I've always believed students can learn a lot by noticing mistakes.And by noticing someone's mistake, you might become more aware of your own.My sharing pick today is EVERY DAY EDIT.Every day Edit is an archive of short texts with 10 mistakes.Education World: Every-Day Edits | Everyday Edits | Every Day Edits via kwoutChoose one of the months and you'll get different texts to work with.They offer the text with mistakes and another one with the corrections.For tips on how to use this great resource, I recommend the reading of the wonderful post by Gary Hopkins with different activities for the same material. I guess that after working with these short texts on a regular basis, you can then invite students to correct writings made by their own classmates and themselves.Do you have any other ideas for working with ERROR CORRECTION?

This is why I like Edmodo so much.It's a free platform for educators which makes our lives so much easier. I'd like to share some video tutorials, a dear friend from Goiania (Brazil), Edmilson Chagas, has created to show other teachers how he's been using the site to give feedback to his students.                                                                                   PART 1PART 2PART 3 Thanks, Edmilson, for taking the time to create these tutorials and show us in detail how we can annotate using Edmodo. This is certainly a feature I'll be using A LOT this semester.

Sharing material our students produce in class with their parents is an important step when planning any project.Yesterday, I found out via a great blog called "The Cutest blog on the block" about a great way to do this by ordering a printed version of your blog.If you are using a class blog to record written texts, animations or drawings made by your students, wouldn't it be superb to turn the blog posts into a book which could be bought by parents?First, you go to THIS PAGE , complete the box with your blog URL and click PRINT MY BLOG.A 20-page softcover book - $15.95A hardcover copy - $25.95extra pages only 40chttp://blogger.sharedbook.com/pilot/enterBook.do?bookId=CutestBlogOnTheBlock

I've always loved using comics in the classroom, and now it's become even more fun with the possibility to add audio to my comics strips.http://www.pixton.com/I learned about it from Kevin's Meandering Mind (blog). Unfortunately, adding the audio layer is not a feature available for the free PIXTON version. You have to sign up for PIXTON FOR SCHOOLS in order to be able to do that. Well, at least they offer a 30-day free trial so let's see if I can get my students to create comic strips during that period.This was my first trial with the aim to welcome my students to our EDMODO group. After creating your comic strip you can publish it on a website, like I'm doing right now, or by clicking on the Edmodo icon, this way it's automatically attached to your message to an edmodo group of your choice.To listen to the recordings, hover the mouse over the SPEECH BUBBLES and click on the PLAY button.

Reading Janet Bianchini's lovely blog this afternoon, I learned about an interesting tool which lets you create interactive puzzles which can be embeddable on webpages or even shared in facebook and twitter. http://www.jigsawplanet.com/Janet posted a puzzle of a wordcloud with internet words.Janet, I have to tell you I tried hard but wasn't able to beat your time.This is my wordcloudAnd  below is the puzzle which I've just shared with my students in our EDMODO group. As the puzzle has a time counter, you can also use it on an IWB having different groups try to assemble the puzzle faster. In order to play, click on the SETTINGS icon below the image, click SCATTER and let's see how fast you can go.To make the wordcloud I used http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htmAnd to make the puzzle, I tried http://www.jigsawplanet.com/

The activity filmed below aimed to help students internalize the usage of different phrasal verbs focussed in the lesson.Students created a dialogue using as many phrasal verbs as they could, rehearsed it and then we filmed it by using the free ipad app CARTOONATIC.  WHICH and HOW MANY phrasal verbs can you identify?

I was a great fan of POSTEROUS , and still am :(  ,   because of the great possibility of posting so easily with a simple e-mail.What I liked about it?Well, you didn't need to know much about codes for blogging. All you had to do was attach any file to an e-mail to the platform and they would magically turn it into a nice blog post. You could create a blog anyone could post to. Great for e-projects.After it was bought by Twitter, their closing has come as a very sad surprise to me.Panic, what can we do not to lose projects we've developed on the platform?Well, thanks to Chris Bohlander, a fellow teacher based in Goiânia, I learned about the possibility of exporting my Posterous blogs to WORDPRESS.My original posterous - http://an-image-a-week.posterous.com/The wordpress one - http://1imageaweek.wordpress.com/If you're interested in learning how to SAVE YOUR POSTEROUS BLOGS, I suggest you read the instructions HERE .http://en.support.wordpress.com/import/import-from-posterous/It's not THAT EASY, but if I managed to do it, I bet you'll do as well.If you want to read about the AN-IMAGE-A-WEEK project, you might enjoy reading http://lifefeast.blogspot.com.br/2012/02/project-image-week-with-efl-learners.html 

A new semester has begun and here I am trying to rethink my role as a teacher and how I can help my students learn English in a different way.Well, I've been reading and reflecting a lot about collaborative / cooperative learning and self-directed learning in search of ideas for my classes.But, changing your ways IS NOT EASY. I have to think of my own reality, with certain limitations as  the methodology adopted by the school and my own beliefs, of course.This semester, I have a beautiful and very enthusiastic group of teenagers with whom I'll be experimenting new ways of being in a classroom. Taking one tiny step at a time, we're going to follow a kind of a "project-oriented approach", in which I propose a challenge for students at the beginning of a lesson, we discuss what kind of knowledge we need to accomplish that goal and after 3 or 4 classes working with the content, students have to present a final product using one of the suggested tools. http://culturainglesaudi.wikispaces.com/Inter+A+ChallengesThese past weeks, students brought to class VOCABULARY related to kinds of food they like and we complemented it with vocabulary from the coursebook which we're supposed to cover. If we were to talk about our habits, we had to know how express them in sentences, which led us to the GRAMMAR TOPIC (Present Simple and Present Continuous).Yesterday, students started sharing their final presentations in Edmodo, which I then assembled in the school wiki page so that we can share it with parents as well. I was extremely happy with the results. From their presentation, I was not only able to learn more about my students but I could also  observe how well they could express themselves.THIS WAS ONE OF THE PRESENTATIONS SHAREDThe other presentations can be found athttp://culturainglesaudi.wikispaces.com/1.+My+eating+habits I prepared an activity with the most common mistakes I noticed from their presentations, we discussed them and then my students asked me to show some presentations in class to the whole group.Like I said at the beginning of the post, these are just baby steps aiming for more meaningful learning.

Do you like making lists? Well, it's a way to curate your content and share with other people.This post is aimed to focus on two webtools which I've fallen in love with:LISTLY and THINGLINKLISTLY is a site used for making lists of websites and videos. It's said to be a social experience as you can collaborate with others in building lists, besides commenting and voting. The lists you create or contribute to are not only shareable but also embeddable, like the list I've added at the bottom of this post.http://list.ly/#THINGLINK  allows you to tag images linking it to other websites, sound files, videos or even texts.http://www.thinglink.com/My inspiration for this post came with a pinterest post which shared a list curated by Lisa Johnson entitled "Thinglink EDU examples" which I've embedded below.Thinglink EDU ExamplesView more lists from Lisa JohnsonAs LISTLY is a collaborative tool, I believe it would be perfect for classroom usage where the whole class can contribute in collecting content about a specific topic.

Telling other people about memorable things that happened to us in the past, in my opinion, is one of the most challenging things to do when you're learning another language. Depending on what tense you use, the person listening to your story might not understand the sequence of events you're trying to tell.I remember very clearly the first time I tried to tell a story to some American friends of mine at a slumber party and they kept asking me so many clarifying questions that I noticed I wasn't THAT successful in telling my story.Last week, I presented the challenge for unit 1B which was  to record yourself talking about a memorable moment in your life.First, I asked my students to tell each other about something funny that happened to them in the past.Then, I asked them what verb tenses they had used and it was no surprise that most of them had used ONLY the Simple Past. Well, it was clear we had to learn some more possibilities.As some students were absent that day, I shared the GRAMMAR VIDEO CLASS below (a screencast created by me) with the whole class in our EDMODO group.  Then, I showed them my example recording and asked them to identify the verb tenses and the situations I talked about. After doing lots of exercises and practicing in class, at the end of the third lesson it was their turn to make their recordings.These are some of the recordings they produced:http://audioboo.fm/boos/1259269-my-audioboolisten to ‘My audioboo’ on Audioboo listen to ‘A nice surprise party’ on AudiobooAfter listening to their various recordings, I wrote down the most common mistakes and brought to class so that we could discuss them.For this specific project, the SUGGESTED TOOLS were:AUDIOBOO  http://audioboo.fm/VOCAROO http://vocaroo.com/CROAK.IT http://croak.it/