Twitter:
Twitter can be used effectively by English language educators in four ways. Twitter can be used to collaborate with other English language educators expanding knowledge exponentially. Secondly it can be effectively used by educators is its news or information gathering capabilities and utilizing the information for the classroom. The third use of Twitter is curating or gathering information toad to and pass on to others. The fourth use of Twitter is it could be used for assignments by ESL/EFL students to send the teacher short answers to homework questions for them to answer or for an ongoing update on projects that the students are doing using the 140-character limit to help the students to be more concise with their summaries they submit.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a great place to interact with other professionals, interacting with them asking questions and giving suggestions on how to be come a better teacher or find out what the current best practices are in your inquiries. This is a great place to curate information and ideas for the classroom. It has a weakness that I did not realize though I had succumbed to it. The weakness of the image of LinkedIn as a job/career networking sight and only that. Others in LinkedIn may have the same idea and may be reluctant to be as open as they might be on Twitter.
Duolingo:
Duolingo is a great language learning site for teachers and students. The site offers free language lessons which will help students of ESL and EFL interact with the language outside of the classroom. There are rewards in this site that reward your students’ continuity of practice. There is a forum that it suggests students utilize to interact with other students this would be a great assignment to have students interact with 4 other language learners and see learning form the other’s point of view. A weakness of Duolingo is the lack of visual interaction. This could be a hinderance for a visual learner.
Skype:
Skype and be used in three ways. The first is Skype can be used to interact with teachers and other students around the world. The interaction from both classes would be very beneficial to both classrooms. Secondly, students can interact with native speakers of the target language and foster more communities of practice. Thirdly, Skype although may not be as powerful as other VoIP providers it is simple and allows sharing of screen has instant messaging, one can even share files using Skype.
Rosetta Stone:
Rosetta Stone I am more familiar with since I have it on another computer her at home and used is exclusively while taking Chinese 1 at Mt San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) last year. I like this program a lot; the visual pictures help me connect what is being said to the actions in the pictures. Rosetta Stone has an audio function that will record you voice and, depending on the sensitivity setting, will evaluate how close to “proper pronunciation you are. It does not give you the translation you must figure it out buy what you see and hear. This could be frustrating for some people and they may do better with mango languages or Duolingo which offer translation within the program.
Evernote:
There are five ways Evernote would be good for my classroom. First, my students or myself could use Evernote to list brainstorm ideas be it project, homework, etc. Secondly, students could organize class notes they could send me their ideas and I could assess their comprehension of the task and help guide them outside of class and within the scheduled parameters to contact me, i.e. not at 12:00 am. Thirdly, a student could use Evernote to organize needed material to study for an upcoming assessment/test. Next, instead of using paper notebooks, students could use Evernote for in class note taking and submit their notes for an assessment. Lastly, I could use it to organize my notes for class and prioritize tasked to be done for each class.
Google
There are three ways Google can be beneficial to the classroom. The shareable docs can be used for writing either alone or collaboratively for writing assignments giving an opportunity for students to do peer editing on individual papers or the groups can write and contribute to a piece of work that the teacher can observe and give feedback to the students and assess their progress. Next on the list would be the use of Google forms to create quizzes that students would respond to as a “take home” quiz where they could answer the quiz anywhere they had internet access. The quiz would be self-grading so there would be less time grading individual papers and more time assessing how the class was doing and how each student was doing. Thirdly, using Google Slide (Google’s version of Power Point) could be used by the students to prepare presentations in class their classmates. A big drawback or weakness is if you need to use Google and your county of service blocks Google then one would need to find a way around this issue like use of a VPN. Other weaknesses are that it may have compatibility issues with competing word processing platform.
Kahoot and Socrative
I can see myself using both Kahoot it and Socrative. They both could work in tandem I would use Kahoot. It to get the students engaged with the learning process and use Socative for assessments and comprehension of task as a review in class. Both are great APPs to use in the classroom. Kahoot would be more of a formative assessment tool and Socrative would be the complementing summative assessment tool. With Kahoot the buttons to answer the question are large enough that one would not use them for a summative assessment due to the high cheating factor that could arise from using Kahoot.
Twitter can be used effectively by English language educators in four ways. Twitter can be used to collaborate with other English language educators expanding knowledge exponentially. Secondly it can be effectively used by educators is its news or information gathering capabilities and utilizing the information for the classroom. The third use of Twitter is curating or gathering information toad to and pass on to others. The fourth use of Twitter is it could be used for assignments by ESL/EFL students to send the teacher short answers to homework questions for them to answer or for an ongoing update on projects that the students are doing using the 140-character limit to help the students to be more concise with their summaries they submit.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a great place to interact with other professionals, interacting with them asking questions and giving suggestions on how to be come a better teacher or find out what the current best practices are in your inquiries. This is a great place to curate information and ideas for the classroom. It has a weakness that I did not realize though I had succumbed to it. The weakness of the image of LinkedIn as a job/career networking sight and only that. Others in LinkedIn may have the same idea and may be reluctant to be as open as they might be on Twitter.
Duolingo:
Duolingo is a great language learning site for teachers and students. The site offers free language lessons which will help students of ESL and EFL interact with the language outside of the classroom. There are rewards in this site that reward your students’ continuity of practice. There is a forum that it suggests students utilize to interact with other students this would be a great assignment to have students interact with 4 other language learners and see learning form the other’s point of view. A weakness of Duolingo is the lack of visual interaction. This could be a hinderance for a visual learner.
Skype:
Skype and be used in three ways. The first is Skype can be used to interact with teachers and other students around the world. The interaction from both classes would be very beneficial to both classrooms. Secondly, students can interact with native speakers of the target language and foster more communities of practice. Thirdly, Skype although may not be as powerful as other VoIP providers it is simple and allows sharing of screen has instant messaging, one can even share files using Skype.
Rosetta Stone:
Rosetta Stone I am more familiar with since I have it on another computer her at home and used is exclusively while taking Chinese 1 at Mt San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) last year. I like this program a lot; the visual pictures help me connect what is being said to the actions in the pictures. Rosetta Stone has an audio function that will record you voice and, depending on the sensitivity setting, will evaluate how close to “proper pronunciation you are. It does not give you the translation you must figure it out buy what you see and hear. This could be frustrating for some people and they may do better with mango languages or Duolingo which offer translation within the program.
Evernote:
There are five ways Evernote would be good for my classroom. First, my students or myself could use Evernote to list brainstorm ideas be it project, homework, etc. Secondly, students could organize class notes they could send me their ideas and I could assess their comprehension of the task and help guide them outside of class and within the scheduled parameters to contact me, i.e. not at 12:00 am. Thirdly, a student could use Evernote to organize needed material to study for an upcoming assessment/test. Next, instead of using paper notebooks, students could use Evernote for in class note taking and submit their notes for an assessment. Lastly, I could use it to organize my notes for class and prioritize tasked to be done for each class.
There are three ways Google can be beneficial to the classroom. The shareable docs can be used for writing either alone or collaboratively for writing assignments giving an opportunity for students to do peer editing on individual papers or the groups can write and contribute to a piece of work that the teacher can observe and give feedback to the students and assess their progress. Next on the list would be the use of Google forms to create quizzes that students would respond to as a “take home” quiz where they could answer the quiz anywhere they had internet access. The quiz would be self-grading so there would be less time grading individual papers and more time assessing how the class was doing and how each student was doing. Thirdly, using Google Slide (Google’s version of Power Point) could be used by the students to prepare presentations in class their classmates. A big drawback or weakness is if you need to use Google and your county of service blocks Google then one would need to find a way around this issue like use of a VPN. Other weaknesses are that it may have compatibility issues with competing word processing platform.
Kahoot and Socrative
I can see myself using both Kahoot it and Socrative. They both could work in tandem I would use Kahoot. It to get the students engaged with the learning process and use Socative for assessments and comprehension of task as a review in class. Both are great APPs to use in the classroom. Kahoot would be more of a formative assessment tool and Socrative would be the complementing summative assessment tool. With Kahoot the buttons to answer the question are large enough that one would not use them for a summative assessment due to the high cheating factor that could arise from using Kahoot.