Is your Yahoo (etc) account safe?

Someone asked me the questions yesterday: (a) is it possible to obtain someone's Yahoo (or Hotmail, etc) password -- and thus read their mail -- and (b) how do you do it?

The answers: (a), yes, 12-year-olds at my son's school can do it, and then impersonate others on Messenger; and (b) I don't know -- I said -- but go to Google-is-Evil and you can be sure you can find out.

The key to successful search is often knowing the operative keywords. If you want to know the answer to (b), your operative keywords are "hack" and/or "crack"... I got over 2 million results, and I'll leave it at that.

Fortunately, apart from the Evil, there's lots of good stuff on the Web. If you have a Yahoo account, Yahoo have a good security section, and specific suggestions on how to create a safe password.

A safe password is long, contains numbers and symbols and is not your birthday, among other things...

If you're using Hotmail (or whatever), check their recommendations out too.

If you're using MySpace, just don't...!

More on online security...

What (doesn't) make a good task in the computer room?

Barcelona, as seen on satellite image provided by Google Earth

In a previous post, I provided links to three articles on what makes a good language classroom task.

There ought to be a lot of overlap between that and what makes a good task if you are taking your learners to the computer room, and I think there is.

Here's an example of a task that I think is poor, which comes from the Winter 2006 issue of a magazine I like a lot, iT's for Teachers (which incidentally has a lot of good things online).

The task (the fourth for a lesson plan that began by looking at five aerial photographs of historic sites, including the Great Wall of China):

Get your students to use Google Earth to search for places around the world, including one or more or the places they have seen in the photographs. Can they find an aerial picture of their school or home?

What's wrong with that as a task...?
My doubts are as follows. I provide only questions -- if you want to suggest answers, that's what the "comments" feature is for...

• What is the aim of the task?
• What language are they going to learn or practise in doing the task?
  
• What are they going to do with what they produce?
  
• What's the return on investment?

I'd ask pretty much the same questions of most computer room language tasks, and one of my answers to the third would almost invariably be "Well, I guess they could blog it...!"

Barça's Nou Camp stadium, pictured via Google Earth. Wow...! But what language do they learn from it.

Technical note
Google Earth requires (free, easy) installation: note that you might not be able to do that on your school's PCs.

And -- again, importantly -- does the amount of language they are going to learn from the task really compensate for the time it's going to take to install?

What makes a good task?

What is a task, anyway? A task is "any language learning activity that the students do in their classes" (game, comprehension questions, gap-fill exercises, etc), says this article by Andrew Littlejohn.

I like some of the questions the article poses:

• What is the aim of the task?
• Where do the ideas and language come from?
• How personally involving is the task?
• What happens to what the students produce?
  

We might also ask who the ideas and language come from -- from the teacher or the learners?

In a second part of the article, Making good tasks better, Littlejohn suggests that we can "improve a task if we can increase the amount of ideas and language that the students are expected to produce" -- in other words if it's not the teacher providing all of it.

In a third article on Language Learning Tasks and Education, the same author asks other questions that I think we should ask ourselves when designing classroom tasks.

Blogger Beta

Blogger Beta: Drag and drop your page elements wherever you want... in theory!

If you are creating a new Blogger account, you'll now be creating it with the new "Blogger Beta".

Setting a blog up with Blogger Beta is virtually unchanged [how to set up a blog on the "old" Blogger], but once you've got it up and running, adding things like lists of links are a lot more intuitive, as you can "drag and drop" them, rather than having to edit the code.

In the image above, for example, you can see me dragging my "links" section, which I want to appear above the "+info" section of my page.

One other big advantage of Blogger Beta is that it means that you can add "labels" (aka categories) to your posts -- which means that your user can then navigate the posts labelled (for example) "blogging" or "grammar", or whatever other labels you want to give them.

So far, the only real problem I've come across is that it seems a lot harder to do things if you want to be able to create a truly personal design (not something you want to attempt anyway if you are starting out in blogging).

The Blogger Beta "help" file is not quite as comprehensive as the old one. Partly that's because up front, things got simpler -- but get down under the hood, and it's more complex.

As a geek, wanting to get my hands dirty, I'm glad I came across Blogger Beta for Dummies, which is very useful in explaining how to do things if you really want to know.

The Google Groups for Blogger are somewhere else you could turn to for help.

Not exactly Age of Empires

Age of Empires: building yourself an entire world...

One reason teachers take their learners to the computer room is that it's "more exciting", "more interesting" than being in the traditional classroom.

That may be true -- we shouldn't assume that what we ask our learners to do is actually going to be exciting.

It probably isn't, not if you're a kid who's grown up on video games -- like some of the stunning PlayStation football games, or Age of Empires.

Age of Empires lets you start from scratch with just a few villagers, build houses and cultivate crops, hunt wild boar and chop down trees -- and from there go on to build an entire empire, with castles and universities and monasteries...

A HotPotatoes exercise on a computer might be fractionally more motivating than yet another grammar exercise in your Headway coursebook, but it's not exactly Age of Empires...

Making animations with young(-ish) learners

Here are two sites which enable your learners to make fun animations.

Dfilm MovieMaker allows you to select your character (eight can be seen, left above), add what they're saying, etc, etc.

Dfilm.com
Using Dfilm's MovieMaker you pick from a choice of preset backgrounds, skyscapes, scenarios (rendez-vous, chase...) and characters, write their lines, add music and -- in a series of straight-forward clicks, create your animation.

Once you've finished, you can send it to a friend -- or yourself -- which will then give you the URL (address), so that you can see it again.

ZimmerTwins (above) gives you just three characters to play with but some crazy additional features...

ZimmerTwins.com
At ZimmerTwins you can create similar animations, though you've only (currrently) got three characters to play with. You can save your movies, watch other people's and comment on them, among other features.

Like Dfilm, it's very intuitive to work with -- and kids will love exploring what you can do with it. The "How to make a movie" section explains all, if you are in any doubt (and makes good listening comprehension practice too!)

Note that you have to register (and provide an email address). You could get round your students doing that by registering yourself, and having them use your username.

Which is better?
Of the two, besides not requiring registration, Dfilm also has the advantage that your learners can input more text (important if you want them to be able to write some English).

On the other hand, ZimmerTwins seems to offer more "fun" features. If you've got really young learners, who don't know much English, it might be a better choice.

What would you do with these sites?
Make animations, of course... But what you really want is for your learners to get some language learning and practice out of it -- and it's all too easy for the class to go silent (or real noisy!) while they fiddle with the animations but learn and practise zero English...

Providing them with a list of characters and features first and -- in pairs -- getting them to storyboard their animation first, before logging on, might be the best way to go about it.

When they do then get on-site, they will probably then have to discuss how they are going to adapt their storyboard to what the site can actually do -- but that can only be a good thing!

What's the point?
For your learners, it's a fun, motivating activity. For the teacher, it must produce that language learning and practice.

If it doesn't, should you be using this technology...?

Technical note
Note that you might need to upgrade your Flash Player (an easy download, provided you have "administrator permissions" on your PC/s, which you might not if you are in a school).

National icons: a webquest, blogging project?

A cup of tea, a national icon... Not so the Digestive biscuit (yet!)

Among the Yahoo headlines this morning, "Underground map and red telephone boxes become English icons".

The website www.icons.org.uk has a long list of "England's best-loved things" -- including cheddar cheese, a cup of tea, The Archers, Dr Who and fish and chips. You want to suggest another, you can...

Apart from the possibility of using the site (and others) for a webquest, you could probably build an interesting blog project on the same idea -- the things that your learners regard as being icons for their own country.

Note the "what is an icon" section.

You want a digital copy of the Yahoo article for use in class? Ask me...

List of faux pas, by country

Not sure that you'd get a lot more out of this than a class discussion, but Wikipedia has a list of faux pas, ordered by different countries.

Not sure that students here in Spain would agree with some of the faux pas in Spain -- but that in itself would get the discussion rolling...

10 things you shouldn't do online

An article on schoolcio.com that you should read if you use the Internet in any way whatsover: "10 Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online".

They include:

• Clicking on email attachments from unknown senders
• Opening HTML or plain-text messages from unknown senders
• Participating in chat rooms or social networking sites (like MySpace)

Having a geek for a Dad, my daughter got into the Web almost before she could speak any English. I taught her to trash immediately any mail she got from unknown people and one of the first phrases in English I can remember her producing was "Better safe than sorry".

"Grandpa just sent me an attachment," Isabel (now 10) said the other day. "Should I trash it?"

Now there's a savvy Internet user...!

Why are British teenagers so badly behaved?

Here's a discussion on the BBC that might make for an interesting class activity -- Why are British teenagers so badly behaved?

Basically it's a list of reader comments. You could get your learners to read through it, noting suggested answers to the question.

You'd then have the basis for a class discussion (which do they think are the most likely/unlikely explanations, etc), and could compare with their own country...

They could also write answers on the BBC discussion board.