Ingles360

Linguistics, the Internet +David Crystal | Kalinago English

Do take a look at this lively discussion!
Ruth

Linguistics, the Internet +David Crystal | Kalinago English

Global Learn Day live on Dublin FM Community Radio

In the European section of Global Learn day the show is sent live on the air by radio from Dublin, Ireland. The technical details for participoation and listening are on this page ben300.com/GLDTEN/?p=52
They're using noisy splitters and referring to this as a Talk Show!

John Hibbs the leader of Global Learn Day is now praising the Community Radio and usage of "ordinary mobile phones". I certainly wish that my cell phone would let me make cheaper calls; with my actual Danish company, I pay about 10 cents a minute for LOCAL calls. This would not change with a call card i'm afraid. So happy to have access to use SkypeOut instead,apparently with a ten dollar purchase I can go quite far.

I'm still blogging

Dear All
It seems a long time since we shared those exiting days of discovery during blog06.
You might be interested in taking a look at the blog I created for our teacher's association in Frankfurt: http://www.eltafolk.blogspot.com/
Peter

Teachers doing their first steps into the world of blogs

Doris Molero, my Webhead friend from URBE - Universidad de Maracaibo in Venezuela has once more started an after school study circle for her colleagues. I'm with them in a Yahoo conference and we're supporting their first blog, created at http://www.blogger.com
vivi's page
Griselda's blog
Yaneth's blog
Ana's blog
Arline's blog
Doris' blog
Alejandro's blog

The Yahoo group: Interactive tools for the EFL class

We were working on getting photos in the blog post and profile, and Griselda used this beautiful photo from the bridge over Lake Maracaibo

Whales are huge animals

- and I saw some whales in the Vancouver aquarium. They're tame and trained so you can get very close and watch them playing. We also went on a boat trop from Tofino, Vancouver Island, and on sea all I saw was a lively activity just under the surface where a goup af whales were feeding seaweed or something tiny.

a Virtual guest for webcast academy interview

I'm getting ready to meet in a skype conversation with Lee Baber's grade 8 students. When I was invited some days ago I quickly scanned my memory for good stories to tell totally unknown strangers, then I came up with animals as our conversation topic.

I know a list of animal sounds transcribed to the human alphabet in many different languages and I find this is quite fun.

I also made a search for online media material and found one good resource with free video and sound clips.

Testing a new browser: Flockr. Matching Flickr!

I'm blogging this very post opened from a blue button showing a feather icon, right into my new browser, named Flockr. This is still in alpha mode only, but there will be a first beta release very soon. I cannot yet tell the big difference from using Firefox. The interface looks clean and simple. But I'd rather wait until the beta version to say more.

Pink Flamingo - a rich resource list for educators

Kate Britt is still using her old online name Pink Flamingo, and it was how I knew her already in 1999 when the Global Educators' Network started, with asynchronous online discussion seminars every month or so.

The dear Flamingo is still actively sharing her very inspiring list of resources, and now I see that she also keeps a blog to showcase the newest added resources. Looks like a good combination!
What's New in PinkFlamingo's Resource Lists?

Teacher students in Denmark working with blog & wikis

Hello - I've ben pretty busy the past weeks, experimenting with a pilot course for Danish teacher students at Zahle's Teacher Seminar in Copenhagen. They're heading towards their final exams, but first they had a media project, combined with using online multimedia tools. The web 2.0 tools and strategies were new to themselves as well as their regular teacher, and I was called upon to bring in some inspiration and hands-on knowledge on the matter. We worked in a computer lab for 9 hours, and they thei gave oral presentations supported by their wikis, most groups using video or audio. Next term, I'll hopefully get more involved at an earlier level, as multimedia literacy skills will become part of the new students' intro period!

This was an interesting venture for me as a newcomer to the place and with my previous experiences as an educating person, more into collaborative peer learning than instruction, and happening mostly all online. This was also different for the reason that I'm more used to think and write in English about such matters, and there were many details about how to use tools that I found more difficult than expected to share in Danish. We'll continue developing the wikispace and blog that was started for this purpose.

Dear colleague,
If you teach a foreign/second language and use blogs when doing it, I would really appreciate it if you could spend 5 minutes of your time and fill in my online survey. It's really short, simple and straightforward, and I'm really desperate for some more answers. Your participation is annonymous, the results will be made public, in case anyone is interested.
Huge thanks to all of you (13) who have done it already.
I would also be very grateful if you could possibly forward this link to anyone that may be concerned.

The survey


Thank you.

Anita

TESOL in Tampa

The annual TESOL conference was held in Tampa this year. You can get a taste of the activities by looking at the rollicking photostory that Cristina Costa from Portugal put together. Aiden Yeh from Taiwan shared her Bubbleshare photo album here. Chris Jones posted her pics here. And I took a few pics of my own which you can see here or, if you want to take a look at some of the pictures from TESOL 2005 in San Antonio, take a look here.

Cristina has also created a brilliant webquest about a Canadian family trying to decide whether to move to Lisbon. Experience it here!

Submarine Project

Where's you Virgin Submarine Project?

Here the Beatles song I mentioned:


Yellow Submarine - Lennon & McCartney

In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines
So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our friends are all on board
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

As we live a life of ease
Everyone of us has all we need
Sky of blue and sea of green
In our yellow submarine.

We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

Participant report from León, Spain

Hello co-bloggers,

this is a little situation report from the offline week in a mixed mode course with international teahcers and participants from all over Europe. Right now I´m sitting in a teacher office as a guest to check my email and get a little work done.

I've been a shadow of this English language teacher all afternoon, which means that I was in her class with international students, and also a local guest in her home for lunch, meeting with her parents, a sister and a brother; they all live together in a small village outside of the city of León where I've spent the past week, tomorrow is our last day in the course and then I'll enjoy some days all on my own.

Our group stays at the nicest possible place, a hostel that was formerly a palace of one of the local kings; part of this was built back in the 10. century, and there is a church with a vault for the kings´ tombs, with magnificent fresco paintings that are well preserved, both colorful and narrative. León is a city with a 2000 year old history and all around the old town there is ramins of the defense wall. The cathedral is built from limestone like most other buildings, in gothic style with inspiration from the French cathedral in Reims - which means that the stained glass windows make a spectacular impression when you get inside, especially at noon.

Yesterday we had a rally that our students had prepared for us, looking for special details such as the building by the famous architect Gaudi, and the mussel shell motive from the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela - León is one of the stops on that route and a large building used to serve as a hostel for these pilgrims but has recently been transformed into a hotel. Later that evening we were invited for a reception at the city hall, another elegant palace built by the wealthy and powerful Guzman family. I still need to check more details and find facts about the things that we see: I had not prepared much on advance as I most often find things twice as interesting when I´m on location.

Decided that I have lurked for too long.

I'm Karen Haines, teaching in NZ and working with students who are doing intensive English study before they can go to mainstream academic classes here. I came late to this workshop at EVO2006 as I was doing a couple of others (podcasting and BAW) and it all took too much time!

I've enjoyed blogging all last year in one way or other with my students. This term I decided to try to use pictures more, so each week I get my students to comment on a Picture Post. This is a picture that I think is interesting and will cause comment, and I am slowly learning which pictures work better than others. The first two I chose were quite abstract and I was delighted with the students comments. More recently they have been less forthcoming and more in 'how this picture affects me' mode perhaps, which has been interesting. The last picture I chose was too big to show on screen, but the link is there and we actually looked at it briefly in class. From a language perspective, I wanted to get away from essays/reports etc and encourage students to write differently.

If you're interested the link is http://upperint.blogspot.com/

I shall continue to lurk...

Danish language summer camp in MInnesota - complete with bikes

Learning language while on a bike trip is blogged by Jane Petring in Quebec. Today I stumbled over a Danish language project -in Minnesota where many Nordic settlers have roots. This place, called Skovsoen, (the forest lake) is offering bike rides as part of the course plan. http://clvweb.cord.edu/prweb/danish/danish.asp
I thought it was a fun coincidence, also because Jane actually does speak a little Danish, as she was an au pair working north of Copenhagen way back in the past. Too bad we did not meet by then. I'm sure we could have found something fun to do together.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Are you a digital native or a digital immigrant?
Are you sure? Do you want to find out? :)
I found a very interesting article about digital natives and immigrants by Marc Prensky. You probably have read it, since it was written five years ago. If not, have a look at my blog for some extracts, or read the whole article. Enjoy.

Some Danish multimedia blog inspiration

Dear blogsisters & brothers,

have a look at this inspiring blog for children (and their teachers) with examples of flickr stuff, calendars and animations, created by a group from the Danish CVU Sonderjylland (A college for social pedagog education) Digitale fort�llinger/animationer: Natur-bog 3-10 �r

Their multimedia teacher is Lis Faurholt who is a Dansh web 2.0 maven

asterix915-1.blogspot.com/2006/01/natur-bog-3-10-r.html

Adventures in Educational Blogging: Which Wiki? or The Trouble Without Email

A fifth grade teacher from White bear Lake, Minnesota, Susan Sedro is looking at wikis versus blogs for different purposes, and comparing PBWiki & wikispaces. There are three criteria for this wiki project: readable to families and other schoolclasses, protected from spam but still aloowing comments from outsiders, and trackback of changes, who did what (and eventually find a malicious editor).

Wikispaces announced not long ago that for k-12 education wikis will be free of ads, and could be private for others than the users - with no charge (usually you need to pay a small fee for this service. But one problem may be that students do nto have an email , as they need to get individual invitationf to be able to contribute and edit the blog.Adventures in Educational Blogging: Which Wiki? or The Trouble Without Email

My first post here!

Well, As I could eventually post here and I was also able to embed audio to my blog( with the great help of Barbara Dieu!!!)I decided to do something nice.Thus, I chose to record just a little of Walt Whitman´s poem " Song of the Open Road" , which I consider to be a wonderful reflection about how we should see life and ourselves.That´s how I feel in relation to Blogs right now: a challenging path that I intend to travel with joy and courage in my heart.

Walt Whitman