EVO Crafting the ePerfect Session - Week One Introduction - Tips and Digital Literacy

I am delighted to be one of the moderators of the 'Crafting eTextbooks' Electronic Village Online 2015 sessions.   I have the great pleasure of helping to moderate Week One together with my fellow team members Shelly Terrell, (Creator), Ozge Karaoglu, Debbie Tebovich, Michelle Worgan, Jason Levine and Jennifer Vershsoor!  It is already promising to be an awesome experience, and if you would like to join us for this session, or of course any other of the Electronic Village Online 2015 sessions, you still can!  It begins in earnest today on Monday January 12th!

My personal journey with publishing ebooklets

I have been creating personal ebooklets for a few years now and would like to showcase some of my favourite ones.

My Top 3 digital formats to publish my presentations, lessons and documents are:

Slideshare

Issuu

Youblisher

Usually I do my preliminary drafts in a Word document, and then I publish to a PDF format, before uploading to the sites above.  I also use Powerpoint to create slides which can be easily converted to Slideshare.

As these presentations are 'in the cloud' they are easily accessible whenever I need them from any computer and this makes it very easy to locate them.

SLIDESHARE

Below my very first simple digital e-story called A Fable of Sorts, uploaded to Slideshare:

A Fable Of Sorts from Janet Bianchini

I later created a more complex digital story highlighting the use of idioms with web 2.0 tools, as seen below:

 

An Idiomatic Love Story from Janet Bianchini

I created a promotional flyer for my Idiomatic Love Story by adding some information to Glogster, an interactive poster making tool.

You can click on the 2 heart-shaped audio tabs to hear a little bit about this dramatic love story between Frederick and Isabella!  You can view the Glog in bigger format by clicking on it below.



My 2014 EVO session 3-2-1 poster introduction using Glogster can be viewed HERE:

YOUBLISHER

I like Youblisher for its very quick and easy publishing options and I have created digital ebooklets to use with my students, and presentation materials for econferences as seen in the 4 examples below.  Please click on each image icon to be taken directly to the clickable ebooklet:

Language in Motion: Teaching with the Flow: Presentation



 Teaching Idioms with Web 2.0 Tools: Prersentation

The Man with the Golden Voice: Lesson plan



The Cat that got the Cream: Lesson plan

A Romantic Love Story
On the occasion of my parents' anniversary in 2010, I published a small ebooklet to celebrate it.  I wrote about their very special love story and sent a link to the family as a souvenir. They were able to click the pages to read the story.  I also printed it out to give to my parents as a personal memento.  I hope to create another ebooklet to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary later this year, and again I will use a digital format and update it to reflect the events of the past 60 years.

1955: The Look of Love



ISSUU
I have used this publishing tool Issuu with student projects for a while now, and it is simple to use, by uploading your pdf file and then a clickable ebooklet is created within a very short time.  Your publications can be kept in stacks for ease of reference.  This is one of my ebooklets below, based on a webinar presentation:




Janet's TOP 5 TIPS for publishing your stories, texts and documents in an ebooklet format!

Remember the following:

I hope you find these resources helpful for crafting your future ebooklet.

Fun at the Lake

Jumping back into the Lake School of English, Oxford,  after a period of time away is always a refreshing change.  Face to face teaching is still such a thrill for me personally, after all these years, and I enjoy the experience enormously.  The three directors, Susan, Carmel and Lilly are wonderfully supportive, and the dedicated group of  friendly teachers and staff are a real joy to work with.

The Lake School of English has been featured in the EL Gazette in 2010, 2011 and 2012 as a Centre of Excellence.

This time round in September, I taught two General English courses, Elementary and Pre-Intermediate level - my favourites!  The students were a fabulous mixed bunch from Poland, Turkey, The Ivory Coast, Spain, Angola and Italy.

Having taught complete beginners for a whole year in Dresden, I have a particular soft spot for teaching lower levels.  The reponsibility of establishing a solid foundation right from the beginning, is quite vital.  If a teacher does not oversee a student's development at this critical stage it could lead to a lifetime of fossilized errors taking hold.  I enjoy being the lead teacher of an elementary group, so I can set up a strict focus on accuracy right from the beginning.  Trying to undo errors which have become fossilized at a much later stage can be a nightmare..

I decided I wanted to introduce a Blended learning element into this itineration of sessions and therefore any homework I set also had the option of being sent back to me by email.  A few of the students welcomed this opportunity and I was delighted to receive regular online tasks submitted.  I was able to give immediate feedback and  a good working relationship was established from the outset.  Mixing an online element with the f2f element gave me the chance to experiment with various tools to send to the students as feedback encouragement as follows:

Once again I used my Project366 blog for and in my lessons, and it was a useful place to keep materials and resources in one site.

Below you can see a word cloud I used as a warmer for students to guess my likes and dislikes connected to food and drink.  Can you guess what I like / dislike eating & drinking?

 I created an Animoto "Around Town" which was used in my lessons to teach vocabulary of places.

Try our video maker at Animoto.

We studied some make and do expressions and I had fun creating a new lesson.  You can see some of the lesson activities embedded in a Youblisher e-booklet format below.



I showed the class my weekend in the shape of a TagxedoWord Cloud flower, and then got them to create one for themselves, if they wished as homework to show to the class.

To get us in the mood for the weekend ahead, we listened to Rebecca Black's (in)famous Friday song.  Before the all-important singing stage, the students had to predict what the song was going to be about by viewing the words below:

My final message on my blog to the lovely students I taught. This cartoon was created with ToonDo. Picture frame by Tuxpi.

Now I am back in Abruzzo, I can keep up to date with Lake School news by checking into the Lake School of English Facebook page.

The Lake School is also on Twitter and you can follow regular updates from @EnglishinOxford.

Thanks to everyone at the Lake School for making it such a memorable teaching experience for me!
See you all again very soon :-))

Seeta:Reading Challenge Feedback!

I entered the Seeta Reading Challenge e-course with great excitement. An educator whom I have admired from afar for a long time was to be my tutor. This wonderful tutor was Marisa Constantinides. She organised a fantastic 7-day course on Moodle. It proved to be a real challenge for me and one which pushed me in all the right directions. It was lovely to be a student once again amongst members of my PLN. By chance, the week in question was a good one, because on a few of the days, I had slightly more free time than usual. This was a very fortuitous sign. I approached the course with gusto. This means "with pleasure and enthusiasm".


I would like to share the 3 main activities for reading lessons that I created during the course. I don't think I've worked as hard as this in a long time (lol), and it is all thanks to the excellent motivational skills of Marisa. At one point due to other pressing engagements that cropped up, I wasn't sure if I could do everything. My way to get round the lack of time was to stay up burning the midnight oil and I was able to achieve the tasks.

Day 2 Seeta Reading Challenge: The Man with the Golden Voice
Ted Williams below was part of my reading task for Day 2 of the Seeta Reading Challenge. You may be thinking why is he here? Well, I had to find a text and then devise a series of pre-reading tasks to use with the text. Photo below edited with photofunia


You can read the set of activities that I have published via www.youblisher.com. It's a free and very fast tool, which converts your pdfs into nice-looking "books". These booklets can then be easily embedded on a blog or wiki! Please click on the book to view the activities inside.

Day 5 Seeta Reading Challenge:The Cat that got the Cream
Cats seem to follow me wherever I go online. It can't be helped, I suppose. 3 of them are a part of my life and one of them is my dedicated and trusty logo. The Cat that got the Cream comes as a direct result of a very challenging piece of homework that was set for Day 5 Reading Challenge. We had to devise a set of creative activities for an authentic reading text of our choice.

Below is part of my lesson plan.



I was informed yesterday that my slideshare of this particular lesson plan was a "hot Twitter topic" of the day!

Day 6 Seeta Reading Challenge:Physical Training in Your DreamsPlease see below a list of activities that I created for the Day 6 reading challenge task. Marisa asked us to create some pre-reading, while reading and post-reading activities to share with the group. We had to use the techniques that we had read about in the resources and reading materials that Marisa had included as reading matter every day.

I actually thought of all these activities in the car during our weekly expedition to Penne for our shopping. I was exceptionally quiet and very focused. I just brainstormed a list of things to do with the text that Marisa had kindly supplied us. I really enjoyed having to think up the following tasks, which are, I hasten to add in mixed up order.

I caused my dear tutor a bit of a headache by submitting this homework in this mixed up format. I owe her a few drinks in Brighton as a most humble apology!!

Final Thoughts
I wish to thank Marisa for a wonderful course, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Marisa was able to skillfully select the right level of stimulating reading tasks, and I felt refreshed as a teacher after the course had finished. It made me question some of my methods and it made me want to incorporate new ideas and strategies in dealing with reading skills. A lot of web 2.0 tools were incorporated into the Moodle platform by our expert tutor. It was a great experience for a lot of us to try out new tools in a relaxed and stimulating environment.

I have only included a taster of the course content. There was much, much more!! A lot of superb materials for teaching effective reading skills were shared on the course, and I can't wait to try them out in my upcoming lessons!!

In particular, this post on Advance Organisers was very practical and good background reading matter.
This post on "Tech Tools & Pedagogy 2 - Word Clouds" was great as a review of all the different word clouds that are available.
I also enjoyed this post on "Embedding Creative Thinking Skills Training into our EFL Practice."

Although the Reading Challenge course is officially now over, it is still open if you would like to find out about the reading challenge. All you have to do is register on the Seeta site! There are some more fab courses coming up as well!

Finally, I would like to say many thanks to my co-participants on the course. Together we shared a lot of experiences, resources, ideas, techniques, advice and it was amazing. Most of all, it was great fun learning together!!