Website to create free brochures

Something very interesting also, to create free brochures (if they are for educational purposes). Really exciting, you can print them later. It would be useful to work with tourism, places, products, business, etc.

My BrochureMaker.com
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/account/login

MovieMaker. Great idea for writing a plot.

I was experimenting with MovieMaker to create a (cartoon) film and it is a very funny way of writing a story.
http://www.dvolver.com/live/moviemaker.html

The link to the my experiment should be
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="285" width="381" align="middle"

But I'm not sure the link will direct to it.

WEEK 4 Starting the blog with my students.

Today I was really surprised by the control of mind I showed and by  my 21 students' correct behaviour when we faced the ugly true that only 4 computers worked properly at the time of showing them their class blog!
However we managed to create the necessary e-mail accounts for students who needed them, to show them the design of the blog, to make them authors of it and to explain them how to get to the blog again.
I think I can feel proud of ourselves, doing so much with so little.

Another step

After all we have read this week about Oral/Aural skills and how to develop them through CALL and considering that the class I will work with in this Project has two main weaknesses: speaking and grammar (according to a group self assessment) I am thinking about focusing on the integration of these skills especially speaking as the objective of my project in the context of a thematic unit.
So I have started to search about how to learn strategies to speak rather than specific activities.

It will be a challenge for my students as much as for me, because it is the skill I feel more insecure to teach, as I have said before it is not just settting up a speaking task,we have to teach students strategies and tools so they are able to speak in a foreign language.

Tech-tutorial

I'd like to share this link that it is a tutorial with multiple entries from computer basic management, e-mails, excel, word, power point to the more advanced  topics of webskills. I found it after serching one of Ili's bookmarks, so thanks Ili.

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/archives/techtorials.shtml

Step by step: creating the class blog for my students and crossing my fingers!

I have just finished my first class blog for my Project Class, or I should say I have just finished to start my first class blog, because they will become authors of it by themselves, I only will tell them where to do it. And then they will write their own profile as a group, to finish with a reflection on how they felt doing all these tasks, maybe as homework.

I must recognize it was quite a journey to guess which settting, formatting and comments features were the right ones for a class blog, because it is extremely important to gaurantee a safe learning environment for learning, preventing anonymous comments. So I found the permission tab where I can choose who are the authors odf the blogs and who can write comments. I hope I had done it right.

Now the next step, to set up gound rules for comments and posts and to help those students who don't have a google account to create one to enter the Blogging world.  

WEEK 3 New decisions

This week I decided not to write only one post a week summarizing it but to add posts as I am learning new things or putting things into practise and I decided  this after reading the Project Report I chose. 

The reason is that I realized I should use this blog thinking ahead, recording  my findings and progresses in a way that it will be useful to create my Project and then write my Project Report. So I will try to post more than once a week as I'm completing my tasks and joining the discussions. 

I think this should be the aim of my reflective blog.

WEEK 2 learning experiences and reflections

This week we learnt about web searches and ABCD model to write objectives. We also had our first task for the final project.
About web searches it was very useful to look at Noodtools because it was the starting point to try new web sites and then share our findings on the class discussion. However the internet still remains an infinite universe to explore and I still get lost into it.
I put ABCD  model into practice in one of my classes and even when I'm not fond of structured planning I must recognized it was useful to check if my objectives were accomplished and in what degree and also to help my stydents know what they have achieved, though I did not tell them the degree I expected from them. I am going to use the model from now on, though I'm not sure there is always a behaviour to observe.
And finally I made up my mind about which class would benefit most from this project, though I will try to apply the project 'unofficially' with some other groups.
In addition to this I will share this knowledge about ABCD model and taxonomies with a prefessor and collegue who was interested in the topic after I told her about it.
I think I did my homework quite well.

Open and optimistic

I feel a bit strange these days because of this unusual optimism about applying technologies to teach. My biggest concern about it  was that I was not sure the frequency ALL my students have access to the internet, but as I'm thinking a bit more about it, they can do it at school! after or before their classes without going to a cyber cafe or to another person's house. So I think it will be a matter of habits and getting used to the new idea and and this goes for me as well! (Maybe even more for me).

Hello everyone!

This is my first post ever! I had made two blogs for trial but this is the first time I am using a blog with a real goal.

Honestly I had no idea about what names people gave to their blogs or what type of URL they chose, so I looked at those blogs you had created while I was doing mine. I have to confess that I changed the name and the URL after seeing yours! I suppose this only proves that Paulo Freire is right when he says that the dichotomy 

teacher- student does not apply any more, we are at the same time teachers and students, students and teachers.