they have been responsive to it, they were really happy when Dennis and Carla replied to the blog. The fact that they actually had foreigners communicating with them made the blogging more meaningful. I think our biggest challenge as teachers is maybe to make our students use the blog and actually post. I personally think that there is no magic formula to that, but I see blogging as an extra tool to make the content we teach in class more meaningful. I looked around some bloggings, and we can find all kinds of blogging about all kinds of subjects, so , for example , if we have a lesson about music we can create a post about that, but also type links of other blogs/sites/videos for them to look around and reply. I believe that half of the learning that occurs is our responsibility and the other half is our students', we can't guarantee that our sudents will actually participate in the blogs, access the sites, but it is up to us to make them available to our students and hope they make the best out of it!
The music "A whole New World" is the one that best expresses how I feel about blogging and this whole web tool experience

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October 3, 2008

My Reflection on social bookmarking

- How can online social bookmarking help you?
Although i haven't been able to share my bookmarks yet, nor did I have time to search for many, I have explored some of the bookmarks posted I thought some of them had great ideas. There is this one whose name I can't remember now, suggested by carla that is a world of ideas in itself. I think socialbookmarking helps us to connect to and to share great links with people who have the same interes as us, and it also saves us a lot of research time.

- What are the advantages of having bookmarking as a social activity?
As mentioned before, I think it is a great, fast and organized way to gain and share knowledge with people who have the same interest as us.

- How could Diigo be used in your classroom?

Diigo can be a great way of sharing interesting topics with students and also grammar related sites of the topics covered in class. It is a great resource of tools and ideas that can be used in order to make our classes more interesting!



- What were your main difficulties to get started with social bookmarking?
Sharing the bookmark!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- Did you find any interesting resources shared by your peers? Please, add the link to it.
As mentioned before i found this great one recommended by carla http://eflclassroom.ning.com/index.php
http://www.slide.com
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/resources/professional

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September 20, 2008

Reflecting on learning and tech-richness

September 20, 2008

How do your students learn?

I think students learn a language when they actually experience all the input that was given to them. Teaching another language is like giving students a map of a route they have to take and showing them where they have to go, but only when they are out there in the real world can they actually understand what the road is like. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that a student doesn't learn in class, but experience is the key for the learning to occur, that's why music, videos, conversations, speech classes, oral drillings, writings, readings are so important in the class, they offer students an extra opporunity of experiencing the language.

How much tech-richness does your curriculum provide?

Technology is naturally becoming part of our curriculum, but I feel that it hasn't reached the place it is supposed to be, but it is getting there.

How are you using the WWW to teach your students?

Up to now, I havn't used it much. I mostly use it to do grammar exercises, or to find complementary information to topics. I use the orkut to keep in tpuch with my students and i have just started using blogs with my juvenile students.

How do we turn our 21st century classrooms into learning engines?

By giving them as many chances to experience the language as we can. The web surely has a crucial role , it allows our students to experience the language in real contexts such as in blogs, chat rooms, communities, online projects, and so on, so I believe that the more of the real world we bring to our classrooms, the more  our students will learn.

 

 

Are you engaging your students?

I'm trying to.

What are your main barriers to incorporating technology into your classroom?

Lack of knowledge, lack of time, lack of equipments.

 

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September 20, 2008

My Adventure as an EFL Web Educator


Hi Everyone! This blog is part of my adventure as an EFL Web Educator student. Up to now, I'm amazed about everything the web has to offer. There is so much going on here for me to learn, so many people to meet, so many things to learn and teach. I really expect to come out of this aventure  as a better teacher! I've been trying to get familiar with blogs, wikis, videos, learning communities and the more I know the more I want to know!
I guess that is it for now, but I'll post more soon!
,
Marina

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