Online Tools

In this post, I am going to make a list of different online tools or applications we can use in our classrooms.

Kahoot: This is a great tool that can be used to make revisions, answer questionnaires, generate discussions or complete surveys in a fun way. For example, you can use it to present a  new topic. An activity that I love is creating competitions to check students previous knowledge about a specific content or grammar rules.

  

Quizlet: This is a great tool to work mainly with vocabulary. Once a specific topic, such as parts of a house, food, ways of, etc., has been discussed, teachers can ask their students to create a quizlet collaboratively to use later to play games and to study.

Youtube: Many activities can be done with youtube. An activity that is very interesting is playing short clips stories without showing students how they end. You may ask learners to write about what they saw and to create a possible way to finish the story. Later, the teacher will show them the whole clip and they will compare it with what they wrote. 

Google classroom: This is a great tool for students to do their homework, get feedback from their works and ask questions to their teachers whenever they have a doubt. A great activity that can be done from time to time is to post intriguing questions for students to answer and to start a debate that will be round off in class.

Prezi : This is an online tool used to create attractive presentations in which you can zoom in and out. A possible activity is to get your students in groups to create their own short story with texts and images. Once they finished, you can ask them to tell their stories to their classmates or to go to lower levels to have a story time moment. 

Popplet: The teacher can use this tool for a warm-up activity. She can ask students to get into groups and make a brainstorm with their ideas on a specific topic using popplet.
  

Tweeter: Teachers may use Twitter to post puzzles or riddles that students may need to solve every week. The first student that shares the correct answer may get a prize.

off- line tools

Hi again ! I have created a list of different off-line tools that we can use in our classes with some possible activities.


Word office: Most of you probably know this tool. It is very useful for lots of activities. For example, you can create a worksheet where you ask your students to do the typical fill-in the gaps in which they may or may not have some options to choose from.

Power point: An activity that I love creating with this tool is a Jeopardy game to make a revision of different topics.

A dictionary CD: Teaching students how to use dictionaries is very important. You can work on a text and instead of clarifying your students the unknown words, you can ask them to look them up in groups and try to find the definitions that fit those contexts.
Depending on the type of dictionary, Some of those CDs also offer pictures and extra activities that can be done in order to improve writing skills and pronunciation.

Movie Maker: this is a great and easy tool to use to create videos. When students work on a project, you may ask them to create a video as a final outcome. They may include images, songs, texts and even record their own voices.

Encyclopedia CD: Even though this tool is quite old fashioned, it is great to get your students search for certain information. When there is no internet connection and they need to complete an activity they may resort to an encyclopedia to work. For example, If you are working with cultures and nationalities,  you may want your students to find differences, similarities, typical activities, etc. and for that they will definitely need to make some research on the culture of different countries.


iBooks: This book store is perfect to have PDFs for offline reading. Teachers may ask students to work in groups with specific texts and make notes, highlight passages that they may want to share later, find specific words or phrases anywhere in the book with a built-in search, etc. This tool is great to work with when reading short stories or novels.

Introduction

Hi everyone !

My name is Macarena. I am 23 and I work at an English Institute where I am in charge of  3 courses.  I am teaching very young learners and teens too. I always try to use technology in all of my classes. I have a computer available and an audiovisual classroom where there is a smart T.V. I generally work with videos, songs, kahoot, google drive and online dictionaries but I would like to learn more about different tools and resources I can include in my lessons.

I've been studying at INSPT-UTN since 2014 and this year I´m attending five subjects from fourth year. One of them is ICT. We were asked to create this blog to share with you our work in this subject. Our tutor, Paula Ledesma, will teach and show us different ways in which we can include technology in the classroom meaningfully and I will try to share some of them with you. I hope you find it useful !