CALL Teacher's Portal

http://www.mochimedia.com/games/education

I found this site that has a fair amount of ‘educational’ flash games that are ‘embeddable’. Great for a break from Compass! Just tell them not to click the ads while the game is loading.

Search for a game and click on it to open and play.  Scroll down the page and look for the ‘embed’ option. You might want to reduce the size parameters to better fit in your blog. I usually change them, as in the example below, to about 500 x 500. Here’s an example game:

I am not sure if you all know about this little trick.

If you press SHIFT+CTRL and U it allows you to set up automatic column updating in Compass.

You can set it up for individual columns or for the whole shebang.

Elliott

Using Images in Blogs

I’ve been reading a lot lately about giving proper attribution when using images from the web.  As teachers, we should lead the way in terms of setting a proper example on how to do this.  In fact, teaching students how to do this is part of the curriculum in most districts back home, whether in English classes or in technology.   However, in our context (EFL) doing that properly is not an easy task.  I’ve tried, and most of what I’ve taught just goes right over their heads, and leads to an exercise in futility.  That being said, I think the attempt is worth it.  Here are a few ways to do it:

• get Ss to use the advanced search using the “gear symbol” at the top of the Google search page.

• Scroll down to Advanced Image Search
• Select the “only images labelled for re-use“.  Scroll down to Need more tools?
• Images found under these searches are usually “Creative Commons – Attribution -  Share Alike” images, which means students can use them, but they need to give attribution.  It gets murky here, in terms of how to ‘give attribution’, but in general you should get students to try to find “who” the author is (check the website on which it is found), and if that info is not available, then get them to attribute to the website (i.e. http://www.   ).  As it says in the Creative Commons Wiki, creators need to be given proper attribution,  “unless the creator has waived that requirement or asked that her name be removed from an adaptation or collection. CC licenses have a sophisticated and flexible attribution requirement, so there is not necessarily one correct way to provide attribution.”

• Here’s how they could attribute a picture on their blog, using the “caption” field when they upload the image:

Picture from http://www.greenislandadventures.com/kaohsiunglinks.htm

This is the very least we can do to prevent blatant copyright infringement in our classroom. More information about this can be found at Creative Commons.

Kevin was asking me about getting the comments working…
In order for you and the students to be able to see comments, they’ll have to MODERATE them, which is actually best done AFTER they’ve had a few given to them. So, I recommend starting one of your classes, reviewing what they know so far on their DASHBOARD, then show them the COMMENTS button “all comments” and demonstrate how to APPROVE/UNAPPROVE/TRASH comments from their friends/teacher.

I’m not sure whether to try this one out with my 7′s or 8′s. It would probably fit in better with the ‘animation’ unit for grade 8, but at the same time, it’s a storymaker, and works much better than the Carnegie one, so I think I might add it to the list for grade 7 supplementary activities. It’s fun. The advantages of this story-maker are it’s simple interface/layout/ease-of-use, and the great characters and props (which lend themselves nicely to creative writing) Anyway, here’s the link:
http://kidsspace.torontopubliclibrary.ca/tellastory.html

There’s a link to Tumblebooks, too. There’s a separate site for ‘teens’, but I couldn’t find much there of use to us.  Let me know if you find otherwise.

I have used this comic strip maker called Chogger. It is pretty good because you can use google search to get images.  It appears to also have safe search activated. You can also upload your own images. I had the students use screen capture and then copy into MS paint. Then they added to their blog with a description.

In anticipation of our increasing use of animation in grade 8 classes, I thought I would share this new cool tool with you guys. I will be going over several other tools first, such as Voki, dFilm, GoAnimate as well as Domo Animate before I use this one. So, I probably won’t use this particular tool until the second semester, but I thought it would be good to let you look at it ahead of time so that you can adequately plan how you would ‘frame’ it or embed it in your overall unit plan. Anyway, here’s an example:

Actually, it’s called a “Folder Contents” column! Here’s how to do it:

Inserting a folder contents column

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Here is a site for Go For It online quizzes and other resources

http://elt.heinle.com/cgi-telt/course_products_wp.pl?fid=M20b&discipline_number=301&subject_code=&product_isbn_issn=1413000290&chapter_number=10&resource_id=3&altname=Quiz&from_series_id=1000000401