You became a teacher to change lives. Edmodo is here to change yours.
We use Edmodo in ECO II as a mean for communicating assignment, homework, links and practical works. Its appearance is very similar to FACEBOOK, the difference is that Edmodo is not only a social platform, but also a learning tool. We found it very familiar because of its similarity to Facebook. On Edmodo, the teacher as well as learners can share different information with the group. For teachers is really helpful to see how students can work cooperatively, collaborating altogether with a same task, for instance. When I did my practices at secondary school I didn't have the possibility to use this tool since, although students were given the netbooks, they didn't use them at school so they didn't take them to school neither. But I think It could have been a really helpful instrument to remind them about their homework (they never did it), to share the information they need to do their trip journals, to upload homework, activities. Besides, they would have had all the material they needed for the final task there, instead of having lot of copies (they always lost some of them). And If you use the Edmodo planner, for example, you can make a calendar with assignments, so students can control their learning in some way, because they will organise how and when to work on the tasks according to their available time.
For our second practical work in ECO II, we had to prepare a lesson plan, in which we should include two different presentation tools: Powerpoint and Prezi. These are part of the immense diversity of web 2.0 tools, too. The idea was to choose the contents that we were going to teach in that lesson and design our presentations according to the purpose of the lesson. To do this practical work, we had to work with partners we had never worked before, so this was the first time I worked with Santiago and I have to say I felt very comfortable working with him. He gets on very well with computers, and, as you know, I don't. And that made me feel safe. We chose to deal with routines, and we narrowed the topic to "A typical weekend". Below I will share with you the links where you can see the lesson plan, the powerpoint presentation and the prezi presentation! We had to upload them to Mediafire in order to be able to share them. PowerPoint presentation Prezi presentation
If you want to use one of these tools, but you don't know which of them will be better for you, I share here and image where you can see what you can do with each of them.
We talked about web 2.0 tools in our ECO II lessons and how the use of them in our classroom can make learning EFL much more interesting and motivating, especially for those students who don't like the subject.
For those who don't know, web 2.0 tools are new ways of producing content on-line. People who use them can create and edit content in a vast variety of innovative ways . You don't need to download them, and you and your students can learn to use them easily and rapidly. All people can have access to them.
Some of the tools we worked with in ECO II are Wordle, Popplet, Voki. Here I write a brief description of what you can do with them.
WORDLE!
If you are going to work with a text in one of your lessons and want your students to know and remember the most important words that appear in it, you can use wordle. With this tool you can generate word clouds, highlighting the most relevant words or those which appear in the text more frequently. you can use different fonts, colours and layouts to give emphasis to words. It is an interesting instrument to get the most important ideas in a text. Once you produce it, you can share it with friends, students, colleagues digitally, or you can print copies of it.
POPPLET! This tool is very helpful for students as a learning technique as well as for studying any topic of any subject. With popplet they can create a type of mind-map where the organise ideas in a really clear way for them. They can use images, videos or texts, and each popplet represents an idea or concept, that can be related to other popplet, that is to say, to another idea. I think popplet is a very practical tool for students whose predominant learning style is visual.
VOKI!
With Voki you can create speaking characters and use them in the classroom as an original way of presenting new content or topics. With this tool you can play with your creativity. After you choose a character, you can select its hair and eyes colour, its clothes, and the place where it is. Then, you can type what you want your character to say, or just record yourself. I think this is a very fun tool and students would love to see and hear someone else talking, especially if your character is unusual and weird.
For me, it's great having so many interesting and motivating tools available for teachers and learners, since nowadays it's very difficult to keep students engaged with something. Many young students can't see the importance or don't understand the purpose of learning another language, and have really negative attitudes toward learning English, so the implementation in your lessons of tools and resources they are familiar with, would be a great advantage for keeping students motivated.
I'd like to incorporate all these new things in my lessons, but, unfortunately, I don't count with the necessary resources and facilities to work with them in my workplace.
