DigitaLang

This year I have organised a series of ICT and Web 2.0 training semninars for the Office of Foreign Languages and Bi-lingualism in Alto Adige (Italy.) They run 2 language libraries, the MediaTeca in Merano and the Multilanguage Centre in Bolzano.  This is a short introduction to IWBs, or Interactive White Boards that I will be presenting today.

The presentation is in 4 parts; A quick look at research intro IWB use in language teaching; some Do’s and Don’ts when using IWBs, written by myself, a great film from www.teachers.tv plus, best of all, some practical ideas from my friends and colleagues on Twitter. The presentation also looks at websites suitable for IWB use, as well as pointing out some of the types of IWB software available for language teaching.

Hope that it can be useful to you too!

I saw a fantastic video by Alvin Trusty recently where he talks about how to create high-quality PowerPoint presentations. There are many great ideas in his video, among the ones that I really liked were the use of Flickr Creative Commons photos, the excellent Flickr photo search tool Compfight (which also finds creative Commons photos for you) and Alvin’s move and grow Powerpoint animation (watch the video to find out how this works!) I used the advice in this video to write the Philosophically Speaking PowerPoint lesson I recently posted here. It’s good advice!

Although this video is 45 minutes long, I think you’ll agree that it’s 45 minutes that are VERY well spent! Enjoy!

How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.

WARNING! This video will seriously damage your contentedness with previous PowerPoints you’ve made! I am now re-doing several of my favourite PowerPoint lessons!

Best,
Seth.

This year I’m working as a CLIL/ICT teacher at Martino Martini, a high school in Mezzolombardo, Italy. It’s a really interesting project where I co-teach different subjects together with the “regular” class teacher. The difference with this CLIL project is however that I don’t just help teach the subject in English, but I have to use technology to teach the subject too.  This means that so far this year I have taught subjects as diverse as History, Biology  and Social Sciences using all sorts of different Web 2.0 technology such as wikis, web-based video, online surveys and so on. I tell you what, it’s been great fun! Take a look at our wiki if you’d like to see some of my students’ great work.

For one of my philosophy classes recently I decided to do a speaking activity based on one of the arguments from the BBC World Philosophy Day article from last year. As philosophy is often taught as a fairly dry subject here in Italy, I decided to “spruce it up a bit” by using some of the great creative commons photographs from Flickr to illustrate the arguments. I put them together as a Powerpoint presentation and I hope you’ll agree that the results are pretty good!

Although the PowerPoint presentation deals with philosophical ideas that Kant had, I’m sure that many speaking classes would really enjoy the subject. The references to Kant are infact only in the last slide. I used this lesson with a class of 17-18 yr olds. It does deal with some pretty “full on” issues, so have a good look through the slides before taking it into your class.

Click on the image to download the PowerPoint file. It’s 14 MB so it might take a minute or two!

Talking Philosophy PowerPoint

!!STOP PRESS!!!

Thanks to some great ideas from The Webheads, I’m now also going to do this lesson as a VoiceThread. So, if you (or more likely your English class) fancy joining in the debate, click on the comments button in this VoiceThread version below:

Best,
Seth.

This year’s British Council / IATEFL Conference in Milan was on the theme of CLIL and Learning Technologies. I was really pleased and privileged to give a workshop there, especially seeing as so many of my fellow presenters gave great presentations full of great ideas and useful hints and tips.

By far the biggest highlight of the conference for me was the opportunity to work with such an enthusiastic and participatory group of teachers in my workshop. It was a real privilege  to be able to help such an experienced and  knowledgeable group of teachers integrate technology into their CLIL teaching. We had great fun during the session, and there was a lot of great positive feedback about the work me and my colleagues at Martino Martini have been doing. There was some great debate too about the practical time constraints of integrating technology into CLIL. I think, all told, we agreed the results are worth the effort.

As I promised the teachers at the conference (cross my heart!) here is the PowerPoint presentation with details of all the ideas and tools we looked at during the workshop. If you are one of those great teachers who came along, I hope this helps you! If you would like try something out with your students and want to talk about it, or if you just fancy a bit of help or advice on something we looked at during the workshop, I’d love to hear from you! Leave me a comment (by clicking on that little box with a number on up there at the top left of this blog post – that will take you to the comments section.)

Finally, be sure to check back again in a day or two and I’ll get the History, Science and Geography resources we looked at posted here as well as our fabulous videos!

All the best,

Seth.

UPDATE: For some crazy reason I think anyone who uses Internet Explorer will not have been able to read this post until now.  If that includes you, I’m really sorry! I hope you’ll now be able to read this okay. As always, I look forward to reading any comments and would love to continue discussing the work we looked at in my IATEFL workshop with you all.

Seth.