"The Mysteries of Tortellini"

Hi everyone,
here you have my activities for Module 5. This time the main story is called "The Mysteries of Tortellini", though I've decided to connect it with the story in the activity I did for module 4 ("Revenge").

Revenge

Hi everyone,

here you have my activity. I used the story "Revenge" from the book True Tales of American Life edited by Paul Auster. You'll find the lesson plan on the last slide.

To do this activity I used Google Slides, Voicethread and Padlet. The three of them are very useful tools and offer lots of possibilities to the teacher. It's a pity though that you have to pay to download your work from Voicethread, but there are other free tools that we could use instead. Google Slides/Drive is great to share material and work collaboratively and Padlet is visually appealling, although today a colleague told me they are already limiting the number of free padlets you can create for free :-(

The life of Mike

Hi everyone,
this is my story for Module 3. I used Toondoo, doppelme and Voicethread (and Prezi).

Doppelme is a bit basic, but bearing in mind that Voki makes you pay to embed the avatar, I can't complain! I found Voicethread very interesting, but I ended up paying to be able to export the activity. And about Toondoo...I love it! It's easy, free and it offers lots of possibilities. 

Weird Therapies

Hi everyone,

the following infographic is part of a creative writing activity students did in groups. We had been discussing alternative therapies, so I showed them some bizarre treatments that have been used at some point in history. Then I gave each group another one. They had to come up with two original/crazy explanations for their new therapies and their classmates had to guess which of the three possibilities was the real one.

A life-changing event

Hi everyone,

I used the following story to introduce 'participle clauses'. The text has some of these structures and after reading the story together we would focus on them. I created the cartoons with Toondoo and the music is from http://dig.ccmixter.org/ (you can use the resources there as long as you name the source).

Storytelling in class

So, storytelling...what's that? Every day we tell tons of stories: to our relatives, friends, colleagues...so why not to our students? Creating stories for them and also let them take an active part in the process helps bringing the group together and it creates a nice atmosphere in our classrooms. 

Why to go digital? Technology is all around us; we use it and so do our students. So, as the world around us is undergoing change, our teaching methods need to adapt to the new challenges. We work mostly with digital natives so  we  all should be able to "speak the same language" (or at least try to). Using digital tools might change our classroom dynamics and motivate our students; it could make our lessons more attractive and fun for the learners. I think the effort is worth it!

Having said that, I hope to learn about new tools that can help me plan more engaging lessons.

See you around!→