Language Tools - Spanish and Webswami

The Spanish Department is currently piloting a piece of online language software called Webswami. This is a language tool, which allows students to record their speaking, seamlessly alongside the teachers oral questions. We are working with Grade 9 and 11 students who now have personal laptops.

This is potentially an excellent tool to support students oral speaking skills, which are always assessed directly with the teacher as an impromptu dicussion. Replicating this learning, and scaffolding their language skills is hard for the teacher due to the time constraints of 1:1 conferencing, but Webswami provides an ideal platform for this to occur. Students can replay or re-record their voices, and then submit the final edit. The teacher can share comments back with the students. Alongside the oral functionality there is a host of other activities available on the WebSwami platform.

For more information contact Vicki Berman, HOD Spanish, UWCSEA Dover.

Sharing photos from iPhoto to a Picasa online gallery

Often there is a need to share a collection of photographs with students. The easiest way to do this is to use iPhoto and then export to a Picasa Gallery. You can upload images/photographs and even videos to Picasa, although your account will have a size limit of around 1GB.

1. From within iPhoto you need to click on an event and then select export from the File Menu.
2. Then choose to click on the Picasa Web Albums option
3. Add your school abc@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg email address and password
4. Then you can fiddle and change some options to make the album public or private and add tags.

Digital Ideas to support the ESOL student

Many of our students come from different language backgrounds and as teachers we are constantly finding ways to support them. Many of us have completed the English in the Mainstream Classes which focused on pedagogy and have lots of practical skills. The digital tools which are also available offer students more support and can help them learn more effectively in classes. This post will cover a series of basic tools that can be used with all students but especially those who are developing their English skills.

Text Handling Skills - Safari

• Using the Reader button in Safari allows you to strip away the distractions from a piece of text
• You can right click/secondary click on any piece of text within an Apple product to access some special services: Dictionary, Speech to Text. 
• Other options can be customised and added added through the menu bar - Safari -> Services then Services Preferences. Nice services to add might be Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track

Text Handling Skills - Preview

From within most applications including Safari, Pages and MS Word you can "print" these as in PDF format. Choose the Print Menu and choose to Open PDF in Preview.

Once you have opened the document in Preview you have a rich array of functions under the Annotation button. This allows you to highlight pieces of text, add your own ideas, and comments. You can also turn on the Services within Preview to highlight and send snippets of text to Sticky Notes. These annotation functions should be easier to use in the Lion Update.

Presentation Skills - using Keynote

Presenting information back to the class or teacher is one of the hardest aspects of being an ESOL student, and the final Interactive Presentation assessment can be very daunting. Using Keynote and the recording functions is a nice way scaffold students towards the final assessment. The essential point of using Keynote rather than iMovie is how the students are being assessed. If the focus is on the oral presentation skills and ability of communicate a message, then Keynote is ideal. If you want to assess the product and a polished movie then you would need to use a more advanced tool.

1. The basic task is to make a Keynote presentation
2. Student develop slides with a mixture of media to support the speaking part of the presentation. 
3. They can use words and animations to develop the presentation.
4. Finally they can use the Play menu and Record Slideshow tool to record audio over the presentation. Whilst the audio is recording the student can step through the slide and exit once they have completed this.  
5. Students can use the inspector button to remove the audio, to adjust the volume or to add a soundtrack.

An Academic Screen Saver

We came across this great idea at a recent workshop conducted by Kathleen Ferenz, from Apple. Some of the best ideas are in hindsight the most obvious and this is a good example.

Within Systems Preferences on the MacBooks students can create Screen Savers from any collection of images. Usually these are photographs, but what if these were images from a particular class or lists of a visual vocabulary list? I quickly made a Geography screen saver by doing the following.

1. From within either Keynote or PowerPoint, I can save the presentation as a collection of pictures, using either the export or save functions. This creates a folder of images, one for each slide. This folder can be saved in your pictures folder.
2. Then I went into Systems Preferences and clicked in the + button at the bottom to add a folder of pictures. Here I navigated the folder I had created in Step 1.
3. Then you can change the settings on how the pictures are arranged.
4. Done :)

Applications:

1. Classes could make the slides in Keynote and share collectively through a Picasa Gallery, or sharing functions in iPhoto.
2. Students could easily create different folders of screen saver images for classes, 
3. Teachers could use this as a starter when students are entering your room up on your projector.

The first month of the iLearn project at UWCSEA

Working towards a Digital Classroom

This workshop covers a variety of tools that teachers at UWCSEA have available to use in the classroom. Some of the tools are based on the internet and others are part of the software available on the student and staff laptops.

We can classify digital tools according to which aspect of learning they best support. These main groupings of tools are...

• Research and Information Fluency
• Collaboration and Communication
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving and Decision Making
• Creativity and Innovation

These ideas are part of the NETS (National Education Technology Standards) framework which provides articulation of how we could use technology in the classroom from grades K-12. The other two aspects of the NETS framework are Digital Citizenship and Technology Operations and concepts.

Below is an evolving list of what we could use at UWCSEA Dover:

Blogger

A classroom blog can be an important part of your classroom practise and can be used in lots of different ways. Generally a blog is good if your are showing unique pieces of information over a period of time. The material can be sorted using tags, which highlight the key ideas in each post.

Blogs can be a weekly class summary completed by students, an immersion language site, a record of what is happening in class to communicate with parents, or a way to differentiate and extend more able students. Individual student reflective blogs will eventually be on a similar, but different school based system called Mahara.

Basic instructions:

1. Visit the website http://blogger.com
2. Sign in with your Google Apps username and password eg. abc@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg
3. Create your profile, which describes who you are, perhaps Mr Smith.
4. Then click to create a blog
5. Choose the name of your blog and you can choose the specific URL address.
6. Then choose the theme. This can be changed later
7. Once this is complete you can write your first post. Think about adding pictures, videos.
8. Then go click on the B icon at top and back to settings, permissions to invite people to your website. 
9. When viewing your website you can type view after the URL at see a very nice interface of your posts. eg http://doverdlc.blogspot.com/view/

Babelwith.me

This is a simple chatroom website, which allows you to create a private room for your students to discuss a topic or issue. You create a conversation in Babelwith.me and then share this link with students. When a student navigates to the link, they will have to enter a name to participate. There is also some simple language translation aspects of this site, which students might like to experiment with.

Try this link to see an example of how it works. http://www.babelwith.me/WuHrf

Skitch

Click here to download the program to your laptops. You can also give students this link if you would like to use this in class. This is a relatively new piece of software.

This application allows you to take screen shots and then annotate, add text and export the image or very quickly to your desktop. It would be really good in Science, Humanities, Geography where students could find a picture or diagram from the internet then add some ideas and export the finished image back to their notes or desktop.

Using Google Docs for Collaboration

In this workshop we are going to be looking at the functions of Google Docs for use in the classroom. We will look mainly at the Documents functionality and less at Presentations and Spreadsheets, but the same general rules apply to each application.

This workshop is highly differentiated and you are encouraged to work at a level you feel comfortable with but to also discover something new. Hopefully you come away with some new ideas, but hopefully this reinforces what you already do.

Link for Workshop Resources  - Google Docs