This is the answer to this meme -thanks for your invitation SabrinaHere are the rules:
1) Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2) Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3)Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4)Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

OK- This is my pic :

My students’ reactions to something they really enjoyed doing is what moves my passion towards my profession.

When I see them like the girls on the pic after completing an activity on the PCs I feel awesome! Is there anything more rewarding than their own feeling of satisfaction after havingworked on sth that you -as their teacher- have especially prepared for them?

OK- Memes imply tagging people and I need to tag 5 (sorry for any possible crossposts):

Nancy

Edita

Barbara

Illya

Charles

I guess that’s it from me.

I’ve really learnt a lot from all SMiELT 08 participants . I look forward to keeping in touch and going on interacting / networking.

The following are just some of the phrases I loved reading while doing this research:

“Don’t we need to teach kids how to use technology safely as well as more efficiently?”

Illya

“How can teachers appreciate the magnitude, the networking, the collegiality of the teachers already online, the sharing and the whole deal if some schmuck does the hard yards for them? How can they be totally committed to creating a unique learning opportunity for their students if they themselves haven’t invested some virtual blood, sweat and tears?”

Graham Wegner

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. “

Charles Mingus (from Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, ready or not?)

“If we want to see kids embrace the power of communication technologies like blogs and wikis and podcasts, we need to be good teacher-planners “

Chris Lehmann (from Getting students to blog by Nancy McKeand)

“To teachers who are starting:

* learn how to use the tools quickly, learn on your own, new tools are developed constantly, you cannot have someone tutoring you all the time.

Despite having been a Web 2.0 active participant for a long time I feel I hadn’t got the main idea of what wikis are until I found this lovely video which offers a clear description of how they can be used for the benefit of many:

Perhaps because I have never used wikis before I confess I find it hard to think of potential uses of Wikis with my students, but what I guess makes it even more difficult is the fact that, as far as I can see, the flow of a wiki depends a great deal on an active participation from everybody in the wiki community, and to participate you need to have a very good command of the language. Wikis allow images though, and you may use voice if you provide links to sound files, but my feeling that little could be accomplished with a low command of English , the language my students are learning.
Perhaps with more advanced students it turns out an invaluable tool for the group. One of the aspects I’ve noticed is that in wikis content is above everything (layout , format, etc) – I can figure out a writing lesson with great editing possibilities in a group (and me as the coach monitoring and checking if structures and appropriacy of vocab are ok). And just thinking while typing, I wonder if -in a more teacher centred way-students may be asked to write on a wiki what they understood from a given lesson. With this the teacher will be checking understanding and the excerpts will be available to everybody for future access – interesting for those students who were absent as they will be able to catch up easily (kind of lesson “recorded” if we may call it like that).

Wikis are for the Web 2.0 world class

what a frameless board is for an ordinary classroom.

:-0

For teachers working together, however, it is a wonderful tool for consulting /sharing / brainstorming ideas .

Sources:

*The WikiEducator

*Wide Open Spaces -Wikis, ready or not?

Link to another SMiELT08 blog : “Getting students to blog”

A )

The pic above belongs to the Flickr images that I decided to use to try ideas with this tool.
This is how I used it to enhance interaction with colleagues/contacts from the EVO 2008

B)

Another idea could be the teaching of some grammar points: Let’s consider, for instance, the “Present Perfect”:

1st Look at this image:

2nd And now look at this pic:

Lastly, present this sentence:

Somebody has organized the bookshelf. It’s neat now.

C)

It could serve as an excellent springboard for oral debates.

Imagine a conversation class starting with teacher asking students on first things coming to their minds at seeing this image

D)

Good chance to show some bits of culture and traditions. It is always important to provide the cultural/social contexts of the native speakers of the language students are learning. It’s another way of opening up their minds I think.
Will they get surprised at knowing that “cream tea” is typical in the English Summer especially?

Nice opportunity to teach “clotted cream”, “scones”, “jam” , “teapot”, etc.

(Click on those objects here)

Please look at the pic below and speculate using modal verbs:

1. Is the girl alone?
2. Who do you think is she talking to?
3. Could she be talking to a flower / person /an animal?
4. Are there more kids / adults/ flowers / animals around?

Please leave your answers / speculations on the comment box from Flickr linked here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/englishstudio/2233441360/

If you have some comments related to the activity write your views on the comment box from this post.

The task needs interaction and, I will show the original pic in about 2 days. That will give plenty of time for some SMiELT participants to “play” and help me experiment a little bit to draw conclusions afterwards.

Many thanks in advance for your help. I will be looking forward to your writing bits.

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Updated on 2/2

This is the original pic ( Great guessing Nancy !;)

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How can Flickr be used in the ELT context?

My brand new Del.icio.us tags show some of the links about that -I found them yesterday and I’d like to share them with you. – Mind you- I learnt quite sth about del.icio.us at trying its various features, I used to “save bookmarks” on it before but everything was disorganised as I was completely unaware of categorising possibilities offered by the “bundle” feature, for example. Now I’m really proud to share my bookmarks

Another idea that came to my mind about the use of Flickr has to do with the sharing of experiences/feelings/anecdotes with members of your network.
One of the contacts I gained through SMiELT 2008 is Joaoa . I really enjoyed looking at his pics but what I lliked most was realizing that we might have lots of views to share about a city we’ve both been to and not together!!!! This could very well be a starting point for interesting conversation threads and this is how I wanted to begin:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joaoa/1297329362/

?addedcomment=1#comment72157603824642450

It would be great to read some more ideas on the different ways to use this content network with EFL students.

Based on the idea that we are nobody if we don’t belong to a community, something which is implied directly by Social Media, some experienced bloggers have already affirmed that your contexts are relevant in your work. If you are part of a Network you must show it. Visualization of your context is really practical because that also shows part of what you are, i.e when you share your Network you tell more about you.

There are some who are already saying that the Web 2.0 process is about to be taken over by Web 2.1. They explain that whereas the Web 2.0 was based on tools to produce content to share online , the Web 2.1 is based on people / users who will use those (or similar) tools not only to share knowledge but to produce content together, build up intelligence and enhance creativity. (*)
One of the great tools launched about a year ago was FEEVY , which allows you to create custom widgets out of the content of your favorite blogs, and gives you a simple tag you can use to embed the widget into your own blog. Unfortunately WordPress apparently doesn’t allow this widget but Blogger does. So I posted my current EVO 2008 Network onto my regular / institutional blog

The pic below shows how the feevy widget is shown onto your blogger sidebar, presenting the automatic updated posts of your favourite bloggers.

Up to the moment I only have the blogs of all those colleagues with whom I have already interacted (Nancy, Gabriela, Illya, Berta – all of them on the “Recent Comments List” on this worpress sidebar)

I will be very happy to add more blogs from people interacting in this EVO event so please , if you let me know , I will add your details on the list . I only need your blog address.

(*) Idea extracted from Argentinian experienced blogger Pablo Mancini (in Spanish)