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Using social media as a language learning tool. There's no denying that enthusiasm for learning foreign languages amongst our schoolchildren is at an all time low.

Using social media as a language learning tool

But if things are going to change, teachers and parents need to get smarter. In 2005 the Guardian's Polly Curtis described how more children were learning a language to GCSE level than they were 10 years previously. Apparently, pupils were even willing to explore languages like Arabic, Chinese and Spanish as well as more traditional alternatives such as French and German. Just two years later, this number was down dramatically, with fewer than half of all English school pupils taking a modern European language at GCSE level. Pupils were now not only avoiding traditional modern languages such as French and German, but avoiding languages altogether.

Skip to 2012, and the House of Lords is again being forced to call for languages to be made compulsory in schools. Way back in 2000, Ros Taylor wrote for the Guardian about the web's potential for language learning. 1. 2. 3. 4. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 5 Tips to for an Effective Reading Instruction. Reading is one of the key pillars of literacy and is as old as literacy itself.

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 5 Tips to for an Effective Reading Instruction

However, the problem with reading inside our schools has always been one of the major challenges facing curriculum designers and literacy coaches and all the other players in the field of education. Students seem to falter when it comes to reading and this is one of the outcomes of the over emphasis on teaching reading mechanics ( phonemic and phonetic awareness ) at the expense of comprehension and meaning.

Students are trained to say words right but not to understand them. Reading comprehension is only secondary to reading accurately. Advocates of the Whole language approach, on the other hand, view reading as meaning-making, a process of making sense of the world through written code.In their endeavour to come to grips with the meanings of words, students get to draw on their experiences and local contexts to bring life to those words.

Twitter

6 Characteristics Of Tomorrow's Classroom Technology. Predicting the growth of technology is impossible–in both rate and direction.

6 Characteristics Of Tomorrow's Classroom Technology

The same likely applies to learning. Combine them and you’ve got even greater uncertainty, but that’s what Michell Zappa and the folks over at Envisioningtech.com did in creating the following massive concept map. In the visual there are three distinct domains/learning spaces: Classroom, Studio, and Virtual. Within these domains are 6 sub-domains that represent both areas of growth and characteristics of how learning might change when fused with emerging technologies. 1. 2. Examples: reactive materials, reactive furniture, 3D printers, digitally intermediated field trips 3. Examples: student developed apps, educational games, educational programming tools, achievement badges, self-paced learning 4. Examples: eyewear/HUDs, retinal screens, holography, neuroinfomatics, immersive virtual reality 5. 6. From the graphic: “Education lies at a peculiar crossroad in society.

A pdf version of the visual can be found here. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Using Twitter for Teachers' Professional Development. I am actually engaged in an extensive review of the literature written on the use of Twitter as a Personal Learning Network ( PLN ).Twitter is the core topic of my MAEd thesis and I am trying to approach it from different perspectives : academic, social, and even personal ( for professional development ).

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Using Twitter for Teachers' Professional Development

Academically speaking, papers investigating the use of Twitter in the world of academia are still scarce and the empirical research done in this field is still very limited. From time to time I feature some of the resources I am actually reading and which I know will be of great interest to my readers here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.For instance, today I am sharing with you a treasure trove ( I really mean it ) of Twitter lists to subscribe with and follow to stay updated about the latest news, resources, links, researches, and many more according to your area of interest.

Collaborative ipad apps. What's new in iDoceo 2.5. We'll be updating our web with all the new features in iDoceo 2.5, meanwhile here is a non-exhaustive list of improvements Gradebook improvements - Add icons to students and headers - More than 100 new icons to choose from - Enable/Disable and add a descriptive text to icons - Summary column feature : the same column will be available in different tabs at once - Despite of the selected editor for any given column, Text/Icons is always available on tap&hold - Header height can now be changed - Headers are drawn vertically if height larger than width - New column manager: Move/Copy/Edit/Erase/Send by e-mail several columns at once (under tools icon)

What's new in iDoceo 2.5

Using technology in the classroom

Websites. Apps reviews&how to's.