Halloween Festive Webmix

The Symbaloo Edu team has designed this fun webmix with with everything from costumes to DIY projects, to celebrate the creepy date with your students.

Enjoy it!

Have you been 'FaceQed' yet?

Not yet? 

Well, well, well, I have been a lucky one and my eleven-year-old technologically creative son has avatared me with the brand new free app FaceQ, available for both iOs and Android.

While having an iced drink at a cosy sun umbrella-protected café in the middle of one of those historical trendy colourful suburbs that only a few can enjoy in the summer if they work in a city closed for vacation in August, such as it is warm Madrid, my son would not stop fiddling around with his mobile, taking snapshots, uploading them to his Instagram and talking about avatars and funny faces.

So, my obvious question as a mother, was: 'What are you doing with your gadget'?

Fast and happy, he answered with another question: 'Would you like to have a new avatar?'

And there he came up with this snap design, while I had not really been able to find a sec to say yes, in a couple of minutes, created with his iPhone, using the free FaceQ app, while enjoying the shade without losing imagination.

And this is how I found out two things: what I looked like for my son and how he felt about my working away from home from Monday to Friday.

Besides, I was inspired for a few back to school icebreakers (Thank you, son!) with the aim of fostering ICT use in the ESL classroon once again. I think this app can be a nice free tool to carry out some quick quests over the first days back in our lessons.

Ten ideas coming to my mind right now:

• Pair the kids up and get them to avatar each other. Then, ask them to describe their designs to the rest of their peers and have a 'Guess Who' game.
• Have the kids avatar themselves using the app and compare their faces with the same avatars other peers have designed of them; compare the differences, make them aware of the fact that the image one might have of oneself can be different to the image others have.
• Share the avatars as pictures in their virtual classroom profiles.
• Turn them into posters and decorate the classroom with a big group picture of the class avatars.
• Make badges out of the students' avatars, so they can wear them, both virtually and as real pins.
• Hold a vote for the best avatar and give out prizes or awards.
• Keep them until the end of the school year, then have another round of FaceQ design and get them to explain the changes in their design. How has the image changed, to yourself and to others?
• And of course, take advantage of the designed faces and get them to practise parts of the face, colours, revise shapes, types of hair, eyes, clothes, accessories, and so forth.
• Get them to design the faces of their whole family tree, and then have a nice round of 'introducing my family' presentations among peers.
• Or get to know them better by asking them to avatar their favourite cartoons, characters, sportspeople, heroes, singers, idols ... Here you go another couple of my son's outcomes, which show two of his most-loved heroes in the world right now. 

'Who is each gentleman? Would you like to take a wild guess and leave a comment with it?'

It is a simple easy to use app; outcomes are quite attractive and ready in minutes, as you see. On top of it all, there is no need to register the under-age users and you can go social with your designs too, as they are shareable through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, but you may also mail your creations, so why not give it a try? 

Many of our students might come back to school having already heard of FaceQ or even having used it, so it is a nice chance to go fashionably mobile in class from the very first day.

International Writing Exchange

2013/2014 school year is not even over yet, and however, we teachers are already getting ready for 2014/2015.

I guess we can't help it! As a well-known colleague of mine says, 'September will be here before we know it', and so, here I am, once again, jumping into a new collaborative project for English Language Teachers to try and help learners with writing and speaking skills, connect with other teachers worldwide and develop ideas and new activities.

These are some of the reason why I have joined The International Writing Exchange (IWE) 14-15 taking place at WiziQ and Moodle, willing to learn, collaborate and come up with connected digital artifacts, which I am sure we will be able to design together and thanks to the great support by Dr. Nellie Deutsch's Integrating Technology for Active Lifelong Learning.

Are you a teacher and would like to collaborate too? Watch the trailer below, read the course description and go for it!



All the members of the IWE are looking forward to welcoming you and your students. Don't forget: 'September will be here before we know it'. 

Where Do You Find Everyday Art?

Jodie Mack

From 7 to 20 May 2014, you are invited to take part in Do Now: Art And Popular Culture twittering about the article entitled 'Where Do you Find Everyday Art?'

Read the post carefully, watch the video clip and draw your own conclusions. When you are ready to post your impressions, opinions, comments and so forth on Twitter, please start twittering all along this coming week, on a regular basis, about this topic.

Start all your tweets with @KQEDedspace and end them with our hashtag #DoNow_urjc. Respond to your peers, and retweet all those posts that you regard worthwhile.

Be creative, illustrate your tweets, include multimedia content, use your imagination!

Lots of other students from all over the world are also twittering about this Do Now and they will be using #DoNowAbstract, so it would be nice if you focused on that hashtag too, apart from our own. In order to manage that, you may use a tool for real time tracking and organizing your Twitter, such as Tweetdeck.

Arts&music around the world project. Activities.

Hello everybody!

In this post we want to show you all the activities we have designed for our project. They are very interesting and varied! Have a look!

About Italy...

In this activity, the students will solve a treasure puzzle that has been made with a fantastic tool called jigsawplanet. This interesting application allows us to create our own puzzle. We expect you enjoy!
jigsaw puzzle world treasure : http://www.jigsawplanet.com/?rc=play&pid=32530c3e3f8e

If you click on the link below, you will find an amazing tutorial about how to create your own sculpture just with a mirror and few materials. Take a look!

Tutorial art & music around the world

Let’s discover Egypt!

Here you are two interesting activities about Egypt!

The first one is an online game in which pupils have to match different pictures about some traditional Egyptian aspects with their name. The game has been created with a tool called “purposegames”, in which you can create different games about the topic you prefer. Just click on the link and start to have fun while learning!

Let's discover Egypt game

In the second activity, we challenge kids to write like in Ancient Egypt, using hieroglyphs.

It  is explained in this video:

Let's write like people in Ancient Egypt did!

The video has been created with Camtasia, the tool we used to create the trailer of our project some weeks ago. 

From New Zealand to the world!

We have created a crossword with an online tool, with simply vocabulary about New Zealand. They will have support for guessing those words.

















Then children can learn how to dance "haka" as maori's warriors step by step, is super easy for them and they will enjoy imitating maoris.

Learn Haka Step by Step

About Brazil...

We have created two different and interesting activities.

In the first one, everyone will become dancers of Samba.
How to do it?
Here you can find a tutorial about how to dance Samba. I hope you like it and you want to do it!!
THIS IS A CHALLENGE. GOOD LUCK!
Click here:
Are you ready to dance Samba?

And in the other activity, you can do an interesting quiz in order to check how much you know about Brazil.
Enjoy it!

Let's Know about Brazil!


We hope you like all the activities we have created! :)

Full info at our Arts & Music Around The World e-project Blog.

Online game and activities design for our eproject

Hi everybody!

After the soundcloud channel and the story mix, 
we moved on to design some online games and activities of our storytelling.

So far we have done a crossword game, a hangman flashgame, a jeopardy competition, a Quiz and a poetry writing.

Now we have these original online activities in the post of our blog,
Share it or leave a comment in our blog if you found it useful for you!





1. Crossword

2. Jeopardy


(By Pablo)

Hi there, this is a Jeopardy board I did to work on teams and generate discussion between students. This game promotes reading comprehension and it is useful to work on how to do questions in English. You can use this Jeopardy at any level, although you might need to do some scaffolding first, especially with young learnes. You will access to the link here.

You can create your own one at www.jeopardylabs.com




3. DON’T LET THE DUCK SINK!





(By Nuria)

This game is for the first cycle of Primary Education.

It is a kind of hangman, so the game consists of guessing the hidden word from saying the letter of the alphabet. Concretely, the words of this game are related to “Goldilocks and the three bears”.

If it is not avalible to see directly, please visit http://www.wordduck.com and click on "play hangman",then input "NNGG"

4. Quiz of the "Legend of Nian"



(By Emily)

This is an online quiz designed on the website Quizbean

It is easy for teachers to make a quiz of any content and share it easily.

This quiz is depended on the Chinese story "the legend of Nian", suitable for the second cycle.

5. WHAT ARE THESE STORIES? (By Nuria)
*You need to download the file to play.

This game is for the second cycle of Primary Education.

It consists of guessing the title of the tale that a given text (extracted from a fairy tale) is talking about.

To do this activity is necessary to work first on all the tales we have been posted in our blog because some of these stories are fairy tales but others are invented stories.

The tales this game work on are: “Mulan and Hercules”, “Goldilocks and the three bears”, “The three little pigs”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “The naughty moon”, “The Penguin who felt cold a lot”, “Cinderella”, “Jack and the magic beans”, “The penguin” and “The ugly duckling”.

Here there are some sources, where you can find the stories to work on them. Especially, it is necessary to work on those which are not fairy tales, such as: “The naughty moon”, “the Penguin who felt cold a lot”, “Mulan and Hercules” and “The Penguin”.

This last one, “The penguin” is thanks to Ángela González and Carla Martin, two students from Colegio San Gregorio in Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia, Spain), who wrote and recorded this story, and also thanks to their teacher, @javiramossancha, who made it possible.

·        You can see “Mulan and Hercules”, “The naughty moon” and “The Penguin who felt cold a lot” on our blog: 

http://ictforreadingandwriting.blogspot.com.es/

·         You can see “Goldilocks and the three bears”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Jack and the magic beans” on: 

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/es/short-stories

·         You can see the fairy tale of “The three little pigs” on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fsZKWaso9A

·         You can see the fairy tale of “Cinderella” on http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/english/story_telling/cinderella/cinderella1.htm

   5. Writing poetry. Get inspiration from an image. (By Pablo)

      Encourage your students to find a picture that means something to them and tell them to write a poem about it. You can tell them to work in groups and if they are very young it does not need to rhyme at all. This technique is really useful to help children to find a topic to write about.

      You can use paint or more sophisticated softwares like photoshop or gimp to tell them to write the text on the image as in the example you will find bellow.

PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS sample tests

Visit all the resources

at

Inversions

Science of Love

What is love? 

Watch the video below and find out.

Have you found the answer? What is it?

Now, watch the video clip as many times as necessary so as to complete the activities below.

If in trouble, you can check your answers using this answer key sheet.

Next, watch this video clip:

How many stages of love can you recognise in the video clip?

What main characteristics of love are depicted?

Could you make up a dialogue for the characters? Work with your partner and play a role each.

To extend your knowledge about love vocabulary, try The Idiom Connection.

Women

If you are a That's English student at Intermediate Level, First Year, you might find the lesson below useful.

Enter the lesson.

Don't forget you need Java and the Malted plugin installed in your computer.

You will be gaining knowledge about the following contents while working with it:

Grammar: simple past, irregular verbs, there was, there were. 

Functions: talking about the past, making comparisons, expressing opinions. 

Vocabulary: Women's rights, Housework, History. 

Phonetics: pronunciation of wasn't and weren't

Have fun!