The text below is more or less a transcript of the video above, but it does contain links to all the resources which it mentions. This video is also available on Vimeo and you can subscribe to this series of video podcasts in iTunes.

As I am now officially on my half-term holiday and I thought I’d review some the technology I have used in the past six weeks to improve my teaching and, hopefully, the learning too.

One of my main objectives this half term has been to improve communication with my pupils, and to do that I have used two tools mainly: Ning and Edmodo.

As I have my own website with interactive exercises for my students I decided to integrate my own private social network, using Ning, and open to my students only, into the main website AsíSeHace.net. It has proven to be quite popular and my students use it mainly to ask me questions about the subject, such as vocabulary, grammar or homework queries. Sometimes I even receive the homework directly via our network, which is fantastic.

My only concern with using the free version of Ning is that you cannot control the ads that appear on the website, and these, although never offensive, can be a bit random and poorly targeted: pimp your blog or lose weight, for example… perhaps the guys at Google reckon I have to do both things!

But without a doubt, the star in my quest to improve communication has been Edmodo, a microblogging system that looked really promising, and boy, did it deliver! Edmodo is s little like Twitter, but without the safety concerns, as only you and your students have access to it. I am currently trialing Edmodo with my sixth formers (that’s 16 to 18 year olds) and it has already revolutionised the way I set the homework and how my pupils deliver it. Now, as soon as they finish it, my students can send me the homework at the touch a button.

Not only that, it also allows me to set reminders for vocab tests, for example, or alerts, such as room changes or staff absences, just to name a couple of the things you can do with Edmodo.

My students can also use it to ask questions about the subject outside lesson time, and, although I can understand why some teachers might be reticent to go down that road, I personally don’t have no problem with that. All for the sake of improved communication. It is really an extremely useful tool, do give it a try. Read more about Edmodo here and here.

Another of my objectives this year has been to continue using my subject blog to showcase my students’ work, as I think this is both motivating and encouraging. In the last couple of weeks of so I have been receiving the result of my Animoto Challenge – El Desafío Animoto – which I set my sixth formers.

Their task was to use Animoto, which is free for educational purposes, in combination with Audacity, a free programme that allows you to record, edit and mix sound to produce a photo montage about the environment to which they would add commentary in Spanish.

Not only was I then able to assess my students oral proficiency in the target language, but they also learnt some really useful transferable skills like recording and editing sound using a computer and using Creative Commons photographs and music. Most students really enjoyed it, although I have to say some did find it difficult and could not get on with the technology, which has actually given me a lot to think about, in that not all students are immediately seduced or motivated by the prospect of using technology.

I don’t want you to think I only use technology with my older students. Earlier this term, I discovered Go!Animate, a website that allows you to create animations, as in animated cartoons. I thought my year eights (12 to 13 year olds) would absolutely love this, and indeed they did. After giving up on trying to get the school network to comply, I decided to set the work as homework, so I prepared a lesson explaining what Go!Animate was, how it worked and what I expected of my pupils. You can read more about it in a previous post.

The last thing that has kept me busy this term has been my new podcasts aimed at students who are beginners in Spanish. I have tried to record a podcast for each of the units we have covered so far this year. I have made a conscious decision to move away from podcasts created by students to teacher created podcasts, mainly because my school does not yet have suitable resources for the former. For now, I am going to try out this lesson to take away concept and see how we go.

Picture from Flickr

This post is tagged animation, animoto, assessment, Edmodo, Podcasting, video