Welcome to Issue 4!
Welcome to the fourth issue of Edtech News, a free monthly newsletter bringing you the latest in new technology for teaching English. Each month we look at the latest online resources for teachers and students, and introduce you to useful ICT tips and tricks. We also feature a multi-level interactive whiteboard activity in each issue. We hope you enjoy reading and if you have any comments please get in touch at tecnologica@britanico.cl. To read past issues, visit our archives.
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First and foremost, we would like to extend our deepest sympathies to all across Chile who have been affected by the earthquake which struck early on Saturday morning. Our thoughts are with you and we wish you strength for the coming days and weeks.
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In this issue:
- Pronunication practice at
- Teacher development resource:
Teachers' discussion forums
- Top tech tips:
online collaborative writing tool
- The IWB activity series: Nº 4 - Pull-out tabs
Techno Defoe is back to answer your questions
The name of this website will remind many teachers of the classic book of the same name, and its sister publication, 'Tree or Three?'. The idea behind the website www.shiporsheep.com is very similar - helping learners discriminate between sounds by presenting them in words which differ in only one phoneme (i.e. 'minimal pairs'). The website has the added advantage that you can hear the audio just by rolling over the words with your mouse, rather than having to find them on a CD, mp3 player, or (heaven forbid!) a cassette tape.
It's great to use in the classroom if you have an internet connection and decent speakers, and perhaps even better to guide students to as a self-study resource as it has pictures to support the meaning of each word in the pair, and students can choose for themselves which pairs to work on. There's also simplified phonemic script of the target phonemes on the main page, which can help both teachers and students to brush up on their phonemic transcription (good practice for the TKT exam, for example).
Anyone who's worked in a school with a dynamic teachers' room, or had the chance to observe their colleagues teaching, will know that some of the best ideas and advice for teaching comes from those peers who are working in the same context as us, or those who have faced the same issues and challenges in a different context. A great place to find and share opinions on a wide range of teaching topics is an EFL teachers' discussion board, like the one at www.tefl.net. There you'll find teachers from all round the world exchanging ideas and opinions on topics such as Teaching Young Learners, Grammar and Usage, Teaching Students with Special Needs, and Tests and Exams.
You need to register (for free) to be a contributor to the forums, but you can be a 'lurker' without registering and just read other people's posts until you feel you have something you'd like to share or comment on. You can search for topics that interest you, and you'll be informed about any replies to your posts by e-mail. It can be very reassuring to know you're not alone in facing a particular problem, and to hear others' ideas on issues that matter to you... and to your students.
Check it out and share your experiences, or even just lurk for a while and see what you can learn... but please don't be a 'troll'.
NB: In an update to last issue's teacher development news about teachers' conferences, the IATEFL-TESOL Chile International Conference has just announced its Call for Papers for the 2010 conference at Universidad San Sebastian on July 23rd and 24th. You can download a Speaker Proposal Form at www.iatefl-tesol.cl
Here in the Educational Technology Department, our favourite tech tool this month has been the Buzzword collaborative writing tool from Adobe Acrobat. You need to sign up here to get a (free) account, and it's a beta version so there are occasional technical hitches, but it is wonderful for working on documents together without having to send versions to each other by e-mail or open read-only copies in a shared folder.
Once you've signed up for an account, you can open a new document online from any computer and use it like any other word processing software...
...share your document with others via e-mail...
...read their comments and additions...
...and even track the history of changes to the document and go back to any earlier version!
We use it to work collaboratively on documents in the department, but there are loads of potential applications inside and outside the classroom too. Imagine planning a class with other teachers who teach the same level or year group as you but work in different schools or branches - all of you contributing and commenting on others' ideas. Or using it for students to work collaboratively on a piece of creative writing outside class while you montior who is contributing ideas and who is doing the best work!
It's a great tool and once you begin to explore, all sorts of new ideas come to mind about how it could work well for you. Give it a try and you'll soon be wondering how you managed without it!
- Pull-out tabs (IWB activity series Nº4)
In this month's interactive whiteboard activity we'll be using the Notebook software which comes with Smartboard interactive whiteboards to show you how to create a set of hidden tabs that students can pull out on to the screen to reveal all sorts of lesson material, from task instructions to multiple-choice options to images or sound files. This makes an activity clean and clear in terms of presentation, adds interactivity, and builds in an element of suspense and surprise to engage your students.
Click on the image to watch the video guide on creating and using this interactive activity.
And finally, Techno Defoe is back to answer another reader's query!
Hi! I'm Techno Defoe, EdTech News' resident tech expert, and I'm here to answer your questions. Whatever you need - website suggestions, help with computer software, advice on using technology in the classroom - I am here to help. Drop me a line at tecnologica@britanico.cl and I'll answer in the next newsletter.
This month, Constanza Prieto from Antofagasta writes:
Dear Techno Defoe,
I have come across the terms 'online corpus' and 'online concordancer'. Are they the same thing, and are they any use to me in my classes?
TD says:
Thanks for your question, Constanza. A corpus is a huge database of samples of languages as they are really used, both spoken and written. With the advances in computer technology, the potential to store, classify, and retrieve information about individual words and phrases has become greater and greater. An online corpus is one such database which can be accessed online, and an online concordancer is a tool for processing this data to detect patterns in word use which might be useful for the study of collocation or syntax for a particular word. An online concordancer you can use for free is called Corpuseye and it is able to access a variety of different corpora (though some are password protected) in a range of European languages.
For example, if you select the Europarl corpus at Corpuseye and enter the word 'technology', you receive the following information:
The keyword 'technology' is in the middle of all the examples and so we can see in the magnified section that some of the most common adjectives which collocate with technology are latest, hi-tech, state-of-the-art, modern, nuclear, etc. What's more, if you click on INFO on the left of each sentence, the concordancer gives you a detailed breakdown of the sentence, telling you what part of speech each word is, and its base form.
This can be a great tool to introduce students to in order to help them with their writing, and also for the teacher to take samples of real language use into the classroom as the basis for work on particular words or phrases.
See you next time everybody, and remember: technology is not the enemy!
We hope you’ve enjoyed the fourth issue of EdTech News. Watch this space for
the next issue, coming in April.
Notice: The Instituto Chileno Británico de Cultura is not responsible for the content of any external websites displayed as links in this newsletter.