Tech Tip of the Month

The download is free for window.

What photo story does: It allows you to add text and sound to your pictures on your computer and email the results to parents and friends.

Why I use it:

1. The technology is easy; Second and third graders can operate a digital camera and download the pictures.

Adding text and sound is also simple.

2. Content: Students act out the dialogs in their books or tell about their favorite activities.

3: The students do not have to memorize lines but they have to learn to read them fluently.

4. You can do TPR when you give directions for the poses in the pictures,

5. The characters in the dialog are now alive.

6. By watching students illustrate a short story you can check comprehension.

7. Students are motivated to pronounce words correctly because  they will be heard by the world  (teacher tube or you tube)

8. For elementary school  the topics can be, my room, my toys, my favorite sport, my time line.

9. For elementary school students 3 to 6 pictures is enough so the project can be finished in  3hours total ( I see the students 30 minutes twice a week.)

Example 1 | Example 2

submitted by Monique Navelet

 March 2009 - Adding a Wiki to Your Course

A wiki site can be easily added to any course to serve a number of objectives. For example, you may choose to create a wiki site dedicated to writing.   Open one page where students create a short narrative collaboratively. This whole-classroom activity will offer your students the opportunity to practice key writing techniques and develop skills.  Other pages can be authored by teams of student writers and presented for peer review and peer editing to the other teams.

With a wiki, you can design many interesting out-of-class extension activities to build writing skills.

There are many free wiki programs available, but Pbwiki.com is particularly easy to use.  You can create as many wikis as you want for free with their basic package.  Pbwiki.com offers affordable upgrades, but the basic package includes enough features to create an effective tool.

A great resource on creating wikis:

Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: The Power of the Read-Write Web by James A. West and Margaret L. West.  Jossey-Bass A Wiley imprint. 2008

January 2009 - Voice Recording

Maximizing the use of voice recording programs in the classroom

Many of the class management software programs that teachers and schools use, now include some type of Voice recording software (Wimba, audacity, etc.). There are many little things a teacher can do to begin using this software in the classroom. Here are some ideas:

1) we may have noticed that students don't really use punctuation when reading a foreign language text, making their comprehension more difficult. Therefore, we teachers can record ourselves reading the text, turning it into an audio text to which the student can listen to while reading the written text.

2) make some of the workbook's paragraph writing activities, oral ones to be recorded. Voice boards or voice messages are  excellent for this use. Some sample of such activities are the "describe your family" or the "talk about a film you saw recently" exercises.

3) for extra practice, turn the lesson warm up and cool down into oral activities which students must record prior or after class. As a variation, have students in pairs take turns making such recordings.

4) incorporate some recording into assignments and projects such as PowerPoint presentations, poster creations, book reviews. Respectively, students can record the run-through of the presentation, the explanation of the poster and have a simulated radio show for the book review.

5) turn oral exams and other oral exercises like short conversations into recordings. This last ides also saves time as the teacher can listen to the exams from home.