Sunday out

Woken at 7am by the sound of yet another digging crew churning up the road outside my place I decided to take the hint and get up and do something more productive than moan about noise pollution. So I wandered around the city, took in a Dali exhibition, visited a church and bumped into friends and had a coffee. So, once again thanks to Theodora P and family for their company.

Stuff for your blog

Today I came across two interesting widgets/sites that could prove very useful in teaching EFL/ESL. Thanks to Theodora, I found out about Snapvine's nifty little application which allows you add voice/video to your blog. A great idea for those students whose typing skills are weak or who hate writing in general. You can even start a video/voice blog.

The other application is Voicethread which also allows you to add the spoken word to your blog. I haven't tried it out yet but it looks very interesting and beautifully designed. Thanks to Joe Dale for that. As he says;

"Jo Rhys-Jones creator of the Ning network Talkabout Primary MFL has written a great post on ideas for using VoiceThread for teaching primary languages which beautifully exemplifies some of the potential of this powerful tool.

e.g.

• using the doodler feature to label, annotate, trace a route on a town plan and play games such as noughts and crosses
• differentiating according to ability
• encouraging independent work in the target language
• reinforcing adjectival agreement
• creating evidence of pupils' work
• engaging pupils with technology
• encouraging pupils to leave comments in a moderated environment
• singing a rhyme using a picture prompt
• using authentic digital photos from the country whose language you are learning
• as a prompt for discussion
• describing the weather using an authentic image from the net
• creating a dialogue or open ended text from a picture prompt
• inviting your partner school to comment on a protected VoiceThread
• letting pupils choose the images that appear in the VoiceThread
• scanning in or photographing images pupils create themselves."

Blogging in person

Today I had the chance to swap some books with Theodora P, a fellow blogger and teacher here in Thessaloniki. It was great to catch up on news on a face to face basis with her and Sotiris.

Getting the word out

Edublogging in Thessaloniki is spreading. Theodora P has set up a blog for her German language class. She says that the boys have really been taken to the idea and are now producing much more language as a result. So why not check it out.