Book reports

     My older students are required to read one book in English per school term and I find that checking this task is quite a difficult job for the teacher, up to now I asked them to talk about their books during a break but I realized that it was better to make them write a report because they will take the task more seriously.

     Within the School 2.0 framework I have decided to design a book report using forms in Google Docs, the students can access to the form in the Moodle courses and fill it with the information required. The form application in Google Docs is very useful since it helps to keep a record of their works and the books read by each of them and it even allows you prepare some graphs for the educational end-of-course report.

     Apart from the compulsory reading, they can voluntarily read more books what will be taken into account to assess them. It is also interesting to have a reading log poster to display in the classroom for all to see.

     Below you can take a look at the reading report I’ve designed and you have a link where you can find different report models and reading logs or records.

http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/book_reports.htm

Mind Maps

     Free Mind is an open source program that allows you to make mind maps. I’ve recently discovered the program and, once I did, I realized the useful it can be for students and for teachers and I decided to implement it in my lessons.

     Our school is immersed in an ICT project (Escuela 2.0, also called Abalar in Galicia) by which the educational government provides the students with personal netbooks, those netbooks work with a Linux-based operative system and open source software. FreeMind is one of the programs that comes in the computer image we are working with.

     How do I use FreeMind in the classroom? The most common purpose is as 'a teacher tool' to explain a lesson, especially Science lessons, below I let you one map I prepared to talk about classifying animals in the second and third grades of Primary Education. 

     Taking into account this, another purpose comes by inversing the process, making students prepare their own mind maps to summarize a lesson and learn it better, but that would just be appropriate for higher levels and subjects such as science or history. 

     As I haven’t yet started to teach Science in English to the higher level students, I decided to ask them to make a mind map at the end of each of the ESL units. At the beginning, I had to spend some time teaching them how FreeMind works but now they find it very easy and they don’t need the teacher help. It might be good to give them a model to start.

 Free time (Unit 1, model, saved as Flash object) 

  
     When students have their maps finished and corrected, they can export them to JPEG files or FLASH files and print them to study and review at home.

Examples of my students’ maps:

 The Animal Kingdom (Unit 2, 5th Grade) by Nerea

 Food from around the world (Unit 2, 6th Grade) by Chris

Food from around the world (Unit 2, 6th Grade) by Lucy

     If you want to download the program, click on the following link:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Special Dates

PDI y Moodle en el aula de inglés

I was as a lecturer in the III Congreso Escuela 2.0 (Granada) in the month of October. I was talking about my experience with new technologies in my English lessons. I presented some activities to work with students in the digital whiteboard and I also presented the virtual courses I created in the Moodle platform.

I will let here the presentation and the video with the lecture.

Presentation:

Pdi y Moodle en el aula de ingles

View more presentations from isabelbp.

Lecture: