Introduction

In this Blog you can find a collection of different technological resources that we have been learning about during the course. I created some examples for each tool so you can see how could you use them. Moreover,  I made a reflection of the pedagogical use that we can give them, as well as my opinion about them.

Initial Symbaloo

This is my initial personal learning environment. As you can see they are basic tools but, I find them very useful to study. I will add more resources to it as we learn about them.

Digital story - StoryJumper

Books are a great teaching tool especially in childhood education and the first grade of primary education. But in this case, we are going to talk about digital books. Storyjumper allow us to create and design our own stories and even add sound to them.

This tool can be very useful for teachers, since we can create stories with special characteristics that students are learning, for example, some vocabulary such as animals, colors, clothes, emotions, weather, etc. or grammar tenses. Another advantage is the fact that students can reread it at home as many times as they want. They do not have the problem that usually occurs with physical books that if there is only one book in class you can have it for a limited time or if you really want to have the book for yourself you have to buy it.

On the other hand, this tool gives students the opportunity to write their own stories so they can practice their writing skills and speaking and pronunciation if they decide to record themselves reading it. It is an intuitive tool that I would use with students from 3rd grade on as for younger ones can be a bit challenging. 

In short, I think that it is a very good tool to encourage students to write and give a purpose to their writing. It also allows us to do different activities such as, asking them to write a story about a thematic (Halloween, Christmas) or a book contest, so they start to get into the habit of writing and see it as something fun.

Here you can see an example I made

                            

                                                                               Read this book made on StoryJumper

Hot potatoes

Hot potatoes is a software that allows you to create different types of activities (matching, crosswords, multiple choice, fill in the gaps, etc.) so that students can play them online. In this way, we can make students practice what they learn in a more attractive and dynamic way. For example, if they are learning vocabulary about animals, we can create different activities about the same topic.

In this example you can see a crossword that I created that I would use to review vocabulary of professions in 2nd or 3rd grade of primary education.

 

Professions

Crossword

Complete the crossword, then click on "Check" to check your answer. If you are stuck, you can click on "Hint" to get a free letter. Click on a number in the grid to see the clue or clues for that number.

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Across: 4. A ____ cooks food in a restaurant 5. A _______ delivers letters that are sent by post 6. A ______ looks after sick people 7. A ___________ puts out fires

Down: 1. A _____ bakes bread and cakes and usually works in a bakery 2. A _______ works in a school 3. A ___ takes care of animals 5. A _____ flies planes

In this other example, I did a matching game about body parts for childhood education or 1st grade of primary education. Here you have the link to the matching activity.

I think hot potatoes is a good tool to create activities, specially because you can create different types of activities in the same software and you do not have to be using different apps for different types of activities. Moreover, although at the beginning it may be hard to use once you are used to it, it is not that difficult. 

However, I think this software has some drawbacks. First, adding images to the activities tends to cause problems because the online links sometimes do not work or if you download the images to your computer when you publish the activity online sometimes you cannot see them. Second, the process of publishing the activities online can be challenging and, as happens in the matching activity, when you publish it on the blog it is misconfigured. Finally, I think the layout is quite old-fashioned and not very attractive. 

Quizlet

Quizlet is an educational website and mobile application that allows you to create flashcards so that students can learn them and then play some games and quizzes. In English teaching it is very common to use flashcards to introduce new vocabulary and through this tool we can do them digitally. 

This website offers us the option to put into practice what we learn and we can find different activities: 

• Write: students have to write the image they see.
• Spell: students listen to a word and they have to write it.
• Test: they are shown an image and a possible term and they have to say if it is true or false.
• Match: they have some images and terms and they have to match them. 

These games are really useful as students can review the words and test their knowledge. Moreover, they train writing and spelling which it is very important as many times they learn the word but do not know how to write it. 

Moreover it has the option to do a quiz about the flashcards that students can take individually or in teams.

Here you can find my Quizlet. I created these flashcards to learn about professions for 1st grade of primary education.

I think this tool is perfect to introduce new vocabulary and learn the new words. We can use it with student at any level as they are always learning new vocabulary and you can create flashcards for all levels. However, I also think that it is important to put these words in context or with some examples, so that students really understand what they mean.

Videos: Powtoon and Mysimpleshow

Videos can be a very engaging and effective for teaching, we can pause them, watch them as many times as we want or even change the speed.

Powtoon

As teachers we can create videos about the topic or concept we want to explain to our students. With powtoon we can make very attractive videos as we did in this case to explain the main concepts about energy.

I believe that powtoon is useful if you want to create basic and simple videos. However, it has a lot of features locked only for the premium version and it makes it limited if you want to be creative or make videos longer that 3 minutes.

I personally think that videos are great to introduce students to a topic as it is very visual and dynamic. However, we have to be careful in how much information we want to include in the video or how long or short it will be. If we add a lot of information in a short video they may get overwhelmed and they may not remember anything they just saw. On the other hand, if it is too long they may pay attention at the beginning, but after 5 minutes they will probably start to lose interest. That is why a good valance of time and content is essential.

The language we use will also be very important. If we use video to introduce new ideas, we will use vocabulary that they may not know, that is why it is important to use an appropriate language according to their level and try to be clear. 

Many teachers look for YouTube videos already created by other people and in the case of  American or British authors they probably use an advanced language for students whose mother tongue is not English. Therefore, creating our own videos with tools such as Powtoon is very useful since we choose the content and language level.

However, it is true that making videos is very time-consuming and that not all teachers may have the time to use videos as a recurrent resource. 

Mysimpleshow

Videos are not only useful for teachers but also for students. They can create their own videos and put their knowledge into practice. 

With myslimpleshow you can write a text about anything you want and the tool converts the text into a dynamic video. In this case, I made a video of an example of an hypothetic task a teacher could propose in order to practice the past simple. Students would have to make a short text answering the question "What did you do yesterday?" and then use Mysimpleshow to make a video about it. Here it is the example.

Even if you have to pay in order to unlock all the features I believe the free version is enough to work with students.

I think it is a very attractive and different way of working with students and make them more engaged and motivated.

Excel

Excel or google spreadsheet is a tool that allow us to organize and manipulate data using, for example, arithmetic operations. In this case we used it to calculate the average grade of our fictional classroom.

In my case I had already worked with excel previously and I already knew how to use the mathematical formulas. The only thing I learned is to use the condition that if a grade was lower than "x" it would automatically turn red.

Here you can find my excel file

If we do the calculations by hand, it is a very time consuming process and we can make a mistake at some point and we may not realize it. However with excel it is as simple as adding all the grades to an excel file and write the necessary calculations for one student and the rest will be automatically done. I think it is really important to learn as future teachers how use this tool as we can turn the process of calculating grades from a slow a tedious work to something easy, fast and automated.

However, it is true that learning how excel works can be hard for some people or you can make a mistake and do not realize where is it or why is it not working. Nevertheless, I think once you get used to it and learn how it works it is a really useful tool.

Not only is it useful for teachers, but I think that we can also teach our students how to use it and keep track of their own grades. As it may be challenging to learn for young students, I think it is perfect to start teaching them in 5-6 grade of primary education. We can start by showing them basic things as how to create a chart with their grades and how to change the color, size, shape, etc. and then start with the calculations of their average grade and other thing they may want to learn.