Saturday, June 27, 2009

Telling a Story, Developing Multiliteracies

I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.




The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.

How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?

Originally posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Google Reader - RSS

As we are talking this week about RSS and how to add all our favorite blogs, sites, wikis to our Google Reader, I've aggregated all participants blogs in one folder in Google Reader and then I made the folder public by going to the "settings", "Folders and tags". After making it public, I clicked on "add a blogroll to your site", I copied the crazy code there and just copied to this post so that you have an idea of it. The ideal is to add it to your class sidebar if you have students with individual blogs, or if you want to call the attention of your blog audience to certain blogs you enjoy reading.





Here's how the blogroll will look like:





You can also add a "clip", which is like the latest updates on the group blogs so that it's easier for your audience and you to visualize the latest posts on a blog, for example:




And how about sharing a clip of your favorite shared items?




All of this is made through the "Settings" part of your google reader. If you have any questions or comments about this, just ask here!