Grow Your Own Personal Learning Network

Well this is my first blog posting for quite a while, but I'm hoping to have a lot more coming up very soon. This is just a quick posting to share a session on building your own Personal Learning Network, that I did for teachers in British Council Bilbao recently (25th September 2010).

The session was part of a larger conference that was happening all over Spain to celebrate 70 years of the BC in Spain.

You can watch a recording my conference presentation here.


Or follow this link to it: http://tinyurl.com/382rmy2

The links from the presentation are also below and you can download a PDF copy of the presentation slides here: PLN Presentation slides (PDF 4.7 Mb)

Tools for growing your PLN

Twitter

• Twitter is a great tool for starting to reach out to a huge network of teachers. http://twitter.com/
• You can follow me and see who I’m following here.
  http://twitter.com/NikPeachey
• This is a great starter list for Twitter of people involved in ELT who you can follow. It includes some of the real greats of ELT. Thank you to Barbara Sakamoto for putting together this list.
  http://twitter.com/barbsaka/starter-pln/members

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is a great place to put your online CV, connect with other ELT professionals and start joining special interest groups. The groups are a great place for sharing and finding information.
  http://www.linkedin.com
• I'm on LinkedIn at: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nikpeachey
  

Facebook

• Although controversial as a teaching tool, Facebook can also be a useful professional networking tool, just start looking for the ‘Like’ button on various websites and click it to keep in touch with what’s happening. http://www.facebook.com
• I'm on Facebook too and am in the process of creating a page for people interested in learning technology in ELT. http://www.facebook.com/NikPeachey
  

Ning and other independent social networks

• Many of the IATEFL Special interest groups use Ning for discussion of very specific areas of teaching. Here's an example from the Global Issues SIG
  http://global-issues.ning.com/
  

Yahoo Groups

• They’ve been around for a long time, but there are still some great connections to be made by looking for ELT related Yahoo groups.
  http://groups.yahoo.com/
• Particularly useful is the Webheads list.
  http://webheadsinaction.org/
  

Blogs of course
Some great bloggers to follow are:

• Larry Ferlazzo
  http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/larry-ferlazzos-english-website/
• Ozge Karaoglu
  http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/
• Be sure to check out their blogroll and look for connections to other great blogs.
• Find out about more female bloggers here: http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2010/04/let-us-now-praise-famous-women.html

Feed Readers

• Here is an example of a feed reader page I created. This can make capturing information much easier.
  http://www.netvibes.com/Nikpeachey/en%23Teaching_English
• Create your own using
  http://www.netvibes.com/

Storing links and social bookmarking
These are great tools for storing links to information so that you can find them when you want them and share them with others.

• Instapaper
  http://www.instapaper.com/
• Delicious
  http://www.delicious.com
• You can see my Delicious bookmarks at:
  http://www.delicious.com/NikPeachey
• Diigo
  http://diigo.com/
• Also check out all the really useful Diigo groups. You can see the ones I'm following here:
  http://groups.diigo.com/user/nikpeachey

Simplybox

• This is a great bookmarking tool for the more visually stimulated
  http://simplybox.com
• You can see an example 'box' of bookmarks here. I've made it public to share tools for creating digital content.
  http://simplybox.com/public/?id=145809

Here are some tools for reflection

• Keep a personal online diary with Penzu
  https://penzu.com/pad
• Create your own blog just by sending an email to post@posterous.com and wait for the link to come back in your email.
  https://posterous.com/

Slinkset

• If you want to share links and get comments on them but don't want to write a blog, then create a portal site. Here’s an example of a portal I created using Slinkset
  http://technogogy.slinkset.com/recent
• You can create your own for free.
  http://slinkset.com/

More information

• Barabara Sakamoto created this fantastic ‘sticky wall’ for teachers to express what it means to have a PLN. http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/ChubuTeachers
• Read or download this free booklet I wrote to get the technical knowledge and get started creating your own PLN.
  http://www.scribd.com/doc/22124764/From-Information-to-Knowledge

I'd really like to add a special than you to Barbara Sakamoto from Teaching Village for allowing me to share here work on PLNs and for helping to save me and I hope you a lot of work too.

Please also check out the other recorded presentations as they include:

• Patrick Howarth
  http://www.livestream.com/bcvalencia
• Steve Evans
  http://www.livestream.com/britishcouncilspain
• Graham Stanley
  http://www.livestream.com/bcbarcelona

I hope you find these useful and thank you to everyone at the British Council Bilbao for their hospitality and professionalism under pressure.

Related links:

• Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2
• The Web 2.0 School of the Present
• Survey Results: Mobile learning for ELT

Best

Nik Peachey

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3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.

The free trial creature creator that we will be looking at allows you to create creatures, take snap shots of them and make videos of them to see how they move. Here's an example of a video I created to get students interested. I added the captions and text using i-Movie though you could just as easily use a free online video editor such as Video Toolbox or Windows Moviemaker if you are using a PC.



The creatures are very easy to create, you just drag and drop different features onto a body and the add colour and test them out to see how they move. These are some of the other creatures I created.




Once you have created your creatures you can either make videos of them, take snapshots, which you can either save or email to someone, or create an animated gif of your creature (I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the animated gifs)

Here' a tutorial showing you how it's done.



You can download a .mov version of the tutorial here or this pdf document has the main screen shots and instructions if you'd prefer to follow on paper.

You can download the Creature Creator from the Cnet website here. It's a big download (205MB), but once you have it, you don't need to have web access to do any of the tasks or create the movies and snapshots.

How do we use this with students?

• Create images of different creatures and get the students to create a story about them.
• Get the students to create descriptions of different creatures - This could include appearance, but also likes and dislikes, habits etc.
• Get students to match pictures to descriptions.
• Get students to create a creature based around your description.
• Create a creature and use a picture of it as a picture dictation with one student describing the picture while the other one recreates the creature using the software.
• Get students to create a short video of their creature and add a description and narrative below it as a video project.
  
• Ask students to create a creature suitable for a particular environment, or types of tasks, then get students to discuss which they think would be best adapted for the environment.
• Get the students to write instructions for how to create a creature.
• Use the creatures to demonstrate present continuous tenses ( sitting, running etc.)
  

What I like about it.

• It looks great on a data projector and if you work in a single computer classroom, you can get students up and dragging things around and creating in front of the class.
• The creatures are very colourful and in the environment mode they really start to take on character.
• You can use the tool to create versatile and stimulating materials.
• It's free and pretty easy to use once you get it installed.
• I like the integration with YouTube as it makes it very easy to get your videos online quite quickly.
• I like that they can produce a range of gestures and expressions.
  

What I'm not so sure about.

• It's a big download and will need to be installed on any computer it is used on, so if you want to use it in your school computer room, you'll need the help of a supportive IT manager to get it downloaded and installed on all the computers.
• The Gifs it creates aren't that good, but you don't really need to use them.
• You need a fairly good computer with a good graphics card for it to work well.

I hope you enjoy trying some of these ideas with your students.

Related links:

• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game
• Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG
• Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with
  

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak

I discovered Urtak a couple of weeks ago and took an instant liking to it. Urtak is a web based social polling application that enables you to very quickly and easily create online polls and questionnaires.
The only thing you require to get started is an email address to register as it is completely free. Here’s a short tutorial showing how it’s done.

• Watch or download a higher quality video: Urtak tutorial

The polls it creates are pretty simple. You just type in 'Yes , No' questions or statements and then click enter, give your poll a title and instructions and click on done. It seems like you can have as many questions as you like. The longest one I created had 45. Here are a couple that I created. Feel free to try them out and answer the questions to see how they work. You'll also be able to see the results.

• Teachers' digital skills tick list
• Teaching Kids with Computers
• Politics in the classroom

Once your poll is complete you can either link to it via the URL or embed it into a web page.

Once the poll is live anyone who sees the poll can answer it without having to log in or register. Viewers can even add additional questions or statements to the poll if they do register though.

What I like about it.

• Once users vote they can compare their answers to other people who have used the poll.
• The poll gives a feed out of information on the right and you can even cross tabulate answers to different questions.
• It’s great that other people can add questions to the poll.
• I like that it doesn’t give the ‘correct’ answer but shows most popular answers. This is good to keep students thinking and questioning themselves.
• If you don’t like the questions that people add to your poll you can easily get rid of them.
• You can embed the poll into other web based materials.
  
• It’s free and really quick and easy to use.

How can we use this with students?

• We can use it for class / online surveys and get students to analyse and write up the results.
• We can use it for action research to find out what things we do in class students enjoy or understand or just to get general feedback.
• We can use it to test comprehension by creating question or statements about an online text.
• We can set web research tasks for students by asking questions and getting them to search the web to find answers or find out if statements are true.
• We can use it to create progress tests to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.
  
• We can use it to create debate and explore attitudes by giving students the poll before they come in to class to get them thinking around topics to discuss in class. We could also follow this up with a post class poll to see if opinions have changed at all.
• We could use it for needs analysis to see what students feel they need to study in class.
• We can use it to get students to self assess their progress.
• We can get students to create their own reading tasks by getting them to produce questions in a poll based around an online text, then they can answer each other’s questions.(Great to use with Mashpedia)
  
• We can get students to practice Yes No questions forms and create questionnaires to find out more about their class mates.
  

What I’m not so sure about.

• At present any poll you create is added to the Urtak directory, so it would be nice to have private URLs to ensure only your students answered the questions.
• It might also be handy to be able to disable the option to have other people add questions to your polls as you can’t be sure that what they add will be relevant etc.
• If students go to the directory of all polls they might find some unsuitable and potentially offensive ones.

On the whole though I think Urtak is a great free tool and one that I will continue to use. It’ helped me to make designing web based materials a bit more interactive and also enabled me to quickly and easily do research that I can share and use to inform training and workshop presentations.

I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:

• Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Education for the Global Economy

Best

Nik Peachey