Blogging a trip abroad

Here's an interesting use of a blog that a colleague, Maribel Husillos, has been writing [some content in Spanish].

I'd always suggest that, to my mind, the best possible use of a blog would be to have the learners write it (which Maribel's learners have in fact done to a considerable extent).

However, as Maribel has been the group leader on a trip to Belfast, staying at Rockport School with IH Belfast, the real audience has been not the learners but their parents, as she's been using the blog to provide information on what they've been up to (and to demonstrate how much their English has improved!).

For a teacher taking a party of kids abroad there are lots of things you could do with a blog before and after, as well as during the trip itself -- to publish the results of a webquest about their destination, to give one example.

Project work: Detroit, Barcelona, in decline

Waiting for the bulldozer: Barcelona in decline

One of my favourite blogs (and RSS feeds), Boing Boing, brought me this Time.com photographic essay of Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre [ >> website, for more images].

You don't have to live in a city like Detroit to see ruined buildings (see image above, of Barcelona) and getting your students to photograph them (or construction sites or graffiti...) might make a great project which they could share via a blog.

Those less gifted with a camera, or interested in photography, could participate in the design of the blog, the writing of accompanying text, etc. If your learners have to either take pictures or write the text, they have to interact and communicate.

As I suggested in a recent workshop, one of the attractive things about such a project is the opportunities it affords for real language use to take place: you are setting up enjoyable, creative, real tasks, not fake role play.

Photographing what we eat for breakfast

Greek yoghurt with muesli; black coffee...

Here's an idea that comes from IH Barcelona's Spanish Teacher Training blog -- getting your learners to photograph the week's shopping (information in Spanish).

As you can see from the photo above, a possible variation might be photographing what they have for breakfast, with the idea being to post the pictures on a class blog. I'd suggest that there's a lot of mileage to be had out of discussing such things as a healthy diet, ranking who eats the healthiest breakfast (etc.), particularly if your learners are from a variety of origins, and -- once again -- the fun of creating something together appeals more than the exercises on food in my coursebook.

The idea came from a wonderful exhibition by US photographer Peter Menzel, in which the week's shopping was photographed along with the families from around the world that bought and consumed it.

Links landing in my mail box

All of the following links came to me via the excellent Developing Teachers.com Monthly Newsletter for July.

• 50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do, which might make a great discussion topic before your learners ever look at the site: Can they brainstorm their own list...? Once they get to the site, How many did they correctly predict...? And once they do get there, they'll find some fascinating reading
  
• The story of Jamie Livingston, who took a polaroid every day until the day he died, which (though you might want to limit it to, say, 30 days) would make a great project if you had a class blog -- get your learners to take the picture, in other words, and publish them together with a suitable, accompanying text describing the picture
  
• I was less impressed by StickyBall.net, which has games, jokes, vocab lists, worksheets and so on, though you might find things you could use.
  

The difference between the first two, above, and StickyBall is an important one, I think: in the first two cases, you would be getting your students to do things. In the latter case, it would be you downloading, printing and photocopying, to a considerable extent. Doing will produce learning, photocopying is much less likely to, if you ask me.

Don't go looking for things on the Internet, I always say: have things come to you. The DT Monthly Newsletter always brings lot...

Text connections: a creative writing project

With one of my colleagues, Carolyn Edwards, I recently participated in an experimental creative writing project, Text Connections, in which we got learners to decide on a story from a series of photos torn from newspapers, which they then had to tell by writing a series of connected texts -- which could include emails, shopping lists, police reports...

I think the teacher's notes are interesting and the learners' comments on the project particularly so.

Previously, we did a very brief trial run of the project on a session on our Celta course.

Making collages with Glogster

Glogster: Yes, and those creep crawlies moved about on the page... Yuck!

Like ImageChef [see previous post], Glogster allows you to create images, though the latter is a lot more sophisticated, allowing you to create much more complex collages, making it suitable for older young learners with a higher level of English.

If you got your learners to work together in pairs to create their collage, there is a lot of potential for interaction and language use. You can't quite understand how it works? Don't worry, your kids will get it immediately!

As always in the technology classroom, you want to make sure that language is English!

Alternatively, you could get them to create their collages at home and then present them to the class in an oral presentation.

See also >> Making animations with Dfilm

CELTA session, May 9

Hi, and welcome if you've come to this morning's session...!

I'm going to divide you into three groups, and ask you to look at 3 different projects which involve language learners using technology:

1. A creative writing project
2. Pictures on mobile phones
3. Score your own wonder goal!
   

You've got about 20 minutes to actually do the project (or as much of it as time allows).

Then I'd like you to use the "comments" feature to answer the following questions:

1. Could you have done the project (or something similar) just as well without the technology?
2. What would the advantages/disadvantages of using the technology be?
3. Do you think the technology leads to a lot of language learning with these projects?
4. What else do you like/dislike about the project, and why?
   

Answer the above questions in the comments on the appropriate post (ie. via the links above, not in the comments to this post).

>> See also
For any of you who feel that you don't know much about technology, you might find the Technology 101 section here on this blog useful.

There are some books on using technology in the Bibliography section that you might also find useful.

And here's how to change the default start page of your browser, which was mentioned during the session.

A creative writing project

Our pictures: we could just have stolen them from Google, but went for the non-tech approach!

Below, the rough outline of a creative writing project I'm team-teaching with a colleague next week, with two groups of Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate adults, most of whom use English for work, who have recently been working on register.

Our materials are a series of photographs of people torn out of newspapers and magazines... and that's it.

Stages of the project:

1. Ss (=students) look at the photographs, select 6-8 of them, and decide how the people are related (relatives? work? living in the same block? )
2. Ss decide what "the story" is going to be (someone gets/doesn't get the job, consequences, etc., etc...)
3. Ss make brief "character notes" on the people selected (name, age, background, character...)
   
4. Ss decide what written texts there could be that would "tell" the story (job applications, emails, memos, reports, post-it notes...)
5. Ss agree on and make any alterations necessary for the story to be coherent
6. Ss then write the texts (in pairs, not individually), and post them on a blog
7. Ss write comments on the blog (both on the content, and to provide feedback on the project)
8. Ts (=teachers) provide feedback, correction, etc.

At Stages 1 to 7, the teachers will also be providing help with whatever language is necessary...

That's the outline, we'll provide a link to the actual results of the project... But what do you think so far...?

Would you mind if I take a photo of you?

... and could you take one of us, too?

Here's a small project suggested to me by a colleague, Susana Ortiz, who got her students to take their mobile phones out into the street to take pictures.

They'd been practising making requests and asking for permission, and what they had to do was, in pairs, (1) ask a complete stranger if s/he would mind taking a photo of them, and then (2) ask another complete stranger if s/he would mind if they took a photo -- of the stranger.

Foreign students learning Spanish in Barcelona, they then returned to class to report back how they'd got on (no, none of them got themselves punched, though in most cases they had to explain what it was for, and they did get quite a few "no way's" before they got their pictures!).

What do you think of it as a project...?

Task #2: A six-word biography

With a partner, create a six-word biography of a famous person.

Example: So much talent, all blown away (Ronaldinho)

Click "comments" (below) and add it to those already there.

Don't forget that you should create a second comment to record what you think of the task.

Task #3: A photo and text

One of the images we produced (text in comments, below)

Take a photograph of an object belonging to your partner (watch, photo in a wallet, piece of jewelry, etc).

Open a Word document, save it in "My documents" and then write about your partner's object: why is it of value to him/her?

Task #4: A blogging project

We're going to use the "comments" to this post (below) to brainstorm a list of the 25 greatest rock albums of all time. With a partner, agree on one that should be on the list, name it in the comments, and add up to 25 words justifying your choice.

If you disagree with an album someone else has suggested, say so (in a separate comment).

Don't forget that you should also create a comment to record what you think of the task.

More ideas for blogging projects, webquests

A couple of very recent news stories that might make good blogging projects and/or webquests...

I'm assuming that you have a class blog with a group of adults, on which all your students can "author" posts (write, and not just comment, that is), though if you only allow your students to comment, the first at least would still work well.

1. Virtual fashion
In Britain and France, "the world's first virtual fashion game" Miss Bimbo has been a huge success with young girls (it's addressed to 9-16 year olds), allowing them to create a virtual self and earn "bimbo dollars" to give themselves plastic surgery etc. Needless to say it has sparked controversy -- and it's the controversy that I think would make it an idea that would work in class: your learners will want to talk about it, find out more, etc.

2. The worst food in the USA
The New York Times has a book review that lists the worst foods in America, based on their fat content, calories, etc (like the Chocolate Chip Paradise Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream, with a mere 1,600 calories). The article gives you a starting point for discussion and though they might not be able to find out all of the actual details, calorie counts, etc, researching "the worst foods in Spain" (or wherever), or "the worst fast food", might make a good project.

3. Plastic rubbish on the beach
The BBC's environment correspondent David Shukman has a report on the threat of plastic rubbish drifting in the ocean, which might make an interesting project particularly if you are teaching a content-based curriculum (or have just got to the "Environment" unit in your coursebook!), and particularly if you teach somewhere close to the beach. You might not be somewhere as dramatic as Mr Shukman gets to (the historic Pacific island of Midway), but you might try to persuade your learners (for homework!) to go down to the beach, see what rubbish they can find and report back (via their blog, that is).

Homemade webquests
If you wanted to turn these ideas into webquests, I'd talk about the stories first and see what sort of unanswered questions class discussion produced -- as I much prefer my learners to generate their own questions, their own webquest, rather than one I impose on them.

Alternative technologies
If you don't have a blog, you could still do all of the above, and could produce PowerPoint presentations or things to display on your classroom walls.

A single digital image... plus text!

Things that matter to me...

In the CELTA session we had this morning I suggested a project using a digital camera -- and the image above is one that one of you took.

What I would suggest is passing the camera round from pair to pair and getting the learners to take the pictures, and then writing about each other's objects (which will lead to more interaction than if they just write about their own object...). In our session, we didn't have time to produce the texts, but basically the text would involve writing about why the object photographed means a lot to your partner.

Incidentally, among the pictures taken this morning there were some lovely pictures of the photos of your kids which some of you had in your wallets. I chose not to publish them, and picked the one above, because -- on the grounds of privacy issues -- I'm always very reluctant to publish images of children (and would never do so of my young learners without written, signed parental permission).

The original idea came from techlearning.com and we've used it with people learning Spanish at IH Barcelona, publishing the text and images on our En mi bolsillo blog.

Great new things from a great ELT site

TeachingEnglish.org.uk, possibly the best site on the Web for ELT...

One of the first things I do every morning is check if there's anything of interest in my RSS feeds [explanation] -- what useful new content might have appeared on websites I know are interesting, but haven't got the time to check.

Via RSS, I track the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site, which this morning has three new things of interest:

1. An article on presenting new language
2. An article on how to set up a class magazine project (something which, personally, I would suggest you do online with a blog)
3. A question: What makes a good teacher?
   

In the case of the latter, there aren't currently any answers -- but I think it's a great question, and questions are things that, as teachers, I think we should keep asking ourselves about our teaching and our learners learning. The talk section on the site is an interesting one...

If you already have an overdose of information, and RSS sounds like a further dose, you could set TeachingEnglish as your default start page. As you can see in the image above, you would have spotted those three articles this morning.

Single digital image, plus text

Here's one from my CELTA session September 18th...

My suggestion was that getting the learners to produce a single digital image, plus accompanying text, would make a great project, for example on a blog.

My example was to take a picture of an object of personal value to the person concerned -- hence the shoes in the picture at the top of this post, which were brand new. You wouldn't of course have to limit pictures to that.

None of those of you who attend the session seemed terribly impressed by the idea. However, personally, I think it's a good one. Getting your learners to create, not merely consume -- that's what makes for good use of technology in the classroom. It gets them involved, it gets them caring, it gets them creating; they are active, not merely passive consumers of photocopies.

Still not convinced...? Here are two great examples, one by students learning Spanish here at IH Barcelona, the second the Portraits of Learning project on techlearning.com.

Arts and crafts with your learners

More from the very excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site:

• A new article on Art in the classroom
  
• One on Arts and crafts with young learners
• Full list of articles

Looking for something to do with English teaching...? Don't go to Google! Go somewhere like TeachingEnglish...!

Images, and where to get them from

Born to create... I could have stolen it, but created the image myself... Which is better for your learners?

My thanks to Jordi Castells, who came to a session I gave this morning, for suggesting the Hungarian site SXC.com for free stock photos, sometimes a very useful resource.

Free stock photos [definition] are basically ones you can use without worrying about infringing copyright. Jordi also suggested Wikipedia as another source, as Wikipedia uses images available under creative commons licence.

A single digital image, plus text
The subject of images came up as we were talking about a project which involved the learners producing a single digital image and a text to accompany (explain) it.

My suggestion was that the learners also produce the image, not just the text, with various possible sources:

• A digital camera
• Mobile phones
• Artwork (pens, crayons, etc) which is then scanned
• A photograph from home (eg. of when the learners were very young), and then scanned
• A program like Paint, which is very basic, but which young learners especially enjoy playing with
  

Alternatively, you could use a stock image from a site like SXC... But which is better, an image the learners create, or one they find on the web?

The worst option of all would, of course, be to steal it from Google-is-Evil... Who cares? Well, for starters, the learner doesn't care about the image if that's where it comes from. And caring is where real learning really starts...

See also

>> An example, "image plus text" project
>> Finding images for use in class

Our amazing houses project

Carla's spaceship house (not shown, the accompanying description)

The kids (8-10 year olds) with one of my colleagues here at IH Barcelona, Oliver Harris, have produced some absolutely fabulous houses.

The idea came from the Macmillan Heinemann coursebook Little Detectives Oliver is using, where there is an example. The kids then came up with a Sun Flower House, an Umbrella House, a Dustbin House, a Cloud House, and Shell House, and many others.

"Last year they came up with even more amazing things," Oliver says. "My favourite was a Rolling House, which was inside a football! Kids have just got so much imagination -- and the detail is just so incredible."

A blog project?
We're currently displaying the project on a noticeboard in the corridor. Had Oliver ever thought of incorporating technology into the project somehow, say, publishing the work on a class blog?

"I'm a bit of a technophobe," Oliver confesses, "but yes, I'm sure they'd love it."

The work they've done really is something to be proud of. There are two good reasons why you might want to use technology there: (a) because they'd love it, as Oliver says, and (b) a blog would be something to be even more proud of: "We made that!"

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?

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.

Word collages

Life: a collage...

In the Spanish Department here at IH Barcelona we have a blog project "Las palabras más bellas", in which students each write a post on what they consider the "loveliest" word.

A colleague, Susana Ortiz, got her learners to produce collages to accompany their words. She took a pile of magazines, scissors and glue into class, and had a fun 15-minute activity which also produced a surprising amount of language ("Can you lend me the scissors?", "Has anyone got a picture of a flower?" etc).

For the blog, the students used a digital camera to photograph their collages (with more language practice discussing how best to take the pictures...)

It was fun, it produced a lot of language practice, it had a neat end product and made only minimal, non-intrusive use of technology...

I'd suggest that is how we should use technology in our classrooms.

A room with a view

About 40, tie, expensive coat, shoulder bag, reading freebee newspaper...

I liked this idea, which came from DevelopingTeachers.com's March newsletter, in which Hall Houston describes some of the ideas in his new book The Creative Classroom (Lynx Publishing).

Take your students to the window of your classroom. Tell the class to choose a person outside and describe him or her briefly (you probably don't want them to stare). Now, everyone sits down and writes a paragraph about the topic from the person's perspective.

You might suggest a few ideas to them to get them going -- what is the person's name, age, etc; where are they going, what are they thinking etc.

Possibly you might use a digital camera to take pictures and use these and the paragraphs to decorate the classroom walls.

And of course if you had a blog you could publish them there (see also "comments"...)

The newsletter is well worth subscribing to.

Nice poster, couldn’t we have put it on a blog?

Nice poster, couldn’t we have put it on a blog?

The kids in IH Barcelona have been producing travel posters, which as you can see we then display on noticeboards around the school (and not just in individual classrooms).

I like having people create posters in the classroom: it’s the making of things together that I particularly like, the collaborative, creative writing involved.

If you don't have the technology, or ease of access to it (and it’s not that easy here), it's a big step up from writing it (on your own), handing it in and forgetting about it, which is what writing was apparently about when I was a kid at school.

Couldn’t we put it on a blog?
The same sort of project could, of course, easily go on a blog. Among the obvious advantages:

• The kids can post drafts
• You (the teacher) can write comments, make suggestions, etc. on drafts
• Other kids can, likewise, comment, ask questions, add things…
• Other people (including parents…) can see it
  

A blog is also longer-lasting than a poster, and they are again "making things together" but, with a blog, something bigger, which they can be even more proud of.

Taking pride in your work, that’s one of the things I like about blogs. Who's ever going to be proud of a scrappy piece of paper a teacher has scrawled all over in red ink?

However…
When your kids post it on the Internet, what are they going to illustrate it with? They could of course just go steal the images off of Google. Google stole them anyway, so why shouldn’t they...?

I’ve got my moral qualms about doing that, myself. If you must, then I’d say if you made your blog entirely private, you might just about dismiss the qualms. But what kid wants an entirely private blog? What’s the point…?

You could get round the problem either (1) by having the kids create their own artwork, scan it and upload it or (2) by having them steal their images but by significantly digitally altering them (with a proper image editing program), to create "new" images, possibly in the form of collages.

•If you don't have an image editing program, you can download Gimp for free...

Mini-sagas and 100-word stories

Mini-sagas
The idea for mini-sagas came from an excellent book by Puchta and Schratz, Teaching Teenagers, one that I highly recommend if you ever have to teach teens.

Their rules for this creative writing exercise are:

• Each saga must have exactly fifty words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• The saga can only be a story (not a joke, description of someone, etc)
  

100-word stories
This idea came from Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach, another book that all language teachers should read, and is similar.

• Each story must have exactly 100 words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• None of the words can be repeated

Yes, that is what is meant: if your title was 5 words, your story would contain a total of 105 words, none of which would be repeated.

You'd obviously require a fairly decent level of English to do this second one -- around Upper Intermediate at least, I would suggest.

What's this got to do with technology?
Of course, both of the above creative writing exercises you could do without ever going near a computer.

Whether or not you used technology for them, I would recommend a collaborative, process writing approach, with students reading each other's work, and commenting on it, before they ever hand it in to you, "finished" (another recommendation: Process Writing, by White and Arndt).

Personally, I would get my learners to write on computers -- apart from anything else as it makes it so much easier for them to edit and correct. Ask students to make amendments to something they've hand written, and they'll understandably be a bit put out. Ask them to amend a Word document, and it's just so easy!

Computers were just made for process writing...

Blogging projects
Both of the above would make great blogging projects. Have all your students as authors on the same "team blog", and get them to write their stories as posts, which they can save as drafts until they are ready for others to comment on them.

They could write new posts for second versions, and perhaps a separate one for final versions.

Important that they do use the comments feature... Blogging was just made for collaborative writing.

100 greatest albums

Born to Run: the really greatest album of all time, ever... And it did get on Time's list!

Time magazine has a 100 all-time greatest albums feature that might make an interesting class project. You might want to limit it to 25 albums...

Apart from reading and agreeing and/or disagreeing with Time's choice, your learners could produce their own list and argue which albums should be on it... Then they want to start to write it up...

A class blog would make a great way of displaying the information.

Rather than just nicking images of the album covers off of the Web, you could get your students to photograph them (example, above).

Time also has a 100 great movies feature too, if you (or your learners) would prefer that...

No... ? How about 100 greatest books...?

Halloween project

Halloween in IH... and probably celebrated in some way in many language classrooms

I came across this list of 100 scariest movies the other day and thought, "That might make a good blogging project".

A rough outline of a project

• In class, brainstorm, talk about "scariest movies", to see if we can produce a list of, say, 10 to 20
• See if we can agree on a rough ranking for them
• Turn on the PCs, and use a collaborative process writing approach to produce a plot summary plus what makes them really, really scary
• Go through various drafts, getting the other learners to commit on each others' work, and saving as Word documents
  
• Post the final version on a blog
• Get students to read the finished products, and use the "comments" feature to "vote" which they now think are most scary

Time sitting facing the PC screen...? I'd estimate it at under 30% of the total -- as it should be, I would suggest.

More resources
More Halloween lesson plans on the BBC, and on DevelopingTeacher.com.

More lesson plans for other days of the year.

Class reader blogging project

If you use "class readers" with your students -- ie you all read a book together, either an abridged "graded reader" or the real McCoy -- here's something you might do with a blog, an amazing blogging project done in a Missouri high school as they read Guerrilla Season, which brings in author Pat Hughes as well as the kids.

A class library blog would also make a great project.

Why? A blog gives writing a purpose (it's no longer just to hand it in to the teacher, to keep him/her satisfied) -- so that the learner wants to write.

I think a blog of this nature can also make the learner want to read a book, partly because they want to then write about it -- because it's something being done and shared in a community (the class, the members of the blog...)

Projects using technology for language learning

Four projects / classes are outlined in four separate posts below. Scroll down the current page to view them, or click the links below:

• Podcasting
• A class (library) blog
• Self-study multimedia exercises
• A teacher's own, private reflective blog
  

They are not necessarily intended as examples of good use of technology.

Under the "comments" for each, you will find comments made during our face-to-face session, and further comments by Tom.

Project #2 A class (library) blog

Level: Vary widely, Intermediate to well above

Circumstances: Students in secondary school, doing 6 hours English a week, with an extensive (though under-used) library of "graded readers"

Classroom time required: None; students do task as homework

Brief outline: Students are required to read a minimum 3 graded readers per term as homework. Once they have read a book, they will post their review on the class blog. Reviews to include title, author, brief plot outline, whether or not they liked it and why (not), links to 2-3 related websites, and an illustration.

Equipment required: None. All children have an Internet connection at home (with PCs also available to them at school).

To find out more about blogs and blogging:
This article on TeachingEnglish.org.uk gives a brief introduction, and you will find more posts on blogging here.

See also the "Quick Tour" at Blogger.com.

What can you do with a blog (3)?

Example 3: This is in fact a blog we do with people learning Spanish in our Spanish Department. We ask them to describe an item that they have in their pockets...


Question as before -- would you want to do something similar with a class of English language learners, why / why not...?

What can you do with a blog (5)?

Example 5 isn't a blog either -- again it's an idea for a blog, one that comes from my daughter, who is responsible for the illustration below:

In schools here in Spain, they get kids to write what they call "fichas" for the books they read -- name, author, plot summary, whether or not they would recommend it, etc (as you can see above).

In English language classes, graded readers (abridged, and with limited vocabulary) are used quite extensively, with some schools having class libraries of them.

My idea would be that each student in the class would read several graded readers, and post their "fichas" on a single class blog, which other students could then comment on.

Questions as before...

What can you do with a blog (6)?

Before the Internet, people used pencil and paper...

And finally, Example 6 -- which actually predates blogging, having been done as a class project way back in 1998.

As we were reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, we did a project on Cuba. Basically, that involved each student -- by lottery -- getting a theme (Batista, Che Guevara, Havana, Tourism, the Cuban Missile Crisis...), and then writng "between 250 and 350 words (neither more nor less)" (!) on their subject...

... which we then put together in the booklet form I will show you.

But, now, you could do the same thing with a blog.

Questions, as previously.

Portraits of Learning - superb use of technology

The Portraits of Learning project (a contest, actually) requires K-12 students to submit a photograph and "a short description of no more than fifty words about how your photograph reflects your personal universe".

Note the photo tips page, and don't miss the galleries of entries for 2004 and 2005.

Put together a similar project, create a website (or a blog) on which to display them and that's a superb use of technology in the classroom...!