Digital photography

Image plus text: "This are our hands. We are begining a game of basketball. We won 98-33!"

21st Century Connections has a very basic introduction to digital photography, and suggests some of the ways you could use it in your classroom.

The article says:

You're set to have your students "go digital" - shoot, edit, organize, and share digital photos - as they create information about the subject matter they study.

But it then perhaps gives the impression that you -- not the learners -- are doing all the work.

If instead you get the learners to produce the images, you save yourself a lot of time for starters, and end up with a much more interesting project. A project could be each kids (or pair) producing a single image plus accompanying text, like TechLearning's Portrait's of Learning, or the example that heads this post (uncorrected, from my daughter Isabel, 11).

See also
>> Digital Photography School, for photography tutorials
>> Can you post pictures of young learners?

Young Learners session, May 25

Teaching young learners with technology... Does your classroom look like that?!

Hi and welcome, if you came to today's session!

One point from the session, something I don't think I mentioned, but should have done... I think Peter brought the subject up but we didn't then return to it. If you are going to blog or podcast with young learners, you definitely must get signed written permission from the parents. You'd also want to obtain permission (first) from your headmaster/mistress or Director of Studies.

More on privacy here on this blog...

There will be a couple of other things relating to the session that I will add in the next day or so.

Can you post pictures of young learners?

500+ crayon points... that's quite a collection!

The subject came up at our young learners' seminar today... Can you post pictures of your young learners on the Internet, for example on a blog?

I'd personally say, no, and definitely not without your school's and the kids' parents' permission -- signed, and in writing.

Even then, I think it's vital to protect your kids' privacy.

In the seminar, one of the things I suggested you could have kids blog about would be the things they collect. I showed you the example of my daughter's collection of pencil points, shown above. I've partly got round the privacy issue by not posting a picture of her face... and it still makes an interesting photo.

But even then, I'd still get written permission to publish it on the Web.

Setting up a blog with Blogger

You want a blog...? First of all you need a Google account!

Blogger is one of the best options for blogging. You first step, however, has to be to go to Gmail and set up an account (1, in the image above).

Next, go to Blogger.com...

Next you want to go to Blogger.com, where you could "Take a quick tour" (centre of image, above, if you're still not sure what blogging is). "Create your blog now" will start the set-up process, which really is as easy as they suggest.

Sign up for Blogger!

You've got your email (Gmail) address, now you want to give yourself a "display name" (2, in the image above). Your display name is what (automatically) appears where it says "Posted by..." at the foot of each post.

Your blog title and address...

Now you have to give your blog a title (3)... It's about your thoughts on life? Make that "My thoughts on life" (or whatever). The "blog address" (or URL) (4) is where it will actually be published on the web.

What do you want your blog to look like...?

Your "template" determines (automatically) what your blog will look like. Choose the least horrible looking for now, and come back and change it afterwards (when you will also get more options), if you want.

... and that's it!

Your blog has been created. Click "start posting" to do just that -- it really is that simple.

Blogging... why it's just like email!

You are now ready to start posting on your blog. Virtually all the buttons there will be familiar to you from emailing.

While there's a bit more still to learn (how to personalise your template, upload images, create links and so on), blogging really isn't complicated.

If you can email, you can blog...

Protecting your (young) learners' privacy

If you're teaching young learners, it's absolutely vital that you protect their privacy, don't give away their emails etc.

No, you don't want your blog listed!

If you have set up your blog at Blogger, the first thing to alter is the default "Yes" marked (1), above. Having no links (listing) pointing to you will make your blog much harder to find, which makes this a vital step.

If you're using something other than Blogger, you'll want to take similar steps.

Determine who can comment... Under "Settings" > "Comments"

You want to change who can comment. The default "only registered users" (2, above) in fact includes anyone with a Blogger account -- which includes an awful lot of people desperate to sell you sex toys and Viagra (etc). Your alternatives are "anyone" (no, thanks!) or "only members of this blog" -- neither of which are ideal.

Assuming that you have made all your learners members (under "Settings" > "Permissions", see below), you want that third option.

Alternatively, if you did say "no" to "listing" your blog (see above), choose "anyone".

Mail posts to yourself

Under "Settings" > "Email", you can enter an email address (3, above), like your own, which means that any posts on the blog get mailed to you. That's worth doing if your learners are going to post to the same "team" blog; you thus get alerted by mail to new posts (and to any undesirable posts).

Who can read your blog...?

By default "Anyone" can read your blog. Change that to "only blog authors" (4, above) and only you and your students can do so (assuming that you have made them "authors" that is).

If you were the sole author, writing for your students, selecting "only people I choose" would limit your audience to the class (and would require log in, as you can see above.)

Protect your profile, too
From the top right hand side of your screen, you can access your "dashboard", which allows you to manage your blog (or blogs, if you have more than one), and to edit your profile.

The default settings for your profile are shown below:

You don't want young learners to share their profile with the world (5, above), so click that off; you don't want their names published (6), leave that as it is; and -- vitally -- you don't want to reveal their email accounts (7), so leave that too.

And finally...
With young learners, you should also obtain the school's permission to blog, and (written, signed) permission from the parents.

Using pictures in class

Picture from a Picasa album projected from a laptop (foreground) on to the whiteboard

I liked an idea Jamie Keddie demonstrated at a teacher development workshop here at IH Barcelona the other day.

Using a laptop and projector, Jamie accessed his Picasa photo album and used images in it for a variety of classroom activities. One fun thing he showed us was how easy it is to crop images in Picasa, show only half of the picture and get learners to predict what they think is happening.

Of course, if you wanted to get hi-tech, with an interactive whiteboard, you could cut out the cropping part, and just access images on a USB drive, using a mask to hide or reveal as much as you wanted.

You also need to spend time actually finding the images that are going to work like that. Hating to spend time trawling the Web for things, personally I like a no-tech solution: one of the freebie newspapers we have in Barcelona is ADN. Check it out, if you can -- there is a great picture nearly every day on page 2 which is often the makings of a class.

Granted, projected on to a large whiteboard, Jamie's images (see example, above) looked more impressive than something torn from the morning's paper...

Teaching other languages

Some of you that do the CELTA course in Barcelona with us in fact finish up teaching other foreign languages, not English -- or sometimes both.

Some online resources you might find useful (possibly also as learners of other language yourselves):

• The Times Educational Supplement (TES) has a huge bank of resources for teaching foreign languages (it also has a useful weekly email about new resources, etc)
  
• LanguageGuide.org has "free sound integrated resources for learning languages" developed by volunteers. For some languages (English, French, Spanish...) you have grammar as well as vocabulary sections
• Internet4Classrooms.com has a series of links to resources on other sites for French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew...
• There are a number of UK-based bodies with good resources -- like the resources bank at the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at the University of Southampton; CILT, the National Centre for Languages; or Scotland's MFLE, which also has an interesting modern languages blog
  
• If the language you are interested in has an official body like the British Council, their websites are also a good place to look -- somewhere like the Instituto Cervantes (for Spanish) or the Goethe Institute (for German)
  

See also
There was an discussion recently on Answers.com as to "Which language is more difficult for you to learn as a second language?", which itself might make for an interesting class discussion.

On nvtc.gov you will find extensive information on the languages of the world, with Wikipedia also being a good site for information about languages.

Holiday plans, anyone?

May's DevelopingTeachers.com newsletter has a holiday plans lesson that looks interesting.

It doesn't actually use the term "webquest", but you have the makings of one there in the links provided.

>> More about webquests
>> More about email newsletters for ELT

Ficlets: collaborative stories

I think this also came from May's DevelopingTeachers's newsletter...

Ficlets ("a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world") looks like a website (currently in Beta) you could have your learners write on directly as a project.

They explain:

Once you've written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you'll never guess where (or even if!) it ends.

Or you could take the idea and have your learners publish their (collaborative) stories on your own class blog (or elsewhere, eg. as posters on your classroom walls).

On the Ficlets site, you have a maximum of 1,024 characters for your stories. On your own site you could try mini-sagas, with a fixed word length (or limit -- ie. exactly 100 words, or "not more than" 100 words).

Larry Ferlazzo's great collection of links

Another site I came across recently is Larry Ferlazzo's great collection of links, (over 7,000 at present) which also has a great RSS feed, as well as an email subscription service, if you prefer that.

10 different uses for an ipod

And you thought an ipod was for listening to music...?

This one came to me via one of my favourite RSS feeds [explanation], AssortedStuff: suggestions for 10 "different" uses of your ipod, which is on a site I wasn't familiar with, OpenCulture.

I always poke around sites I come across -- what else is there that's of interest? OpenCulture has some podcasts for learning a variety of foreign languages, including English.

Now that's a site you could use and recommend to your learners!

Second Life posts

A list of the posts here on Tech ELT Blog on Second Life... so far! In reverse chronological order:

• Second Life: where to find out more
• Second Life: the hype
• Virtual worlds here to stay
  
• Second Life: where to get started
  

There is an index of all posts -- on all other topics -- here.

Some day I'll get round to labeling them all properly!

Will new technology get adopted?

One of my favourite technology blogs is Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog.

From my Blue Skunk RSS feed [explanation] this morning, this chart enabling you to work out the probability that technology will get adopted large scale.

Doug asks, "What are the chances of large scale adoption of (...) Second Life?"

I make that low...!

Happiness is...

Here's one from the Staff Room here at IH, where Ellie and Caroline, two of my colleagues, were planning a lesson on "happiness".

Their starting point was a video that came from instant-ideas.com, from which they'd moved on to a section on the BBC on a "happiness formula".

It looked like it was going to make for a fun lesson...

Linking with another school

Here's one that came to me in the Times Educational Supplement's weekly newsletter, which keeps you updated on the latest additions to its excellent resource bank.

This particular article has suggestions on how to get started with linking up with another school, in order to do project work etc.