Stories inside the classroom

Some weeks ago, I came across with Storybird (https://storybird.com/), an incredible webpage that lets us create art-inspired stories that we can share, read and print. This webpage allows not only teachers but also students to make different kind of stories. What I really like about Storybird is that it encourages creativity. 

I embed a tutorial, just in case you want to learn how to use Storybird (I truly recommend it!)

Teachers can benefit from this webpage as it can help them to assess students' reading skills (there are many stories that can be read) and writing skills (students can create their own stories.) If I wanted to use Storybird in my lessons, I would work with a specific topic and ask students to write a short story about it. Of course, they  would first have to write down their ideas, then produce a draft, and lastly write the final version that would be written in Storybird. Once all students have created their own stories, I would print them so as to create a mini library inside the classroom; students would be able to take the short stories to their homes, and we would have books so as to work with them whenever necessary. 

How would you use this wonderful tool?

Source: https://storybird.com/

Social media in the classroom

I came across with the following websites:

• http://www.phoenix.edu/forward/perspectives/2014/02/how-teachers-can-use-social-media-in-the-classroom.html
• http://www.edutopia.org/blog/guidebook-social-media-in-classroom-vicki-davis

Both of them provide tips as regards how to use social media in the classroom. I'm posting them as sometimes it can be quite difficult or we may feel lost when planning how to work with this new technology. Kathy Cook (Director of Educational Technology for the Universtity of Phoenix) states that students are using these technologies in their personal lives, so it makes sense to leverage them for teaching and learning. We are constantly talking about connecting student's outside world with what happens inside the classroom, why don't we start with social media that really catches students' attention? 

While I was doing my practices, I worked with a very well-known webpage, couchsurfing (https://www.couchsurfing.org/). At the end of the project they had to create their own profile in the webpage; during the process they were so engaged that they really put a lot of effort so as to learn the many grammatical contents that I presented to them, but because they indeed were expecting to complete the final task. Moreover, some of them said that it was the first time they worked with something so original. 

Working with social media inside the classroon it's not so easy as we have to plan the lessons very carefully, it's time consuming, and we need certain items like computers, beamer (if you want to show them something from your own computer), internet connection, etc. However, it's not impossible and it is really worth it. We should try to include students' interests in our lesson plans so as to motivate them and at the same time in order to show that English lessons go beyond the student's book.

In the above webpages you can find very interesting suggestions...hope you find them useful! I worked, as I said before, with couchsurfing...what would you work with?