Week 4

Hi everyone,

When I explored the tools presented in this week I was fascianating!

Images are really a great, useful and magnificent tool to use in class and I believe that it is much clearer as well as easier to understand than just using words. 

As a tracher, I meet a lot of pupils who are visual learners and pictures are a great solution for them to understand the material learned better.

I liked the most the photofunia tool, which is not only using pictures but it also a tool engaged to play! I am sure the the pupils will love it. I also liked the tool of EFL picture sets and "pixabay". I entered these sites and on "pixabay" I saw such a beautiful, clear, clean and high quality pictures that I will definitely like to use during my lessons. In addition, The EFL picture sets provide a lot of pictures in different topics that can help us, English teachers, in class. We can use them as flashcards or even to play a game! There is no doubt that there lots of things we can do with these great tools in order to facilitate the learning of our pupils.

Week 3

This week I was untroduced to many different technology tools that can be used in class. Some of the tools that I liked the most are: Quizlet, FlipSnack and Wordle. 

I chose to create my own set of flashcards using Quizlet in order to teach my fourth year pupils new words. Since now we are learning about the weather, this is the link to the my set of flashcards on quizlet:https://quizlet.com/128534114/weather-flash-cards/
I chose to use quizlet because I think it is a very useful tool to teach vocabulary or anything else in an easy and fun way. Quizlet allows not only to see the words but also to hear them, to see the translation and a suitable picture. The pupils can also play games, chech their spelling of the vocabulary learned and be tested on the words. I am really happy for using this tool and I think that the other tools that I mentioned before are very useful and effective too.

FlipSnack is an online flipping book software that allows to convert PDF documents into Flash page flip digital publications. It's the good idea for those who would like to embed a book, magazine, catalog, newspaper, portfolio or any other kind of document into a website or blog.

Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. What you need to do is paste in a text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text - This means that the more frequent a word is in the text, the larger it will appear in the cloud. In addition, you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, project them in class on the board or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Hope you will also like to use these tools.

Hi everyone,

It was fascinating to read technology in education blogs and I really want to share the information 

with all of you.

The Cool Cat Teacher blog is mainly about encouraging teachers to improve education. I really liked the post about note taking- What makes “good notes.” What do they write down? How should notes look? If you think that note taking skills are just automatic, you are wrong. The writer advices teachers to encourage pupils to use visual note taking, means to draw instead of using words only. She also writes that the Using symbols, notes and such can help connect ideas in powerful ways. 

The Edudemic blog aims to connect education and technology. I enjoyed reading the interesting post about the best ways to use Google in the classroom. We all know that Google is a source of information but it is not only that. It also enables us to use lots of tools that can improve our lessons in the classroom. A very good idea that I read about in this post was to use Google in order to organize and create, for instance you can create a calendar that your students, their parents, and other classrooms can have access to. There, you can set up Assignments deadlines, tasks, and event notifications. In addition, you can indicate times you are available for student-teacher conferences. Moreover, teachers can use Google docs for having students to create collaborate on a paper, play or other project. It can also allow teachers to see a writing project in progress so they can recognize where students may get stuck.

The last blog that I chose is Klein spiration blog. I liked the post about the app that makes group work manageable. According to this post, group projects help students develop life-long skills, particularly strong communication skills and ability to take responsibility and ownership of their contribution. This magnificent app is called Ignite Teaching and by using it, students can work together with several people from the class. In addition, teachers are able to see to what extent each pupil has contributed to the project.

I learned all these great ideas from reading the posts in these blogs, hope you enjoyed reading it and expanded your knowledge regarding technology in education.

 

Hi everyone,

My name is Sigal and I'm a fourth year student on Levinsky. I have started to work as an English teacher this year and I'm very glad and happy to do so. I have learned a lot during this year and I am sure that I will continue learning lots pf interesting things.

I am very curious about what we are going to learn on this course because I really want to improve my knowledge regarding the use of technology. I think that especially nowadays, it is essential to learn how to use the tools of technology in order to engage our students to learn English and any other subject.

Hope we all will enjoy learning, Sigal.