Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia

I've just discovered Mashpedia and I have to say I really like it. It's a combination of a search engine and an encyclopedia. It's very simple to use, you just type in a search query and hit search.

The site will then generate a page of information links about your search topic. It collects information from multiple media and different sources from books, blogs , text images to video and even Twitter references.


Here's a couple of example pages I created, just click the titles to see the pages compile themselves.

• Learning technology
• Jimi Hendrix
• London Zoo
• Barcelona
• The European Union
• The Oud
  

This is a great tool for creating reading and research tasks for students, based around authentic materials. It creates genuine web based reading tasks that demand that students assess clues to text content from multiple sources before exploring the links, then read or watch for gist to check relevance before reading / listening more deeply for specific information.

The pages will always create similar though not identical content so don't create very specific reading and research tasks, make sure the tasks are general and more generic.

Here are some possible reading / research tasks you could use which would work for most topics:

• Get students to look at the information and use it to create a quiz on the topic. They find information that interests them and write questions to quiz the rest of the class.
• Set students to find 5 - 10 facts about a topic. You could stipulate some of these need to be negative aspects and some positive to make it more challenging.
• Get students to search the page and decide which of the sources it links to is the single most informative or interesting.
• Get students to research a topic and create a multimedia poster about it using text, images and video embedded. You could use something like Glogster for them to show their results.
• Get students to research a topic and create a short documentary or news report about it. If you have access to a video camera you could video their presentations.

Of course you still have to be careful with younger students as you can't control what comes in to the page, and also expect much less of lower level students and set them quite simple tasks, perhaps as simple as pulling out some images and describing them etc.

This is a great way to generate web based reading tasks from authentic materials that students can access in an authentic way. I hope you find Mashpedia and these suggestions useful.

Related links:

• 35 more reading tasks
• Using Wise Quotes with EFL Students
• Get the News Through Images
  
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
  
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Create Image Books

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Edublog Awards 2008 Nomination

Well wonder of wonders, my Learning Technology Blog has been nominated for an Edublog Award.
It's been nominated within the Best Resource Sharing category, which means there is some VERY stiff competition. To be honest, my money ( and actually my nomination) is on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day/ but it's still nice that someone has seen fit to nominate one of my blogs.

If you haven't already, it's well worth checking out the list of blogs that have been nominated as there's some really excellent ones there, which makes it that much more of an honour to get one of mine in there. You can see all the categories here: Edublog Awards 2008

And you can see my nominations here: My nominations

Hope you find some interesting stuff there.

Related links:

• My learning technology blog
• My nominations
• Naming My Sources: Part 2
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Creating a personal homepage

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Teaching Better: Digg for Language Teachers

I've just came across this rather interesting new site for language teachers (any language , not just English) that looks like the language teachers version of the popular user generated news site Digg. It's called 'Teaching Better', though the second 't' is the other way around.

Any teacher can come and register on the site and write about interesting and relevant websites or web based news for teachers. Visitors to the site then read the stories, follow the links and can vote the story up or down depending on how useful they think it is.


I'm glad to see that one of my blogs 'Daily English Activities' has been listed and has 8 votes already (Okay one of them was from me).

This looks like a really useful resource for teachers of all languages. I hope that they are able to maintain the quality of the links and references as this is the kind of thing which can easily be taken over by spammers.

So far it looks good, has some useful links to quality sources and even has a useful RSS feed to subscribe to.

Hope you find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating a personal homepage
• Turn Feeds into a PDF Newsletter
• RSS and Personal Homepages for Teachers
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Creating a Wiki
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Naming My Sources: Part 2

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Becoming a citizen journalist

Ever thought of becoming a journalist in your free time, well now you can with Instablogs!

Instablogs was brought to my notice by an email that arrived in my inbox asking me if I wanted to become a 'citizen journalist'. I have to say that the thought is quite attractive and this might be something to get students involved in on some level too.

I had a quick look at the site and it is interesting and looks like a credible news site. It splits the articles geographically by continent (good to find so many countries represented rather than just the US or Europe as is the case with so many sites) and also splits the news by topic, with the usual things like, entertainment, technology, sport, politics etc.

You have to register to actually write an article and in the email I recieved it did mention payment for articles, though the amount was very small, so I don't think this would be a motivating factor.

As I said, this could be quite a useful resource for students or for materials for your students, partly because it does cover such a broad geographical area, and it might well be interesting to compare some of the 'citzen' news with articles from more mainstream news sources like BBC or CNN.

It might also provide your students with some great motivation for writing too as they could possibly get their work published and people have been known to launch careers from such sites!

As for me, the main thing that puts me off writing for the site is that it doesn't have an education section. If it did well... I don't know.

• What do you think?
• Would you write for a site like this?
• Is this site an attempt to empower people or just a cynical attempt to get cheap content?
• Should citizens be journalists or should that be left to the 'professionals'?
  

I'd be very interested to hear your views, so please do post a comment if you have one.

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..