Welcome to Week 3 of our EFL Blogging School! Please find below the tasks you are kindly requested to complete by October 26. Last week we played with ZeeMaps and created our first blogs on Blogger, Weebly or Wordpress. This week we are going to experiment with a few other exciting online tools which will help turn our blogs into effective teaching tools.
TASK 1
Voicethread is a wonderful online tool which allows several people to comment on one document / picture / video online using text or audio comment (See more details here). Voicethread has a great collection of online lesson plans: https://voicethread.com/about/library/. Take a few minutes to browse through the projects created by my college students: Let's share our voicethread projects! Please follow these easy steps to leave a voice comment on our project voicethread embedded below:
1. Create a free accunt on Voicethread http://voicethread.com/
2. Upload your profile picture or an avatar
3. Grab your microphone and
4. Leave a short audio introduction about yourselves on our project voicethread below
https://voicethread.com/share/5084472/ .
5. Browse through the Voicethread Library - please tell us which voicethread is your favourite one. How could you use Voicethread with your students (leave your comments below, as a comment)?
Please feel free to mention the following in your audio message:
- your name and job title
- where you are from
- the school you work for
- age level you teach
- your hobbies and special interests
More details on how to use Voicethread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlpyJthISTQ
A very important blogging tool is the ”embed” option, which allows you to place another website or widget on your blog page. If you want to insert a ZeeMap or a Google Survey, a YouTube video or a power point presentation on your blog, then you will need to follow two simple steps:
- find the embed code of the other online tool
- copy paste it on your blog
See more tutorials below:
- How to embed a YouTube video on Weebly
- How to embed a YouTube video on Blogger
- How to embed a YouTube video on Wordpress
For example, to post the power point presentations on our project blog, I use Scribd, one of the biggest online libraries on the web. Your students can find free online books there, such as A Christmas Carol, The Gift of the Magi or Alice in Wonderland for example. You can find ESL/EFL teaching materials, such as ESL Games or Grammar in Use books. I uploaded my presentation on Scribd, found the ”EMBED” option, copied the embedding code on Weebly, after dragging the ”EMBED CODE” box from the tool box on the left side of the page. All the power point presentations created by our trainers will be embeded on the RESOURCES page.
Now, let's experiment with the blogs you created last week.
1. Choose a nice YouTube video or a Scribd book for one of the lessons you are going to teach in November.
2. Find the embedding code and place it on your blog (In the LESSON PLANS sections for example).
3. Design several tasks for your students to complete after they watch the video or read the book.
4. Post the link to your page below as a comment.
Feel free to analyse the online lessons I posted on my blog as examples:
a) Explaining the concept of "virtaul wallet" to college students: Banking in the future
b) How to write an argumentative essay blog post
c) How to create a video resume blog post
Good luck designing the first blogging tasks for your students!