If last week's class was jam packed, today's was even more so! Class started with a lesson about Lyrics Training, a program which helps students improve their listening skills by filling in gap words while listening to a song and watching a video. It has 4 different levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert. I tried the intermediate level with a song, and even had a challenge with a few of the words, so I can imagine how hard it can be for students! This is a program that I will certainly use with secondary school students, as kids like and connect with music so much, and it's a great way of getting them interested in improving their English! There are more than 30 different genres to choose from- everything from folk to hip-hop to country or punk. I had a lot of fun with it and want to try more songs!
Camino gave us an introduction to interactive white boards, giving us some good advice, asking "What is the advantage of using the technology?" She added that anytime you introduce a new technology it's more work, so it needs to have an advantage, and that the advantage of white boards is movement, and that we should take advantage of this feature. She also showed us how we could use Debut to record everything done on the whiteboard, which could be useful for reviewing lessons or evaluating students' work.
At UPNA the program used for creating white board lessons is E-beam, and we learned how to use that tool so that we can create a lesson in groups for the next class. We had time to practice with the white board and I must say that it's super fun to use and seems to offer a lot of possibilities for creating dynamic activities.
Next we quickly moved through several programs- Animoto, Story Jumper, Pow Toon, and Moovly- for creating animated videos and story books. I find these programs to be super appealing, but also think that they are incredibly time-consuming! I imagine myself spending 20 hours just to create an animated video! And although that's probably not necessary, I'm almost certain that I would invest way too much time and effort, especially with Moovly and Pow Toon. On the other hand, I think students would be super enthusiastic to use these programs, and I can see their application in the classroom as introducing something fun and creative that encourages students' self-expression.
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