Category Archives: resources

Turning Words into Fun Visuals

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Have you ever come across something like this?


Via: Voxy Blog

 

Have you ever wished you could do something like this for your students? These are called Infographics, and basically they are used to represent information in a graphical manner. We all know that visuals are appealing, and that they do help in understanding concepts which might be hard to grasp otherwise.

Well this is a link to a site that can help you find tools so that you can make your own infographics. I would suggest some time to experimenting with these prior to your teaching practice. Might come in not only handy and but you can even ask your students to produce their own infographics.

I also use WORDLE very much and students love it. I use it for example when I ask my students to summarise their thoughts on a particular topic/concept in a number of words. All they need is to copy and paste them into the online WORDLE tool and voila’ – some great wordles come out.

This is an example:

Wordle: designinglearningresources

This WORLDE  has been created automatically by inserting the link to our Designing Learning Resources blog. Took me 2 mins to make :) but I find it looks pretty good. No need to sign up or anything. Just paste away your words and let WORDLE do the rest.

Learning without Frontiers…the conference

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Every year the team from Learning without Frontiers, headed by Graham Brown-Martin, host this huge conference in London. This year unfortunately I couldn’t make it but anybody who is anybody in the Education sector in the UK makes sure to attend this conference. This year the speaker lineup for the conference is impressive. The title for this year’s conference is the Future of Learning. They’re even broadcasting live so you might even get to see a talk or two if you find some time.

What is interesting about this team at the Learning without Frontiers is that the Founder himself was a high school dropout, but in the end he successfully holds conferences with the target of making a change – a tangible one -  in the Education sector. One line from him says: No matter how much technology we throw in, we will NEVER change Education unless we change the way we do Education. A good point to ponder. Follow the conference through the website, and also through Twitter… the tweets there are most encouraging and great to follow.

Spicynodes…adding spice to you classroom

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Just came across this tool… called Spicynodes… can’t wait to use it with my own students…great for mindmapping. Check it out. Simply sign in and use it with your classroom to share and brainstorm ideas whilst watching as your students progress on their work. This blogsite has been created specifically for one project and shows how young students are producing tangible results for an English language class. Great use of different resources including: Spicynodes, Audioboo, and YouTube.

Salman Khan and his Academy

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This is one of the nicest and most inspiring talks I have watched recently. This is the story of a young man, who started out on a great mission by accident. He just wanted to “help” out two of his cousins. And the road he chose to take, now brought him to establish this ‘academy’ which is used to teach, to learn, to proceed forward in a quest for knowledge. It all started with a couple of videos uploaded on YouTube for how to learn a concept in Maths.

Link to video

Now there are over 2,700 videos for Maths, Science, Humanities, and so many more. All these videos are for everyone to use because as we have been saying, and most of you have been saying through this blog, everyone has the right to learn, at any time, at his/her own pace, when he/she needs it. Have a look at what Khan talks about and then browse through the videos. Use them for your own personal self, to learn, to teach and to grow.