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[ICTs in English] ICTs in English Weekly Update - Where has the year gone?


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Hamish Chalmers <hchalmers AT ashs.school.nz>
  • To: ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz
  • Subject: [ICTs in English] ICTs in English Weekly Update - Where has the year gone?
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:23:38 +1200

With the often-stressful-and-busy term three now upon us, I thought I might get in there early and share a few ICTs to help with preparing students for end of year stuff. With prelims coming up for some students, not to mention the possibility of one or more text studies during the term we’re not only looking for things that can help with revision in and outside of the class and student to student as well as teacher to student, but also ICTs that can help further deepen learning. Obviously plenty of ICTs could be helpful for both depending on how they’re being used but it still pays to keep both revision and deepening learning in mind if we want to keep our students prepared and engaged right up until the end of the year.

To get the ball rolling (I guess that’s a snooker or bowling metaphor?) here’s a couple of handy mobile device ICTs that have some potential for text studies and other Englishy type work. I’ve mentioned App Inventor before and I really can’t get enough of its goodness. With Android devices on the increase App Inventor has some great potential for students although with a little bit of a learning curve involved, it might pay to get a few select students upskilling now. They could then start on developing awesome apps to test and learn with other students further on in term three. They don’t need to download any fancy software to use App Inventor either as it’s all browser-based. The design and function of the apps is also totally open to the students and doesn’t need to be limited to the standard flash-card, quiz approaches they might initially come up with. I’m not sure if anyone saw the 60 minutes article a week or so ago on mobile device apps that featured the Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja creators? Your students might even develop an app that makes them overnight millionaires. Back to reality, you could save yourself some leg-work (is that a dancing metaphor or something to do with gang thuggery?) by getting students to design apps that you can create the content for without going through tecchy stuff yourself.

If you want something a little easier to get to grips with (too general a metaphor to guess at here) ibuildapp is pretty much an instant win and is even usable across platforms so the Apple and Android camps can all work together happily. Students can build an app literally in a few minutes and test each other across devices. If mobile devices aren’t your or your student’s thing, there’s a heap of great lists of quizzy, testing-type tools, (try this) not to mention the huge list of reviewed resources on English Online to peruse. Once you get digging on the links here there’s a wealth of stuff there that could help add that extra zing for term three.

So what online, mobile and other types of ICTs are people planning on using for learning in term three?

Hamish Chalmers
Facilitator: ICTs in English
http://englishonline.tki.org.nz/



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