Lingro - dictionary for any website

Lingro.com will pop up a dictionary definition for any word you click on a website. No need to play about with site code. Simply type http://lingro.com/translate/
before the URL of the website. So if you wanted to try it now on this blog all you would have to do would be to type http://lingro.com/translate/http://efl20.blogspot.com (or click on the link).

If you register at Lingro.com the application will save a history of the words you have clicked to enable you to practice later. Other tools include, file uploader, bilingual dictionaries, for French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish, audio of the word, add new translations, ajax based dictionary which starts suggesting definitions after you type the first few letters of a word http://lingro.com/dictionary/

VoiceThread as a Collaborative EFL learning space.

I don't think I have mentioned VoiceThread in this blog as yet, surprising really, as if I were to choose one web2.0 application for EFL elementary, voicethread would be the one.

Although a written description doesn't do it justice here is a quick summary of the features.
Userfriendly application which allows you to create an online album of photos, pictures, video and documents, invite others to contribute by recording their voices, doodles, text, video(web cam) or even uploading mp3 they have prepared ahead of time.
Threads can be public or private, comments allowed or not, moderated or not. Did I mention Userfriendly? VoiceThread is free for teachers, after requesting a teacher's account you can create unlimited VoiceThreads. Although it is neccessary to register with a confirmable email address, one account can be used for a whole classroom, teacher simply needs to add extra identities to his account ie an identity for each student.

So why the intro? Until last week I had only tried voicethread with a small group of students, however last week my two 5th grade classes (about 70 students) started working on this thread.
I was happy to see that the interface was easy for them to learn, but much happier when I finally got home at the end of the day and could listen to their work.
They did a really good job!
I'm now looking for classes to join us on the thread, it is moderated so comments won't show up until I approve them - (yes, a couple of my students recorded things that I'm happy I got a chance to erase before they were seen/heard by others - also a couple of the student recordings were drowned out by a very loud teacher - who has only just realized exactly how loud she is!)

I have started a collection of voicethreads for efl elementary it can be seen at
http://iteachr.buzka.com/efl_voicethreads if you'd like to add yours to the list just add a comment to this post.

Nice Surprise! Old friends, New friends!

Well, it's been quite a while since I created this blog, but finally found the time to visit in order report on what's been going on in our EFL-Tech classroom (One 45 min lesson per week).

A very pleasant surprise awaited me here, when I discovered a comment from Christine Southard, whom I "met" first on Classroom20. I've been so sidetracked for the last couple of months, translating the Ning platform to Hebrew, setting up a network for my EFL students and kicking off "Edureshet" a social network for Israeli educators (reached 50 members yesterday - yay!!) that I haven't been taking part in the English conversations going on - there just doesn't seem to be enough time to fit everything in.

Hopefully now that Edureshet seems to be about to take off I will be able to revisit the friends I made during the summer.

As I mentioned briefly above, we, Susanb the EFL teacher and I, have set up a Ning Network for our EFL 6th grade students.
Registering to the site, working inside the Ning space and creating their profiles and profile pics, takes time for our students, but it's all good! They are using English in an authentic way, and they are enjoying it so much that they visit the site from home too!

We have set up the site so that the profile questions- repeat vocabulary and grammar used in the first few weeks back at school. The profile pics have been used to revise Parts of the Body, ie students create avatars here. Next up they will add an "About Me" text to their pages, and create voki characters and after maybe we'll start blogging.

The original intention was to follow the pace of the regular EFL lessons, but so far that has proved impossible - however I think our pace will pick up once the students start to feel comfortable with the site.

For now it is wonderful to see the busy list of recent activity, to read the short comments they leave on each other's pages, to discover through their profile info that Eshel's hobby is building computer games, or Boaz plays guitar etc.. That Nir "am not so good English" (although he really is), to recieve a message from Adva through the in site mailing system ...
...and of course to recieve "friend's requests" :-) (although I haven't announced it anywhere - anyone sending me a friend request gets a gif of their name in glitter - I'm waiting to see how long it takes them to realize that)
as the site is a closed site instead of adding adding a link I'm uploading a couple of screenpics.