Learning Kids Games: online communities

Showing posts with label online communities. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

A Collaborative English Grammar

I have to admit that I'm not a great fan of grammar, but this is a site that I do really like. It's called English Language and Usage and it is like a Q & A of English grammar. The site has a huge collection of questions that people have sent in about various aspects of English grammar idioms and general usage and anyone who is registered can the try to answer the questions.

I think this would be a great tool to use with trainee teachers. They could find questions and check to see if the agree with the answers. They could also post their own questions and answers. It's also a great way to test your ability to answer thorny questions that might come up.

If you are looking for questions related to a particular aspect you can search through the tags to the side and click on any that interest you.

For me this is a great way to approach the development of grammatical knowledge ( I find attempting to read grammar books impossible). Though I'm not sure that the site would be suitable for any but the more advanced students of English.

English Language and Usage is a really good way to make grammar interesting and collaborative. I hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

IATEFL 2009 Conference Online

Well I have arrived in Cardiff where I'm working with the online team for the 2009 IATEFL conference. The venue is fantastic with some great architectural features and some wonderful sculpture. I'm a particular fan of chandeliers so here's a particularly nice one.

A part from the architecture, there will be plenty to see, even if you aren't able to attend. A number of the sessions will be streamed live from the conference, and you can see a list of these along with times at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/live-sessions

We will also be videoing as many as 40 of the sessions and making them available asynchronously at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/programme/home so you can start checking those out after the next few days. You will also have the opportunity to comment on the sessions and engage with the presenters.

To keep up to date with what's happening register at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009

Hope you enjoy the sessions and get involved with the special interest group forums. You can see more images from IATEFL 2009 here

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, October 10, 2008

Free Web Publishing Community

I've just been checking out Scribd and I have to say I like it a lot. Scribd is a web publishing community which uses a tool that looks very similar to Flash Paper to enable users to upload and share documents ranging from single pages to complete books.

There's a really wide selection of books and documents uploaded that you can search through, and if you register, you can also start adding your own documents and projects.

The 'reader' part of the site delivers high quality at quite good speeds and you can also get an embed code so you can add the books to your site or blog and build tasks etc. around them. Here's a quick example of a short document on how to teach poetry:

Poetry is Contagious - How to Teach Poetry (Betsey Coleman) - Upload a Document to Scribd

Adding the embed code to this page took just a couple of seconds and I didn't need to register to get it. You just need to register if you want to upload documents.

If you go to Explore and look through the education section there are at least 1000 books or documents there all of which are free. Some really handy ones on teaching and also quite a few dictionaries including the Dictionary of English Slang.

Scribd is definitely a site I want to spend more time on, might even use it to make an e-book version of my Learning Technology blog.

Hope you find something useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Video sharing for young learners

Youtube isn't the place you'd really want your young students browsing, though as we all know there is some great stuff there for kids, and that's why Totlol is such a great idea.

It's new video sharing site and community which allows parents and teachers to set up their own channels and share videos for ages 6 months to 6 years and above ( Found quite a few that I liked). The videos are collected from Youtube, but are shared through the Totlol community site so there's no danger of your students clicking through to something unsuitable.

The site is still in beta, but it looks like there's some nice content there already, so this would be a good place to start looking or get your younger students in the habit of looking for good, safe, educational content. You can also sign up for your own free account and start contributing towards the community.

Well hope you find this useful and hope you enjoy this alien song! Read More..

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Build your own Facebook Apps

App in a box is a really interesting site that claims to be able to help you build your own Facebook applications within 5 minutes.

The site offers to help you build 5 different types of applications at the moment. These are:

Text
Mp3
Video
Image
Any combination of the above

They also have 3 new ones planned

Link to information on other social networks
A count down to an event
A quiz type app

If you are keen on getting students using social networks like Facebook and want to connect that to other work you are doing without all the hassle of learning lots of programming skills, then this looks worth a try.

I haven't tried it myself yet, so I'm not sure if it does all that, but will post something ( maybe even with a tutorial on http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ once I have.

If you try or have tried it, by all means post a comment below and let me know how you got on.

best

Nik Read More..