Website Analysis

After a few days in the weekend that my group (Aldana, Fernanda and myself) got together, we finally finished what it is our first practical work. It was about analysing websites (I told you about that in a previous entry on this blog).

The hardest part was, at least for me, thinking about activities in which we could use the material available in those sites. After struggling a little bit with ideas, we did a couple of 'activity brainstorming', and chose the ones that we liked the most.

The day before handing in, or in this case uploading the finished work, we had to polish the final draft. We did this without having to meet. We made use of GoogleDocs, creating a document and modifying it from each other's house. We found this method reeeeeally practical. Once the document was good enough for us, we just had to download it as a PDF document, and that's it. The final step was to upload it into the platform 'Edmodo' for our teacher and mates to take a look at it.

If you want to see it, you have it here too:

Power Point vs. Prezi

We were asked to watch a couple of videos about these two presentation generators and to make a comparison.

I'm posting here one of them because it is hilarious. It is about what NOT to do with a Power Point Presentation.

The thing is, you CAN use some of these features exaggeratedly if you want to make a point, specially if you use humour in your presentation. If we are talking about a formal presentation, in which you speak about a delicate subject, maybe it would be better if you follow Don McMillan advices.

Prezi, in contrast, has two significant advantages: you have endless space to work on (your work will not be reduced to a single slide) and you can make use of the zoom for highlighting information (for example: a part of a picture). Besides, you don't have to worry about the version of Microsoft Office that your learners may have in their netbooks because Prezi needs only a web browser and the Flash component installed (it's hard to find a computer without these two requirements). Not to mention that the animation Prezi offers is much more appealing.

Here you can learn about a couple of Prezi features.

Hope you like it.
See you around!

First P.W. goin' on.

It comes the time when we finally revise all of our notes and start to prepare for something. This time, a practical work. There will be a few of them throughout the year and this one is about evaluation of web sites that have to do with the classroom.
The first step was make use of GoogleDocs in order to get the groups of no more of three o four people. Below each group we had to state what sites we are going to analise. One of them will be about its potential usefulness as resource for materials design and the other about its usefulness in the classroom.

The criteria for evaluating web resources will be divided into: purpose, authority, objectivity, appropriatness, currency, responsibility, clarity and accessibility.

So far, we are starting to analise these two sites:

http://www.mes-english.com/

http://www.cambridge.org/ar/elt/students/zones/resources/item2325607/?site_locale=es_AR&resourceType=2505894&resourceTypeVisibility=student&currentSubjectID=2325607&pageNo=1

We will let you know about our conclusions as soon as we have the results.

Personally, I'm getting a lot out of this because I've never approached a website in this way. It's the first time I examine the authenticity of a site, finding out about the creator and his purposes. Until now, I just looked for the things I needed, no matter where did they come from. Of course, I will be teaching someday, so I must be very careful with the material I choose. This practical work is a great tool to have in mind.

Next step: Google Docs

As another web tool for us to have in mind, we are going to see what Google Docs is about.

This tool is a web-based office suite and you can also storage data. You can create, edit and share your documents with other people. They can modify (if they have your permission) your documents in real-time.

We all are familiar with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Well, GoogleDocs has practically the same office tools. The difference: they are absolutely free. In this way, some of us will finally stop being pirates.

An anecdote:

I was taking a course on Photography last year and my teacher show us some things on Photoshop. He opened the software and this sign appeared while it was starting:

While that image was on the screen, the teacher said: 'these are all the people I owe money, because this software is cracked'.

Well, with GoogleDocs that's not an issue.

I'm sure in the next weeks we will be dealing with this product, trying to get the best out of it.