The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book

This time I am introducing Terry Freedman's The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book. This free e-book contains over 90 web 2.0 projects for all ages and language levels.

I am proud to have contributed a project for the book: it is called "Book and Film Reviews" and I carried it out last year with my students.

You can download it for free at http://www.ictineducation.org/free-stuff/

I you have already dowloaded it, please take a minute to complete this poll

10 Free Digital Game-Based Learning Resources for English Classrooms

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) can be a good way to get students of any age excited about learning. The right games can serve as effective teaching tools that not only speed up the learning process, but also improve comprehension. There are many different learning-based games that can be played online. Here are a few to try with your English classroom:



Free Rice - FreeRice is an online trivia game created by the United Nations World Food Program to provide free education and end world hunger. When visitors answer game questions correctly, rice is donated to hungry people around the world. Trivia categories include English vocabulary, English grammar, geography, math, chemistry, language learning, and art.



Free Poverty - Free Poverty is similar to FreeRice in the fact that it donates to needy people whenever visitors answer questions correctly. The difference is that Free Poverty donates cups of clean drinking water rather than rice and focuses solely on geography trivia.



ProProfs Brain Games - This site offers free puzzle and brain games, such as word searches, hangman, memory games, and word jumbles. Visitors can play existing games or create their own online learning games and puzzles.



Fit Brains - Fit Brains is an online brain fitness platform that provides fun games to educate and exercise the brain. The site's word fragment games have been proven to improve English language vocabulary, comprehension and fluency.



Learning Today - Learning Today, a provider of Internet-based education, offers several free reading games that can be played online. All of the games are research-based and designed to improve phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.



Spell It! - This game, from TheProblemSite.com, displays a picture of a common object and then asks players to spell out the name of the object. Most of the words in this game are spelled the way they sound, making it a good game for beginning English students with limited vocabulary.



Tutpup Spelling - Tutpup is a new digital game-based learning site that offers fun and competitive English and math games. The site's spelling game, which requires players to listen to a word and then spell it out, is ideal for English classrooms.



iKnowThat.com - This education site provides a wide range of online language arts games that would work well in the English classroom. Each game includes a teacher's guide to help educators choose the proper level of play for their students.



Sesame Street Games - Sesame Street's online learning games are perfect for younger children who are learning the alphabet and older children who are just learning to read.



Big Universe - Big Universe isn't technically a DGBL site but it could easily be used as one. The site allows visitors to create and publish their own books online--an excellent activity for any English class.



Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degrees for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

Social Media Count

This is a probably useless but attractive widget to count social media interaction, as created by Gary Hayes and available in his blog.

A collection of web 2.0 resources

One of the most important things for this year is my commitment to train my teachers on the use of web 2.0 tools.

I am planning to do a series of in service training sessions to show them the amazing potential of web 2.0 and some simple resources to get started.

To that effect I have put together a wiki, where I have started collecting resources and tutorials on several web 2.0 tools, such as Wordle, PicLits, Voicethread, Voxopop, Blogger, Wikispaces, Bubbl.us and many more!

I am sure it is a good starting point for many of these tools....

40 Things you can do with a Data Projector in an EFL/ESL lesson

40 Things you can do with a Data Projector in an EFL/ESL lesson

There's no doubt that IWB's are very popular these days. However, many schools do not have them, but have data projectors instead. A data projector connected to a computer with an internet connection is quite a valuable resource for the EFL/ESL classroom. Here's a list of possible uses of a data projector for an EFL/ESL context.

1. Watch a film
2. View and navigate the Internet. Surf and display websites that the entire room will be able to see in a teacher-directed manner.
3. View and solve interactive problems together in groups.
4. Work collaboratively on word processing documents, spreadsheets, design projects.
5. Connect to video conferencing systems.
6. Present student work to a wide audience.
7. Show video clips.
8. Demonstrate how an educational software programme works, e.g., Wordle
9. Create drawings, notes and concept maps in class time which can be saved for future reference using a mindmapping tool.
10. Display images for brainstorming, warm up, discussion, creative writing, etc
11. Model how to effectively use technology (Spell check, searching online, copyright issues) as well as critical thinking skills.
12. Model comprehension strategies on non-traditional texts (i.e. blogs, wikipedia, website articles, ezines) as well as media texts (i.e. commercials, youtube) to develop critical literacy.
13. Highlight lines of text so that students can follow along.
14. Integrate power point presentations into your lessons.
15. Display quickly-changing information on the board (i.e. interactive graphs)
16. Do interactive language exercises
17. Show and tell
18. Highlight good vs bad grammar in writing
19. Go over tests
20. Do creative writing tasks - add a line
21. Do comparison activities using split-screen
22. Show slide show presentations
23. Do class webquests
24. Do group storyboarding
25. Display class agenda/schedule
26. Read aloud from a projected text
27. Freeze images from videos
28. Use sequence of pictures, time lapse, to demonstrate progression.
29. Do compare and contrast tasks.
30. Do choral reading.
31. Do group cloze activities.
32. Do labeling activities - project on a white board and label images.
33. Do prediction activities.
34. Give instant feedback on student work.
35. Use split screen for before/after.
36. Do descriptive writing activities using image as writing prompt.
37. Travel interactively using Google Earth or other web app like Nile Guides.
38. Use picture books with read alouds.
39. Show rubric next to writing using split screen, and grade the example.
40. Allow students to present lessons/ projects.

One of my favourite uses is for any aspect of digital storytelling, which I will address in more detail in future porstings.

If you come up with any other use, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.