Week 6- Lots to Write About

  Wow! So many new ideas! If I wrote about all the ones I likes we will be here for a while.

1) Printing Press

Through this website, students can create newspapers, brochures, flyers and signs with many realistic looking templates and designs. I think that this is a great creative writing activity that can be incorporated in a lesson, either alone or in pair work. Example:A certain  event can be introduced, and students must create a front page of a newspaper discussing the event.

2) Spelling Bee and Spelling City

These two great websites, are great for practicing spelling. It is possibly harder to use them in a classroom setting, but would be great tools to use at home for students to practice.



3) Make Your Own Story

Here students are given story templates and have to fill in words that they would like to go in their stories. It's cute, but can only really be used as a one time thing as there is not much option here. 

4) Story Jumper

This is a fun website that allows students,to create their own story book through adding text, pictures and more. I think this can be a task to work on over a few lessons. Students in pairs, can first brainstorm what they want their picture book to be about, and prepare outlines of the story, and then actually get to work creating it. Students should first have good knowledge about how to access pictures.

5) Class Tools

As I demonstrated above, you can go anywhere with this one. They have fake facebook pages, SMS conversations and others. This can be used very nicely in an audio-lingual class, where the focus is on teaching spoken language through conversations between two people over SMS. 

Week 4

You didn't see they had a whole section about me in the paper this week?!!
Now I think this websites pretty cool! Go to http://photofunia.com/ and have some fun creating!
I think this tool can be incorporated creatively into a lesson, using familiar faces of people on the school or city, famous figures etc...

You've got to know the technology you are dealing with. The Innovative Educator gives us some tips on how to properly use various free educational programs in the classroom. You cannot just bring and put the kids to work. A teacher bust be fully aware of the program's instructional design and learning objectives. How exactly will the program be incorporated?  What will the teacher's involvement in the student learning look like? These are among many things that must not be overlooked when bringing computer programs into the classroom.

Thanksgiving is around the corner. Though not so commonly celebrated in Israel (though you will find some holiday turkeys here and there, in the US its a big one. Free Technology for Teachers, brings some useful websites with ideas for making the holiday part of the English lessons. I didn't take to much interest in the ideas given there, but it definitely reminded me of the obvious - current holidays are perfect topics for use in English classes!