I recently found a video of 1st graders using the iPad to visualize a poem that their teacher read to them. After students drew what they imagined, they got into pairs and explained their drawings to a partner. The teacher also circulated to listen and to ask deeper questions of understanding. The concept  inspired our Kindergarten teacher and me to try something similar with our five and 6 year old students. Learning how to listen or read a story and being able to visualize the setting, characters and storyline is an important skill. Being able to "translate" one media (oral text) to another (an illustration)  is a critical literacy skill. Our librarian helped pick a book "How do Dinosaurs say Happy Chanukah", appropriate for this time of year. The Kindergarten teacher explained to the children, that she would be reading the book to them without showing them the pictures. A gasp was heard around the room: "What? No pictures?". Instead they were asked to use their imagination and draw the pictures in their heads first. We then handed out the iPads and ask them to draw the picture they had formed in their heads on the iPad with the help of Doodle Buddy. Once finished, we saved the images and emailed them to the teacher. Dinosaurs And Chanukah from langwitches on Vimeo. How could we expand the above visualization technique to other grade levels and subject areas? have students visualize math word problems create visual notes when watching a movie introduce and perfect sketchnoting skills documenting a science project or lab summarizing a book read How do you see visualization techniques embedded into your area of influence?

Just before the year finishes, here are my favorite web tools in 2014.  Evernote should certainly be the first on this list! I have been using it as my e-notebook for a long time. Also, the students in my 1:1 iPad class are using it as their electronic portfolios. They take their notes on the lessons, write their reflections, and keep their products online. It’s great that writing notes on their Evernote has turned into a habit for me and for them! Plickers is a treasure! It’s so much fun and a very simple tool to get feedback or to collect real-time formative assessment data. The best part is that your students don’t need to have any device! Seeing the positive reaction of the students and the teachers has been amazing this year! EdPuzzle is one of the most multi-tasker tools I have ever tried! It helps you to crop your own videos or other videos from different video sharing platforms. You can record your voice over a video, or you can add audio notes. If you like, you can add quizzes or questions to a video as well! WeTransfer is not a teacher tool but I have used it a lot this year to share files online! You don’t need to sign up to send your large files. Simply upload it, write the e-mail and send it! It will also send you a notification when the receiver downloads the file! Write About is the best digital storytelling so far this year! It has many picture prompts that you can assign your students to write a story about. You can even challenge your students to record their voices as they tell their stories. Clyp.it is my new option for Vocaroo. Record your voice and share it with others or you can upload an audio and get a link to share it! Knock on this door to explore where the door will take you! A great web tool for brainstorming, using adjectives, describing places, feelings! I love Google apps and here is my favorite one this year! Story Builder just gives us another perspective to create our stories! Write your story and see how your text turns into an animation. I have started using student selectors this year. Like that, I can give each my student a chance to speak all through the lesson! This one and that one are my favorites. I know that Padlet is not a new tool in the market, but we have used it in so many ways in our lessons this year! Because it doesn’t ask you to sign up to use the wall! I think this makes this tool one of the bestiest on my list this year! Here are mine, what about yours? Image Source: ShutterStock

This year, just like the other years, I have had the chance to try out different apps in my App Class with my students. And here is my list of my favorite Apple apps that really works in an 1:1 iPad class! Adobe Voice is the very first app on this list. It is free and it gives the chance to children to use their pictures or their text and record their voices with music at the background. I have used this app many times for so many different activities in my classes.  Tellagami is certainly sharing the first place with Adobe Voice. It’s very great app with so many possibilities to integrate in different context. Tellagami helps you to create your own avatar, choose a background and record your voice for your animated avatar. There are not so many poster makers on the market but certainly me and my students’ favorite one is the Phoster. Yes, it’s a paid app but it is really easy to use and a cool way to create posters and share with others. PicCollage is another app that we have been using a lot in class. As it is very user friendly and let students write and add props in a picture, it’s a treasure in my class. Animoto is not a new app but as it is one of the easiest way to create videos with pictures, videos and text, it is one of the tools that I use it in class. I can add Voicethread to that list as well! Videolicious is another favorite on this list. It is a great tool to create videos from your pictures, by adding music and your voice. Students love this one! I would certainly add SpekingPhoto ad Shadow Puppet apps to this list as they are my students’ favorites! It really makes it easy to record our voices over our pictures and share it with the others. QR Code Scanner and Creator is another one that we have used a lot in class in so many different ways. Kids love it and I love it! FriendStrip is another app on this list as it boosts the creativity and the imagination of the kids! Simply just pick a story and personalize it with your pictures and texts! The very last one is the Biscuit app! With this app, you can create your own vocabulary list and it will give you the definitions immediately. You can keep that list and you can get notifications on your smart phones that will remind you the word and show you the definition. What has been your favorite app this year? Image Source: Shutterstock

Matt Gomez shared a post today with a screenshot of his storytelling iPad app folder. I wanted to reciprocate and share mine. Storytelling I Folder StoryBuddy StoryBuilder StoryPagesHD Toontastic Tappy Memories StoryBoards Premium StoryMaker HD StoryPatch In a World … Drama Build a Story PhotoPuppets HD Epic Citadel Sock Puppets StoryKit SonicPics StoryRobe PuppetPalsHD TellaStory Storytelling II Folder StoryLines for Schools VoiceThread Storify This is My Story Talking Dino StoryDice Art Maker Felt Board Our Story Draw & Tell Stories About Me StoyPals Little Bird Tales I am throwing in an extra gem for everyone today, or as we say in Argentina, "dar la yapa" , when you get the baker’s dozen, something unexpected extra, the "buy one, get one free deal": 20 Best Mobile Learning Apps for Children.

This was where my digital journey had begun … This may be a beginning for you too! Electronic Village Online Sessions are five-week collaborative and hands on virtual courses & discussions that engage hundreds of educators every year. They are completely free and a great opportunity for professional development and connect with other teachers all over the world. This year, I will be moderating the "Crafting e-Textbooks" online course with many great and big names in ELT. If you would like to outline, design, and complete 1 chapter of an e-textbook that meets your learners’ needs and can be used yearly with a few edits and updates, our online course is the right one for you!! The registration has already started!!! Don’t miss the opportunity, and share the joy! Image Source: ShutterStock

The Upgrade and Amplification Exercise slide deck below grew out of the need for companion slides to "21st Century Critical Literacies- Is Traditional Reading and Writing Enough? Once you know of the NEED and URGENCY of updating your curriculum and instructional repertoire to give the critical literacies of our century justice, take a look at the checklist below to guide you in considerations as you upgrade and amplify. What does upgrade and amplify even mean? Upgrade Definition: Raise (something) to a higher standard, in particular improve (equipment or machinery) by adding or replacing components. Synonyms: improve - better - ameliorate - promote Amplify:  Definition: 1.    Increase the volume 2.    Increase the amplitude Synonyms: expand - enlarge - extend - magnify - aggrandize Upgrading and amplifying traditionally taught activities, lessons, units or entire classroom learning environments TAKES time and practice. Just as in any sport, if you want to get better at it, you have to put in the time and practice.  Before you become an athlete, who thinks nothing of running a marathon or has the conditioning of swimming 5 hours non stop, one has to have enough attempts of failing and be exhausted by "working out" for only 10 minutes at a time. Only with practice does the couch patatoe become an athlete. The same holds true with upgrading and amplifying. Most educators are "not in shape", not conditioned, not in the routine of upgrading their curriculum to embed emerging critical  literacies and amplifying their own and their students’ work. They have to practice, put the time in and "pay their dues" until it becomes easier and second nature. I am sharing with you my "workout" schedule, my model, my routine and techniques/methods of "getting into shape" to upgrade and amplify. By upgrading and amplifying, you are not throwing out your instructional goals and objectives. These goals and objectives are just expanded and enlarged. The idea is to align standards with the framework of 21st century learning. The standards, skills and literacies are fused and support each other. For warm-ups, take good old Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. Make sure you touch on more than one learning AND teaching style to address all kinds of learners. Continue your warm ups  by going through a cycle of Bloom’s Taxonomy of higher order thinking skills. Be aware of the different stages (levels) and  pay special attention to creating.  Shortcuts do not pay off… creating your own material, will allow you to share and amplify the work easier later on. Once warmed up, you are ready to take a challenge, you might not have been exposed to before. Alan November’s model of the Digital Learning Farm prescribes six roles to empower learners. Don’t overdue it at the beginning of this workout series. There is no need to go through ALL the exercises at once. It will leave you over exhausted. No need to use every role in every activity, but take care to evenly distribute the roles across the school year. The next workout is outlined by Ruben Puentedura‘s SAMR model to move from substitution over augmentation and modification to a redefinition of a task. The workout consists in starting out with using technology as a direct tool substitution, but no significant task improvement. It is compared to a direct automation of a previously analog task. The second set of the workout is to use technology in a way that allows for some task improvement. Don’t stop now and work through the aches and pains to reach the transformational stage. You will use technology tools to be able to modify the task by allowing a significant redesign of the task to finish off the workout by being able to redefine the task, create new tasks, previously not thought of or possible. Take a look at a chart of sample tasks, moving from the substution stage to the redefinition stage. Once you worked through the workouts and routines outlined in the "upgrade workout routine", become fit and conditioned in upgrading, the next level of your exercise routine takes you to the amplification routine. You can prepare yourself for amplification with simple warm up exercises. Instead of your students handing their work into you, have them present work to their classsmates first, then to a larger audience by inviting another class from the building or their parents in. The first routine of amplification becomes the task of digitizing analog or physical artifacts of students’ work. This simple modification allows you to be able  to share the work online. With this simple act (uploading digital content), amplification is ready to happen. Parents, friends and family living across the country or the world will be able to connect. By choosing to produce evidence of learning in a variety of media, we allow our online audience to read, look at, watch, or listen to student work. Amplification happens when we go beyond the traditional media in schools (which traditionally and primarily is text) and give students choices to use different media forms, mix and mash up media and/or create new forms. Amplification means to extend classroom time beyond the traditional school hours. It also means to amplify the pool of people we learn from. Traditionally the "only" teacher in the room was… the teacher. When the teacher steps aside and allows students to share their knowledge and experiences and to open up classroom walls to bring in peers, experts, eye-witnesses from around the world, we amplify who we consider teachers as well as our geographic boundaries. Traditionally our students have not had a long "reach" beyond the scope of the families, teachers and schools. By "reach", I mean the amount of people their work could reach (could be read, watched, be looked at). An essay handed in to the teacher to be graded, has a reach of 1. Amplification happens when a blog post, uploaded, cross posted and linked to by others and the link disseminated via Twitter has a potential reach of thousands.  (Disclaimer: Sometimes the single act of uploading content online is not enough to reach further. There also has to be an ACTIVE EFFORT to build a network to be able to disseminate through). Through social media, our potential connections, collaboration and dissemination paths can reach exponential levels. The REACH is about the amount of people our work is capable of touching. The reach of our work would be already considered amplified (in a small way).  if we make it available in a password protected environment (only accessible to colleagues, classmates, community members). A larger ripple effect/amplification happens when our work is open to the world and disseminated across the globe though. We move from an audience of one to a global audience through synchronous and asynchronous tools. A global audience brings in different perspectives, points of view and resources, previously not available from a locally confined audience. Making a difference in the world is possible through the amplified potential reach of a global audience. Even children as young as four or five years old (with the help of their parents or teachers) can find their voice and be heard! Traditional limitations of age, physical handicaps, financial limitations preventing traveling or a  lack of social network connections in the physical world,  don’t have to limit someone’s voice any longer. An amplification  to be heard can happen for anyone with an Internet connections.  It is a powerful realization that we all have something valuable to share with others. The last tip to getting in shape to upgrade and amplify is: SIMPLY SHARE! The popular saying "A Candle loses nothing by lighting another candle" holds just as true for our purpose. The simple act of sharing online brings automatically larger degrees of upgrade and amplification with it. In order to share (without infringing on copyright or committing plagiarism) one has to create. By not keeping your creation to yourself, you amplify the potential reach your work can generate. In the slide deck below, you will find examples from the classroom illustrating upgrades and amplifications to traditionally taught lessons and activities. I hope that the examples and the checklist below will help you in practicing and exercising your "upgrade and amplification muscles". Please share your examples (or links to examples) in the comment section.  You will automatically upgrade your practice (connect, communicate, collaborate, create) and amplify YOUR work (networking, linking, disseminating), by linking them here. You can also download the Upgrade & Amplify Checklist as a PDF  

‘Great teachers create great students!’ As the teachers are the most inspiring and the motivating key factor in students’ learning and achievement; ongoing professional development for teachers is sure to lead to improved and better outcomes in the classrooms for the students.   Over past 10 years of my profession, I have evolved and grown by simply taking online courses, participating online workshops/webinars and using social media websites for learning. Here are some of the best resources that I have been using for professional development. Electronic Village Online Courses take place in January and February every year. The courses are totally free and open to anyone around the globe. The courses let you meet with TESOL experts and participants from around the world to engage in collaborative online discussions or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. This year, there are thirteen courses available and I am happy that I am co-moderating the creating e-textbooks session with other great educators from different countries. These workshops have made the most important contribution to my professional development. They have totally inspired me! You can still join one! Shelly Terrell is conducting 30 minute online webinars every Friday on American TESOL Institute. You can also watch the archived sessions of her. Don’t miss the chance to meet this edtech guru and the authors of The 30 Goals Challenge for Teachers and Learning to Go Books. Coursera is the best education platform that partners with TOP universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. It includes amazing courses such as Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Web 2.0 Tools, Foundations of Teaching for Learning 6: Introduction to Student Assessment, Shaping the Way We Teach English, 2: Paths to Success in ELT. Don’t miss your chance to enroll one of these courses. FutureLearn also offers a diverse selection of courses from leading universities and cultural institutions from around the world. These are delivered one step at a time, and are accessible on mobile, tablet and desktop, so you can fit learning around your life. Some course titles are: A Beginner’s Guide To Writing In English For University Study / Assessment For Learning In Stem Teaching / Introduction To Cyber Security. SEETA (South Eastern Europe Teachers Association) is also offering online courses for teachers of English.  You can also watch webinars, videos or join the forum with other teachers from different countries. K12 Online Conference is an online conference open to anyone that are organized by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. You can also have a look at the archive of the previous years’ videos. British Council’s Teaching English website offers online webinars that you can attend by many important names in ELT. You can watch the archive as well.   The Open University is also offering free and online courses on many different topics including education! Google is giving online training on Google tools and how to apply them. You can also complete basic exams and become a Google Educator. Intel’s free, just-in-time professional development courses are here that you can experience now, anytime, anywhere. This series of compelling courses provides deeper exploration of 21st century learning concepts. As teachers, we can never done learning! Here are your chances to take free and online courses to certainly become better teachers. Picture Source: Shutterstock

I am thrilled to share with Langwitches’ readers an amazing learning opportunity. Take a look at the Out of Eden site and let your imagination run wild how you could get your students excited about learning via the resources available the Pulitzer Center. Overview: In early 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek will set out on foot from the birthplace of humanity, the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, and walk in the footsteps of the first modern humans who left Africa to settle the unknown world. This immense narrative journey spans roughly 50,000 years of human history and 22,000 miles of the planet’s surface—from our paleoanthropological "Eden" in East Africa north into the Levant; across the steppes of Central Asia to China; by sea from Siberia to Alaska; and then down the length of the Americas to the continental "Land’s End" of our species in Patagonia. This continuous walk will last seven years. The goal of the world walk—and the Out of Eden project—is to slow readers down and allow them to reflect on current events as a form of pilgrimage. By using the history of our migration as a backdrop for international news, Salopek will examine the most important global stories of our day from ground level, at three miles an hour—walking into stories as diverse as human conflict and local innovations, mass migration and the Internet revolution, climate change and cultural survival. A worldwide audience is invited to "walk along" via quality Web reportage that includes articles, video, audio and blogs. Salopek is a National Geographic Fellow. I am proud to say that, I was involved in creating the curriculum guides for grades 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12, complete with big ideas, essential questions, Common Core standards & NETS standards alignment, content, skills & strategies, suggested learning plan and activities. Take a look, think about the possibilities for connections and collaboration across geographic borders and over time. How can we get students so excited that they will continue following Paul over the next seven years long past the time they will be spending in our own classrooms?  

Terakki Schools will be organizing the second TELT conference on February 21 in Istanbul, Turkey. If you are already in Istanbul, please join the conference to listen to a great line up of speakers and get a chance to be interviewed for a future job!  To learn more about, visit here: http://www.teltforum.com/ We are all looking forward to seeing you at the conference.  

I have narrowed down my leitmotif of learning in the 21st century (the time we happen to live in!)  …to being self-directed and self-motivated learning. There is an opportunity, as a professional, to put exactly these two skills into action. Take a look at INNOVATE13.  A physical conference to be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil next month (January 19-21, 2013). While there will be educators physically traveling to Sao Paulo, there will be the ones who will attend virtually THROUGH those attending face to face (f2f). It is a tremendous opportunity to gain perspective, network and possibly kick start further global networking and collaboration as a professional, but also for the students in your charge. It does not matter if you live in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Iowa, USA or in the Australian Outback,  YOU can be part of a global network of educators and participate in the conversation to re-imagine schools. Keep reading… Innovate 2013 Innovate 2013 marks Graded School’s commitment to re-imagine the school that best serves and inspires students for tomorrow. Please join us and innovators from across the globe to engage in a dialogue designed to ignite new ideas resulting in building a foundation for the change our students deserve. In partnership with Un-Plugged at the American School of Bombay, the Lausanne Laptop Institute at Lausanne Collegiate, the European 1-1 Learning Institute hosted by the Frankfurt International School, and the Association of American Schools in South America (AASSA), Graded School is honored to launch the conversation in South America. In order for learning across distances to be  possible, a symbiotic relationship between the physical and virtual attendees has to be in place. If  in-person attendees are not opening their conference walls and sharing with the outside, the online participants will not be able to connect, add, reflect, ask questions, contribute perspective or curate resources generated by the community physically present. If the online participants are not visually participating in the conference platform (NING), using backchannel venues, blogs, twitter hashtags or other collaborative tools and social media platforms to connect their experience, the in-person attendees cannot actively amplify and connect their learning, their connections & perspectives to theirs. Both kinds of attendees (physical & virtual) of the conference have to posses the following requirements: a desire to connect with other educators from around the world and grow their professional learning network an ability to use technology tools that allow for synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration a wish to be part of a group of "pioneers" who are exploring new forms of learning a disposition of being a reflective practitioner, not afraid of being transparent an ambition of overcoming obstacles and "making it work for YOU" a resourcefulness to overcoming obstacles, such as time zones and geographic boundaries an understanding of having to experience and experiment with global connectedness, collaboration and learning before you can bring that experience to your students a love of sharing the power of ACTING on this call to participate It is up to you (physical & virtual attendees) to make it happen. Self directed and self-motivated learning is what sets 21st century educators apart from others. Physical Attendees: This is a call to in-person participants to make a commitment to: share openly and connect your learning experience at the conference to a larger global audience BEYOND the other f2f attendees be transparent and reflective in your own learning. find ways to summarize, synthesize, curate and document ideas, learning, projects, concepts, etc. choose one or more platforms to share make a concerted effort to include and make the virtual attendees feel PART OF a learning community become a buddy/mentor to someone who is not physically attending. volunteer to a be the "online moderator" of a backchannel during a live presentation/workshop/keynote approach someone at your school or maybe someone in your network and ask them to experience a conference together IN NEW FORMS. Virtual Participants: No travel costs are involved, NO registration fees are required. Make a commitment to: mark your calendar to be able to participate. January 19-21, 2013 find a dedicated "conference attendance" time. Use that time to read through the Twitter stream/hashtag, Ning activities generated through the conference, resources being shared. ACTIVELY participate versus PASSIVELY consuming information. Contribute resources, your own perspective, thoughts and experience. make strategic connections with physical attendees. Connect with them even beforehand via the Ning, on Twitter or via a blog. Leave a comment, @mention someone in a Tweet, use the conference hashtag to connect your voice to the conversation. Take it from… I always wanted to… and…What an incredible opportunity… to…I can make this happen!… I can experiment with learning in new ways… Here are some tips/steps to take for the active collaborative connected conference attendee: Make a commitment to attend virtually (add it to your calendar/block a time off) Participate in the conference Backchannel Follow the conference Twitter hashtag (#innovate13) Become a member of the conference Ning Fill out your profile, say hello and introduce yourself, join groups, post valuable resources Join the Twitter List Innovate2013 with Tweeps participating (virtually & physically) Being part of the list will give everyone an idea who will be joining f2f and from afar. Find a Buddy, someone who will be physically at the conference Discuss before hand how your can help each other Learning in the 21st century has taken on new shapes and forms. Professional Development can happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from all corners of the globe. It is critical for educators to develop the skills and capacities to be able to ACTIVELY participate by connecting, communicating and collaborating virtually . Just do it! Step forward, out of the shadows of being a "lurker" in order to take your learning in your own hands. Let  SELF-MOTIVATED and SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING become your mantra as an educator. Looking for a buddy at the conference? First Steps? Leave a comment here on Langwitches or become a member on the conference Ning in order to connect. Looking forward to learning with you at INNOVATE 2013! Download the "Attend a Conference in Person or Virtually" Guide as a pdf file.

My two favorite apps; TeleStory and Toontastic are gone completely free on AppStore with all their great features unlocked as they are both acquired by Google.  TeleStory is a fun video creating app that uses the augmented reality video camera. The app gives you to a theme, background scenes, face costumes, cue cards and special effects to create your own TV show. The app allows you to write and record your story using different themes. You can sing a song in your band, you can report the news or you can go on a space adventure or a play in a spy movie. Using the augmented reality video camera, students can tell their stories with effects. This tool is amazing to boost the creativity skills. This tool will certainly motivate the students to speak and write in English! Toontastic is another digital storytelling tool that lets you create your own animated films by drawing or choosing the characters and the setting. Then you just move the characters and props around on screen and record your voice. You can also add music by picking up an emotion at the end. Toontastic is sure to impact the creativity of the students and this is a great app to teach kids how to structure a story with different storytelling elements.

I have written and spoken extensively about the use of Twitter in education: as one social network tool to connect, collaborate and amplify (Seven Degrees of Connectedness, Upgrade & Amplification Exercise and Checklist ) as a critical component of 21st century skills and literacies for the classroom ( Twitter HOTS & Establishing a Twitter Routine in the Classroom, Twitter Policy and Rationale, Guide to Twitter in the K-8 Classroom, K-2 Twitter in the Classroom Checklist,  Twitter in Education Pinterest Board ) as an important component of Professional Development for educators (R U Ready 4Twitter?, New Forms of Learning: How to Participate in a Conference 2.0 Style?) In addition to the above mentioned uses of Twitter, I am increasingly becoming aware of the importance of Twitter as a CURATION tool for me. The term "curation" in itself has become quite popular recently. I am not sure yet, if it is another term destined to become a victim of talking at cross purposes among the educational community. Mike Fisher has blogged about curation and what it means versus the concept of collection. Collecting is what kids do when asked to find resources for a particular topic. Usually, it represents the first 3 or 4 hits on a Google search, without meaning, discernment, or connections. Curating is different. It’s the Critical Thinker’s collection, and involves several nuances (see Figure 1) that separate it as an independent and classroom-worthy task. Mike created the following image to point out the continuum from collecting to curating The stages and progression of using Twitter as a mere consumption tool of collected information (by others) to curating information, adding value with additional perspectives, connections,  resources or interpretation, the platform of Twitter as a potential tool for curation becomes evident. There are different sides to Twitter as a Curation tool: Taking advantage of a network of curators working for you (building your own customized network), consuming their curated information Collecting, organizing, connecting, attributing, interpreting, summarizing the vast amount of information that comes across your desk/ feed /books/articles/etc.  for YOURSELF! Becoming consciously the curator for others for a particular niche, area of expertise or interest. Disseminate resources, add value, put in perspective, create connections, present in a different light/media/language. Real time curation allows you to be part of an event, that you physically might not be attending or being on the opposite end allows you to be the bridge for others to participate at an event where you are present, but your network is not. Download Twitter as a Curation Tool as a pdf file. Taking advantage of a network of curators working for you (building your own customized network), consuming their curated information. Create lists on Twitter, that will clump together users who are experts and curators for a particular area of interest to you. Ex.: Library & Media Specialists (List by Langwitches) LanguageTeachers (List by Langwitches) International Educators (List by Langwitches) Classrooms Tweeting (List by Langwitches) Follow #hashtags of topics or groups. Ex. #Kinderchat (for Kindergarten teachers) #1stchat (for First Grade teachers) #educoach (for educational coaches) #edjewcon (for Jewish educators) #globalclassroom (globally connect your classroom) #iosedapp (for educators interested in educational apps for iPads/iPods/iPhones) Collecting, organizing, connecting, attributing, interpreting, summarizing the vast amount of information that comes across your desk/ feed /books/articles/etc.  for YOURSELF! A few years ago, I set up the Langwitches Twitter Blog,  another WordPress blog under the Langwitches domain. Using the Twitter Tools plugin, any tweet, I am posting to Twitter, automatically gets posted to the Langwitches Twitter Feed Blog. I am finding myself using the blog’s search function more and more when I am trying to recall a resource, need to quote someone, find a username of someone I interacted with on Twitter, etc. Since I am increasingly using and relying on the search function of my Twitter blog, I am also more aware of the Tweets I am posting. I am carefully thinking about future keywords, I might be searching for in order to recall a particular tweet (s). Consciously becoming the curator for others for a particular niche, area of expertise or interest. Disseminate resources with added value, put in perspective, create connections, present in a different light/media/language. This is the difference that separates the "collectors" from the "curators". Establish yourself as an expert, by sharing selected quality information freely. This is when YOU become the trusted member of a network that funnels QUALITY / FILTERED information to others. Real time curation allows you to be part of an event, that you physically might not be attending or being on the opposite end allows you to be the bridge for others to participate at an event where you are present, but your network is not. As the event unfolds in real time, you use Twitter to document and link what you are hearing, witnessing and learning. I recently published a blog post outlining the symbiotic relationship between physical and virtual attendees of a conference: New Forms of Learning: How to Participate in a Conference 2.0 Style? How else are you using Twitter as a curation tool? Please share.

The second Educational Technology Summit will be held on 14 March 2015 in Istanbul Turkey. The conference aims at bringing together professionals from educational institutions, businesses and the media with parents, students and teachers who understand the importance of following the current and the future trends in Educational Technologies. Some of the speakers will be the edtech guru Shelly Terrell, Steve Wheeler and Gary Motteram. I can’t wait to listen what these edtech leaders will be talking about.  I will also be there as a speaker for an ELT Edtech forum with other strong edtech ladies from Turkey who are Burcu Akyol, Ayşegül Liman Kaban, Sedef Koç, Beyza Yılmaz and Eva Büyüksimkeşyan! If you will be there, please join us to discuss about what’s really happening in the real classroom environment in terms of educational technology, what is working and what is not,  what are the good examples of technology integration and how we can build a better teacher profiles in today’s classrooms. 

I confess, I am a visual learner! I also relate better to metaphors, since they paint a picture in my mind. My eyes roll back when I see long passages of text, that I am supposed to read, digest, analyze, understand, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I can do it (I am an avid reader), but I can wrap my mind around concepts, thoughts and content better, if it is represented visually in some shape or form. The majority of content presented to students in school is in form of text, the world outside of school bombards us with information in many forms of media beyond text. Image licensed under CC by Trey Ratcliff Our ability to navigate a media rich world and "read and write" in that world is increasingly important skill to posses. Visual Literacy is defined by Wikipedia as: the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be "read" and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading. I have been working with one of our Middle School teachers, Morah Ita,  and her blog. She is steadily climbing the classroom teacher’s blogging step ladder. Her classroom blog has moved from being a static replacement of the weekly newsletter sent home and information "pushed" out for students to read and consume to a hub, where students respond to prompts from her, are able to read and comment on each other and allow a global audience to their conversation. Another upgrade we are taking a closer look at now, is a move from TEXT HEAVY to a more MEDIA INFUSED writing style.   Inspired by the website Visual Writing Prompts, I took the text based journal prompts on her blog and "visualized" them. From creating these visuals as a journal writing prompts, my thoughts turned to other subjects. Our 4th/5th grade Math teacher is revisiting fractions. Part of her class needs more help than others in understanding and making sense of fractions. Again, the idea was to bring more visual "real life" elements to a typically taught abstractly (with numbers) or with clipart (blocks or circles) concept. Just google "visual fractions" and switch from web to images. The meta-cognitive process of creating the slides and thinking of a questions to go along with them gave place to another opportunity for the more "advanced" students. As the teacher works with struggling students, they would be able to create visual fraction problems for their classmates to practice and solve. Our Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Yegelwel, shared the following on our school’s Professional Development Ning. A seesaw is a perfect balance (given the right amount of weight on each side)! How do you teach heavy, light, equal to Kindergarteners? Using balances and connecting cubes in the classroom is good, but using their bodies on the seesaw outside is even better.  We (not me personally!) weighed ourselves, figured out which child weighed the same or almost the same as another child and then tried to balance on the seesaw. The activity is excellent. I am so glad that the teacher documented it by taking the image to be later shared among colleagues and parents via her classroom blog. I am wondering now though, how can we continue to upgrade and continue to infuse visual literacy for our 5 and 6 year olds?  Can we take images from objects the children are familiar with (ex. from around the classroom) and create visual questions for them. The objective is to teach students not only the concept of heavier, lighter, equal, but to give them the ability to see and evaluate images and transfer the concept to real life and vice versa. PS. I used the (free)  iPad app Haiku Deck, in case you were wondering how the visual slides were created. I have found the app to be perfect to quickly create good looking slides. The app is very intuitive. The fluency of the creation process is smooth. 1. Add your text (you are limted to up to two lines…which is a good thing!) 2. Choose an image (from Flickr’s Creative Commons pool or upload your own) 3. Choose the layout 4. Share your slides (export it as a PowerPoint file or send an e-mail with a link) I then emailed the slides to myself, opened them up in PowerPoint and exported them as images to be uploaded to the blog. You can also view the slideshow on the iPad and take screenshots of the individual slides in order to upload them to a blog. I am calling on all of you bloggers, presentation deliverers and teachers to BREAK UP THE TEXT! Include less words, embed a variety of media to support you message/content, infuse visual literacy into your teaching!

If you are using different methods of choosing students names in class, here are some techie and fun ways to do it in the classroom. You can use this Dart Board Selector to choose your students. Simply copy and paste your students names and throw the virtual arrow. You need to sign up to the website to be able to use it. Here is another colorful dart students’ name picker that you can use. You can edit and save your class list, you can even embed it to your blog so that it will be ready to use anytime. Here, copy and paste your class list, set the timer and click on ‘go’ to choose a student. You can remove the name once that student is selected. This is actually my favorite one.  Random Name Generator will help you to create a class with a password and add your class list. Then you can see the names of the students one by on a blackboard screen. This tool also lets you create a seating chart or it will automatically group the students for you.  Fruit Machine is another student picker tool. It turns your class list into kind of a gambling machine where you can choose a student by moving the lever. It’s fun too! How to use in class: Instead of writing names on the student selector tools, you can write numbers and each student can be responsible for one number. Like that we can use it in all classes without changing the names each time. Instead of writing the names of the students, we can write some questions. In pairs, the students ask each other the questions. Also, we can write words instead of students names and play Hot Seat. To play this, choose a student, s/he sits with his/her back turned to the screen. As the words appear on the screen, the rest of the class try to describe that word.  Hope you enjoy!

It is no secret that I am a fan of the iPad app BookCreator since its release in 2011. Our students have created several eBooks with the app. You can read about the creation, its process and even download the final eBooks on the following blog posts: Finally! A Book Creator App The Making of a Story in Kindergarten and Amplification Thoughts Step-by-Step: How to Create a Collaborative Class eBook First Graders- First iPad Encounters One of the most important features of the app is the openness and responsiveness of the developer Dan Amos. He truly is interested and flexible to accommodate educators and their special needs in the classroom. Our wonderful librarian Karin Hallett, who blogs on Liquid Literacy (a must subscribe blog) published a step by step recount of her process of creating a classroom eBook with current first graders.  (Tip: the student reflection video is especially interesting and the "Book Author Checklist" (see below), Karin created for first graders, is useful:) Each student worked on their own iPad to create their eBook. We are working on stacking our eBook library with student created books, that will allow students to "leave a legacy" by making their books available for future students of their grade level. The challenge for us teachers was to combine each individual student book into one classbook. Each student book was to be a separate chapter. Dan Amos had extended the new beta version of the new BookCreator to me and we were in luck that the ability to combine more than one book together was already included in the update. Each student emailed me their eBook file, which I opened in BookCreator on my iPad. Once I had all eBooks in my BookCreator app, I simply chose to combine the books. Again, Dan Amos was open to my suggestions to making the app even more intuitive and better for teachers wanting to create classroom eBooks. I had the following suggestions for him: copy title page when combining books being able select more than one book at the time to combine being able to insert pages at specific points in the book, not just the end. being able to duplicate pages The app update is coming out of beta today and ready to be downloaded by everyone. I encourage you to upgrade quickly and start creating your own combined classroom eBooks!

On 21 February, at TELT Forum and Career Day, there will be a Coordinators’ Panel where you will have the chance to meet with the leading schools’ FLD Coordinators. Don’t miss that chance! About the conference: The 2014 Terakki Language Teaching (TELT) Forum and Career Day once again brings together our community of K-12 Foreign Language Teachers in Turkey , to explore how we can best prepare our students to be successful global communicators in what is a rapidly changing world. The theme "Blurred Lines: Teaching becomes Learning" reflects the main focus of our forum, which is ‘the changing role of the language teacher’. We will explore this theme in a variety of plenary sessions, workshops, roundtable and panel discussions, and much more. As part of the Career Day component of the conference, participants will also have the opportunity to meet our Terakki teachers and leaders, and to interview for positions on our foreign languages teaching team for the 2015-2016 school year.

You have all been there… Professional Development days at your school… Administration usually choose a topic, design the activities and/or bring in a speaker. Most likely,  they will be slides with bullet points…listening…turn to your partners…learning about a new initiative your school will take part in…etc. As more and more educators are building PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and taking their Professional Development into their own hands, they realize that their in house, school based PD needs to take on new forms as well. The EDCAMP style PD is sweeping the USA and the world in order to honor the "experts" among ourselves versus bringing in "outside experts". Conferences, like educon, edJEWcon or Innovate steer aware from the sage on stage lectures towards conversation style sessions. They aim to move from an exclusive "you physically have to be there" to inclusive virtual connections as an integral part of the learning experience. These conferences seek to blur the notion of a PD event as one moment in time and space to becoming the hub for growing one’s learning network and conversations for "just in time" learning beyond "just in case" tools or skills. There has also been a wave of new styles of presentations beyond the traditional style lecture typically supported by bullet heavy PowerPoint sides. Take a look at TED style presentations or Pecha Kucha types (see Chris Lehmann‘s example at Ignite Philly above)  to spicen up presentations. At a recent Professional Development day at our school, a "Hatzatah Presentation"style contest was held, open to our faculty. "Hatzatah"= Ignition in Hebrew,  is our Jewish Day School’s adaptation of  Pecha Kucha and Ignite. Each presenter had 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides which automatically advanced every 15 seconds. The winning prize was an iPad. We gave them a wide open topic of  "How has/have iPad(s) impacted your teaching practice?" and shared with them a checklist outlining Presentation Logistics, Content, Presentation and Resources. We asked three judges to take a look at the recorded Hatzatah presentations and choose a winneri. Mike Fisher from Digigogy, Lisa Johnson from TechChef4U and Richard Byrne from FreeTechnology4Teachers & iPad Apps for School, graciously agreed to be our judges. Each of our "contestants" shared with me, that the process of creating these types of presentations (condensed to five minutes) have been an incredible source of learning for them. In the spirit of sharing, allowing others to learn form our process, maybe even inspire the possibility of a new form of professional development at your school, here are the filmed Hatzatah presentations. What are some new forms of Professional Development you are  experiencing or experimenting at your school? Karin Hallett (Liquid Literacy Blog) Stephanie Teitelbaum (Teach Blog & Tweet ) Shana Gutterman (ShoshyArt Pinterest Board) Seth Carpenter   Shelly Zavon (Teacher-Twenty-One)

Youtube Kids App is released both on Appstore and Google Play for free! This app helps us to remove advertisement, side bars and unwanted/not appropriate videos for kids as well. The app is clean with big buttons and it has very easy scrolling to use with all age appropriate channels and playlists. The playlists include great channels such as Sesame Street, Thomas & Friends, and Dreamworks, online hits like Mother Goose Club, TuTiTu, and Super Simple Songs. Parents can also turn off search for an even more contained experience and they can set the built-in timer to let your kids know when it’s time to stop watching. The app puts these settings behind a grown-ups-only lock, out of kids’ reach as well. I think this app will be a great resource for teachers, content creators and parents as well! This is certainly the app that I would recommend my parents who want to find kid friendly and kid related videos! Thank you Youtube! Picture Source: ShutterStock

I can die happy now I have seen learning in the 21st Century modern classroom! The learning just oozes through the cracks of the physical classroom walls. Learning is amplified by the amount of people who are collaborating, participating, communicating and creating. The learning is NOT about the technology tools, but what students can DO with them to learn in new ways. The learning is about an authentic tasks, that allows students to contribute in a individualized and personalized manner to make them realize that their work matters in the real world. It all started out with a conversation between Mike Fisher and me. He had written over 40 children poems and was in the process of wondering what to do with them? I was looking for an authentic task for 9-11 year old students. We felt we had a perfect match! How about getting the students Language Arts  and Art teacher involved? The initial idea was to make a unit of poetry come alive, study Mike’s poems and visualize the poems by creating illustrations. Great plan… it snowballed from there… A quick Skype call between Mike and the teachers, helped flesh out each of our expectations and a timeline for the "project". A critical component was the participants’ willingness to be flexible and see where the students would take "the project". What if… …Mike allowed students to alter his original poems if they felt inspired to remix them, making the creation process fluid and embedding new ways of looking at forms of copyright? … Mike offered to write a new poem to additionally created illustrations by students, flipping the collaboration roles? …we published a poetry book on various platforms? (hard cover/eBook) …we had student run a marketing and advertisement campaign? …we involved the Math teacher to support students in calculating how much the book should cost, what would the profit be, how would a profit be split? …allowed the class to handle the entire business venture? …we incorporated Alan November’s concept of the Digital Learning Farm and leaving a legacy? Each student was "given" a poem from Mike to be responsible for. We set up a first Skype call with Mike, the author, for students to meet him, ask questions about "their" poem. Part of our job as teachers was to observe students as they were taking on the roles outlined in the Digital Learning Farm. We were/are looking to identify NEW FORMS of assessment, since our "project" was not to be an add-on to traditional assessment tools.   As I was watching students talk to Mike Fisher via Skype, Will Richardson’s call for Thinking Differently About Learning, which includes Learning to Talk to Strangers came to mind. As students interacted, I was watching their body language, paying attention to their vocabulary, ability to articulate an idea, their conversation etiquette and ability to follow a conversation and interaction. Stay tuned for the publication of a Taxonomy of Skype Conversation to facilitate assessment of video conferencing. As the Skype conversation was happening in the foreground, other students were busy documenting and collaborating in backchannels. A Google Doc was opened and shared among all students, teachers and Mike Fisher. The multi-tasker Mike is, allowed students to Google Chat at the same time as he was talking to students via Skype. Other students had taken on the task to tweet the Skype call Take a look at the 4th and 5th grade Twitter feed, documenting the skype call. Students are exhibiting understanding of Twitter grammar, syntax and etiquette. They are showing progression by starting to add value, links, citations and they own thoughts. They are summarizing and articulating thoughts in 140 characters or less. They are directly communicating, disseminating, collaborating and connecting via social networking.  We are using Twitter and HOTS as a way to assess these skills. We had other students use different tools to take notes too. The notes app on their iPad or traditional paper and pen One student chose to summarize what he heard during the Skype call by mindmap doodling. He was able to re-tell the different poems that were discussed between his classmates and the author. Take a few minutes to peek into the classroom as students were debriefing from the Skype experience. Poetry Book Skype from langwitches on Vimeo. So, where do we go from here? The students are very excited and are taking ownership. There is no talk about what kind of grade they will be receiving for their work. An authentic audience will decide if they were successful. Students will volunteer to take on different roles in the publishing, marketing, finance, communication department. We will allow them to take the lead, consulting, coaching and modeling if needed. Stay tuned as this "school project" unfolds. .  

An essay is the most popular assignment for every high school and college student, because it trains his creativity, critical thinking and analytical thinking skills. Although students should learn to write essays correctly, especially if they want to prepare solid research papers in the future; most of them feel intimidated and get stressed when they hear about writing an essay. And of course, there are moments when students do not have the time and nerves to complete their essays without a delay; or they cannot find enough materials to complete their papers and then it may be the right time to ask a professional writer from a custom writing service online for help.  So if you are looking for a great, reliable professional writing service that you can trust, PapersMart.net can be a great choice as it is one of the best ultimate essay writing service that you can find in the market when you consider the level of writing, ingenuity and uniqueness of each paper that are submitted as well as rapid and secure delivery.  Using PapersMart service, you not only find essays but you can also get help to find term papers, research papers, book, movie reports or films reviews on any topic or any complexity that you need. You can also get customized paper on any topic such as business, communication and media, computer technologies, culture and art, economics, finance, government, history, literature, management, marketing, philosophy, politics, psychology, case studies on different topics and many more.  The process of writing is fast and effective as experienced and creative writers will help you to organize your thoughts and decisions for your paper following the structure and format of your text citing everything according to the requirements of the format. Like that they will do their best to make your essay look and sound personal, informative and non-plagiarized with a good quality. By receiving a professionally written essay, you will also be able to see and learn how a good essay should be.  Beside all these things, the price will be lower and completely affordable. So if you looking for a 100% non-plagiarized written papers from  experienced and multitasking writers who are experts in dealing with any kinds of papers and with attentive and helpful administrators, use PapersMart.net to make your college and university life easier today.

As first graders are learning about the butterfly life cycle, we wanted to stay away from usual activities such as coloring in a pre-printed coloring page. INSTEAD of such an activity (created by others) and a quiz about recalling the different stages of the life cycle as assessment, we decided to have students built on their knowledge and fluency of creating a collage and CREATING a visual of their learning. The digital visual was to become an artifact for their student portfolio. Our first graders are working weekly on a Hebrew visual dictionary on the iPad PicCollage app. They are very comfortable with the app itself. We were ready to spill over from Jewish studies into their General Studies class and push them on their workflow (fluency) with the iPad. we reviewed the stages of a butterfly showed students a National Geographic video of the life cycle modeled the creation of a PicCollage Butterfly poster by breaking down each step embedded digital citizenship (images copyright issues) emphasized the workflow of : choosing appropriate tools/apps (critical thinking) navigating to website ( workflow, information literacy) searching for images (information literacy, critical thinking, creativity) saving images (workflow) switching apps (workflow) browsing for images> importing images > editing images > adding text (workflow) designing (creativity) saving (workflow) emailing final product (workflow, communication) I was impressed by our 6 & 7 years olds to get to work, able to follow along the workflow path, some having a little trouble with spelling some of the words, but ALL comfortable with tapping, swiping, switching between apps, pinching in and out, editing, saving images and simply knowing that these images will be waiting for them in their Photo Album to be used in another app. This activity was NOT about using the iPad app, it was about creating a visual of their learning. It was about workflow, skills and creativity. The emailed collages, will be placed on student blogfolis with a written or audio reflection of their creation or learning process.     Interested in other "upgraded" activities for first graders and a butterfly unit? Take a look how last’s year first grade students created an ePub iPad book for the world as the culmination of their unit of study of butterflies.  

Vocaroo has always been my favorite online voice recording tool! It is easy to use and the best part is that you and your students don’t need to sign up to use it. Other than recording your voice, Vocaroo also lets you upload your audio files and get a link for that. And it supports many of the most common audio formats to upload. When you upload, you can share your audio online through many social media tools, get an embed code to embed it on your blog or your website and you can get a ready qr code to share it.  Picture Source: ShutterStock   

Recently, I tried to explain to a teacher from another school how we are trying to use iPads BEYOND apps. We have over 100 apps on our school iPads and introduce our students according to age level to a variety of them, but the focus of the use of the devices NEEDS to remain primarily as a tool for: exposing students to skills, characteristic of a "modern learner" critical thinking personal learning transformative learning workflow fluency anytime/anywhere/anyhow creating There is nothing wrong with using apps for isolated skills practice, such as multiplication, spelling, memorization, taking digitized quizzes or substituting otherwise traditional analog activities. These purposes should not be the only reasons of using iPads though. As students are being exposed to different apps, the focus needs to remain on the purpose, creation, workflow and sharing of what they can "do"with the iPads. They should "do" what they could not conceive or accomplish without them before. I have shared last week, how our first graders are showing first signs of fluency when working with the tools at their disposal. How do we approach the workflow fluency with Kindergarten students? We chose four apps (Doodle Buddy, Skitch, iMovie, ExplainEverything) to introduce our 5 and 6 year olds to the workflow: import>create>save>share Students listened to a story (about dinosaurs and Hanukkah) without seeing the illustrations in the book in Doodle Buddy, they visualized the story by drawing the imaginary images in their heads. they saved the images in the photo album emailed the images to their teacher (to be inserted into student blogfolio under categories: Art, Writing) We started out by having students use Skitch to take a picture of themselves (some of them asked a buddy to take it for them, which they then reciprocated) by using the pen tool, they chose a color and then wrote their name on the image from Skitch, their "annotated" images were emailed to the teacher  (to be inserted into student blogfolio- Category: Kindergarten, Me, writing samples) Using iMovie students created a new project recorded a buddy telling them about their "favorite part of Kindergarten". they played the movie back, re0recording if necessary until the movie clip was to their satisfaction students saved and named their project the movie was sent to a school vimeo account (to be embedded into student blogfolio- Category: Kindergarten, Me, Oral Language)   The Kindergarten teacher set up scenarios and took photos in the classroom, demonstrating the Math concept of "fewer, more, equal". the images ( different scenarios with different groups of children) were emailed to each iPad and saved in the Photo Album students looked at each image and chose the scenario, they wanted to "explain" (all students chose an image they were part of!) using Explain Everything, they then imported the image chose the pen tool and color recorded, paused, and drew their explanation the project was saved and mailed to teacher to be uploaded to classroom vimeo account (to be included in student blogfolio under Categories: Kindergarten, Math, Oral Language)   As we were using the above apps, we continue to ask and reflect: How is the app used to directly support curriculum content? How are we allowing students to demonstrate evidence of their learning in this moment in time? How are we/they documenting their learning process? How do we provide opportunities for students to think about and reflect on their own learning? What skills of a "modern learner" are we exposing our students to and how are we supporting the development of new literacies? What are some of the workflows your students are becoming fluent in? How are you connecting skills and literacies of a modern learner to transforming activities in the classroom?