Lake

Via my twitter feed I have just found  this great 32 page booklet on how to store all of the information you find on the internet.  Nik Peachey has come up with a classic and it’s great for teachers who like to work from paper. Just print off a hard copy and you have a booklet at your fingertips (or just save it as a PDF file). It gives information on social networks to join, blogs to visit and people to follow on twitter.

This information is not for a digital native…get used to the basics first!

http://bloggingandsocialmedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/from-information-to-knowledge.html

Well the new academic year has just begun and I feel like I deserve a holiday after my mad summer, but I just want to post up a couple of  sites which have come my way over the last few months.

http://ninjawords.com/This on-line dictionary looks simple to use. The only negative point is the lack of phonemic transcription.

Click here for a link to an American pronunciation site which gives clear visual guidelines to producing the sounds of English. Thanks Leticia for this recommendation.

Also I want to mention dropbox. Mar demonstated that this site is much easier to use than google as  storage  for all of your files on your USB stick!

Finally the wonderful world of SPOTIFY has taken over my life.   It’s great, you download some simple software and thousands and thousands of CDs become available to you.  You can make playlists and because the music is streamed directly from the Internet it is not illegal.   Fantastic for your homelife and as a teaching resource!

Hello teachers.

I’ve finally updated my blogroll with my favourite sites! Have a look, let me know what you think and post me links to yours, you never know I might add them onto the roll as well.

I’m just making sure that all my links are still up to date on my attachments to you.  I’ve found out that pbwiki has now changed its name to pbworks and you can sign up for a class wiki by clicking here.  Unlike blogger it is not necessary to use a gmail account.  Good luck.  Check out my blogs and wikis post below on November 26th for creating a blog.

I hope we have time to start this today,  it all depends on if room 8 is open this afternoon.  Fingers crossed!!

Right time to get ready for the teachers’ course next week.  Twitter is ‘the new black’ . It has been declared the social and educational tool of the year and I feel I really must get the hang of it.  So today, I finally activated my account and decided I should give it a go.

I’m trying to find a plug I can activate onto this blog,but so far no luck.  It’s all so time consuming!  I’m going to carry on tweeting and give my feedback to the teachers next week.

Blogs are dead, long live twitter!!

The most helpful site so far has been Nik Peachey’s blogging and social media site. Click here.

I generated this short text in my writing session this afternoon and am now going to embed it in my blog. (Edublogs now excepts java script which makes it easier)

January teachers how are you?!   I hope you have all enjoyed your first week and that you have a fantastic weekend.  Well, now I have breathed new life into my blog I thought I could add a link to the online multiple intelligence test which I showed you in class.  This is the site which presents you with the beautiful pie chart at the end.

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/choose_lang.cfm

Hopefully, if you double click on it, it will open in a new window!

This evening I have come across this great idea which involves an elementary school in America wanting to link up with 80 schools around the world via skype. i thought it was such a wonderful and simple project I have decided to resurrect my blog and add a link to the site.

http://langwitches.org/blog/2009/01/07/update-around-the-world-with-80-schools/

Now time for my favourite session!!

A good  website where you can download videos, lyrics and worksheets is the following: www.tuneintoenglish.com

Extending a Sentence

An important part of developing good written English is the ability to construct longer and more detailed sentences. Learners often use very short sentences and struggle to make longer more detailed ones.

Click here to see an expanding sentence.  Click on any of the shaded words to expand!

http://www.telescopictext.com/

Students could then use a word processor to expand their own simple sentences.

Such as:

I went home.

I had a bath.

I went to the beach.

Here is a good fun site for creating short texts.  The best feature is the newspaper generator.   Just remember to keep the text short.

http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp