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.

Final symbaloo

After this two months and a half of this course, I had added some tools that we have been working with in class. I only added the ones that I think will be most useful for me in the future.

I think that Symbaloo is a tool that I will use in my personal and professional life as it is a very visual way of having all the important webpages you use in the same place, as some times I want to use a webpage and I cannot remember the name of it and with Symbaloo I will have all of them saved. I will also use it with my future students and I will add it to my class Blog, so students can find them easily. Moreover, I believe that we can also show how to use this tool to students so they can create their own learning environment. 

Final reflection

What did I know about what we have done this course?

When we started this course I knew that some of the things that we were going to see I was going to know them because I really like technology and I like to discover new resources on my own and keep up to date with the new websites that come out. But even so I have learned new tools and apps and also how to do new things in the ones that I already knew.

The tools that they already knew were Excel, Kahoot, Blogger, Powtoon, Audacity and Genially. Most of them I have used them during the degree and in the case of Excel and Audacity I was taught how to use them in high school.

What have I learned?

However, I learned that in Kahoot you can combine two quizzes, how to do the interactive images in Genially and how to use the condition that if a grade is lower than "x" it will automatically turn red in Excel. I also learned a lot of new resources such as Mysimpleshow, Interactive White Board, Story Jumper, Hot Potatoes, Educaplay, Quizlet, Quizziz, etc. 

What is going to be the most useful for me? And the least? Why?

I believe that the most useful tool for me as a future teacher will be the interactive white board. I think that somehow you can live without knowing how to use the other tools or if you don't know how to use one, find a similar one, but the IWB is indispensable nowadays. Learning to do exercises on it this makes me feel more prepared and confident in the future since it will not be something completely new for me but I will know how to use it in a more intuitive way.

I would say that the least useful tool is hot potatoes. I think it is very time consuming to get a result that other websites do online and in a simpler and faster way. Also the activities you can do are nothing new or original so I think it is not worth downloading it to do something simple that can be done online.

What have I liked the most?

My favorite tool is Storyjumper, I never thought creating online books would be possible and easy to do. It was something I really enjoyed doing and I think it has a lot of potential to implement it in class, as it is very engaging and attractive for students.

What were you able to do with technology when the course started and what are you able to do now?

I think I can more or less do the same things I used to do, but now I definitely have more alternatives to do the same type of activity, for example if I had to do a quiz I would have used Kahoot, however, now, I know that there are different options like Quizziz or Socrative. Same thing with presentations, I only knew Powerpoint and now I could also use Genially.

What do you think teachers in general and language teachers in particular should know about technology?

I believe that all teachers should have basic technology skills. There is no need on being a professional, but knowing basic things and different resources is essential. For language teachers it is really important to know about the different online dictionaries like Cambridge or Collins that provide reliable information and also other types of dictionaries like the collocation dictionary like Online Oxford Collocation Dictionary. As language teachers we will be working in English constantly and it is normal that doubts arise because we are not native speakers. For this reason, knowing these reliable websites is essential since many times tools such as google translate do not give us the correct answer. In addition, in online dictionaries we can consult something instantly, unlike with a conventional dictionary that takes some time to find what we want.

How do you think this course has helped you to become a more effective teacher?

I think that now that I know so many websites I can compare them and know which ones are more effective and if I find a new one I will know if it is useful or not. I also believe that I can create more diverse activities that help me develop the content I want to work on and better adapt to the interests and abilities of students.