This past weekend I presented and helped organized the Virtual Round Table E-Conference. All the recordings are available here. I presented on mobile learning activities. One of the most compelling reasons to use mobile devices is to get learners to begin using the device to learn even outside the classroom. I remember that when I taught my learners how to do this they would excitedly come to class and report to me how they used their device to learn. Students carry these devices with them and already use it to text or post on social networks. Why not train them to learn with the device everyday?

Below is the link to the recording, the slides, and also various other resources. None of these activities require you to be on the Internet. They are meant to be used with standard tools that come with most cell phones and mobile devices, such as the ability to record your voice, take a picture, or record a video. If learners can do any of these things with a mobile device then they can do these lessons. These lessons also promote speaking, reading, writing, and listening skills. I have done many of these activities with English language learners of all ages from 4 to 80 years-old and they have enjoyed them.

The Resources

Below are a list of the resources from the presentation and a link to other mobile learning webinars that took place during the Virtual Round Table E-Conference.

Recorded Live Webinar: Magical Moments in Mobile Learning
Free ebook- Effective Mobile Learning: 50+ Quick Tips & Resources
Livebinder with free app creators, a list of apps, and 100s more resources on anything mobile learning
Recorded Live Webinar: How to Get Started with Mobile Learning by Carol Rainbow
Recorded Live Webinar: A Mobile Learning Treasure Hunt by Anne Fox 
Recorded Live Webinar: Mobile Learning in Business English by Mike Hogan
Recorded Live Webinar: Using Technology Eclectically with Dogme by Dale Coulter (Dale talks about mobile learning about halfway through)
Recorded Live Debate: To Text or Not to Text featuring Matt Firth, Natalya Eydelman, and Dr. Doris Molero

Free Apps

Below are a list of the apps that can also be used with each of these lesson ideas.

• Fotobabble App- students take a picture and tell the story of that picture. Many of the ideas listed in the presentation would make great Fotobabbles!
• VoiceThread- students can post videos, drawings, images and more then have their classmates comment on what they upload.
• Videolicious- video creation app.
• Posterous- have students send their creations to an email address and it will post on this free blogging platform. It’s so easy and anything attached to the email is embedded within the site. This includes audio, video, images, or text. Posterous is my favorite tool!
• Sock Puppets- students work in pairs to make sock puppet plays.
• Puppet Pals
• Animoto Video Creation App
• Shmuppet- students create a podcast or tell a short story with a puppet and send them to their friends via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Audioboo- create a podcast of local news around the school
• MindBlowing App For Idevices- students collect audio and video clips as well as images under any theme. This is a multimedia mindmap app.
• Talking Tom & Ben News Reporters- students create dialogues that reflect any news item worldwide and around the school. Kids will love when Tom and Ben report that news. Here’s the link to the Android version.
• Evernote app for nearly all mobile devices & for your desktop!

Challenge:

Use one of these ideas in your classes and blog about the outcomes!

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“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”~George Bernard Shaw

Short-term- share an activity you believe worked well with learners. You can describe it in a blog or post it to this sticky wall.

Long-term- continue to share activities and lessons you believe are effective with your colleagues and encourage them to share as well. You might create a blog where these ideas are shared. Posterous is an easy blogging tool. You can have your colleagues post the ideas by simply sending an email.

At the beginning of this month, I had the great opportunity to observe Chia Suan Chong‘s adult English class. I enjoyed her teaching and will share a specific activity she did that I believe is effective and would work for any class. The activity helps students remember their names and helps build class connections. You can watch the activity in the video.

Introduction Ball Activity

Purpose- remember classmates’ names and get to know each other
Materials- a small ball the students can throw around
Instructions- tell students to throw a ball to another student, say the name of the student, and either recite something interesting about the person or ask the student a question.
Additional notes- Chia had them answer questions about themselves at the beginning so they learned about each other. At the end, have the students throw the ball only saying the name. Chia told them to do this as fast as possible.
**My Favorite Part- Unfortunately, I didn’t record the part where Chia’s students changed the activity. They began throwing the ball and asking each other questions. This sparked more conversation and I loved that Chia just let them do this!

Thank you Chia’s class for letting me record this great idea!

LinoIt of Teachers’ Ideas

Important News

• Lisa Dabbs and I have decided to change the hashtag to #30GoalsEdu because we have noticed some sports people using the hashtag. Please make the transition.
• I have been traveling a lot so sorry I missed last week’s goal. This week I will update the Pinterest boards and begin commenting and sharing your posts so please continue to share!
• This year we are focusing on 1 to 2 goals a week in order to have time to really reflect on the tasks and respond to each other’s posts and enhance our support system for each other.

Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours!

Challenge:

Share an effective activity with another educator.

Did you reflect on this goal? Please leave a comment that you accomplished this goal by either posting your own video reflection on Youtube, using the hashtag #30Goals, posting on the 30 Goals Facebook group, adding a post to the GooglePlus page, or adding a comment below!

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

My Me Manifesto

It starts with a choice. Each time we interact with our learners they will leave either with a piece of knowledge they feel motivated to continue exploring or treat as a fact they must know just to pass. They will leave feeling motivated to continue learning, exploring, experimenting, or they will feel as if learning is tedious, boring, and too difficult. They will either feel as if the teacher made a connection with them or that the teacher doesn’t care about them. We make an impact, we leave an impression, we drop seeds each time we encounter our learners. I choose to treat each of these learning moments as an opportunity to create an impact and doing this means I have to continuously feel motivated, inspired and equipped to make that opportunity an impact. Without my Personal/Passionate Learning Network I wouldn’t have been so aware of the impact I make and I cringe each time I think about the times I took this for granted.

About Mini-revolutions

I’ve been traveling a lot for the past year visiting teachers in Thailand, Canada, Brazil, Japan, France, the US, and the UK. I’ve been traveling for the last year to various countries training teachers worldwide, attending conferences, and learning from them. This post was inspired by two teachers who made me think about what it means to be a teacher. One was Adam Beale (@Bealer81), who in his inspiring presentation at IATEFL, reflected that what he had learned after his first year of teaching was that it’s about starting mini-revolutions in our classrooms. The other was a conversation I had with James Taylor (@TheTeacherJames) who told me, “I believe it’s my duty as a teacher to share.” I’ve heard so many inspiring ideas like these from educators worldwide. I’ve seen incredible lessons they do with their learners, and I’ve listened to their passionate stories of the ways they’ve stirred their students. I believe we are onto grassroots movements. I’ve seen mini-revolutions start and I’ve helped start and support some mini-revolutions, such as Edchat, the Reform Symposium E-Conference, the 30 Goals Challenge, ELTChat, the Virtual Round Table Conference, and more. Education will transform and nearly a million educators on social networks are getting excited and spreading the message of what education should be. Recently, I talked in Toulouse about kids changing their world through ICTs and the words of one of these world changers is my message to you. These are the wise words of Talia Leman, 15 year-old creator of RandomKid.org (I’ve adapted the words a bit to match this context):

“What makes this group different from other (educators) out there? The only thing that separates us from any other group out there is simply our choices. Your choices and you, because it is your choices that are changing the world and you’ve chosen to be the kind of people that (teacher) heroes are made of.”

And you, dear reader, have made a choice. You made the choice to read this post and you make choices to read other blogs, attend webinars, interact with other educators in social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and share your experiences with others as well. You choose to be a continuous learner because you want to be a better educator for your learners. And I know sometimes you feel just like me, that you are a different breed of educator. And I know sometimes you wonder if you will ever successfully infect those around you. And I know sometimes you question whether education policy will ever improve. We want transformation. We want education systems worldwide to provide opportunities for our learners to explore their creativity and curiosity. We want our leaders to support us with policy that allows us to really teach. We get so frustrated because we come from conferences, reading blogs, attending webinars, watching a TEDTalk and we feel inspired but when we share others are not so enthused. I want to tell you to try and at least infect one, because if you infect one teacher then you have helped them inspire the 1000s of students that they will interact with. You will have caused them to make a choice, the same one you do almost daily, to become passionate continuous learners and in this you will have started a mini-revolution and your reach will be beyond that one teacher. Your reach will be spread to 1000s of learners who one day will also spread the idea that living life is about learning, being curious, improving the world, and paying the passion forward.

Challenge:

Read the other manifestos. They are so inspiring!

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“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” ~ Socrates

Video: Reading to Ms. Milos’ 3rd Graders in Romania

Short-term- Connect with an educator in another country or have your students connect with students in another country. Several social media tools support great conversation, collaboration, and discussion. These include Twitter, Facebook groups, Wiggio, Google Plus, Twiddla, and Edmodo.

Long-term- Create a global collaboration project with your students. Begin to think about how your global project can really foster intercultural communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Resources and Ideas

• Prezi: Beyond the Classroom Walls: Effectively Managing Global Projects
• Prezi: Using Skype, blogs, and more to start a global project
• Several global project tools and resources listed in my wiki
• Do Our Students Realize They Live in the World?
• Getting Children Involved with Edtech and Voicethread
• Find out how you can read to the Ms. Milos’ 3rd graders in Romania
• Join the Global Classroom Community to help you get started with your project

IMPORTANT NEWS

• Lisa Dabbs and I have decided to change the hashtag to #30GoalsEdu because we have noticed some sports people using the hashtag. Please make the transition.
• I have been traveling a lot so sorry I missed last week’s goal. This week I will update the Pinterest boards and begin commenting and sharing your posts so please continue to share!
• This year we are focusing on 1 to 2 goals a week in order to have time to really reflect on the tasks and respond to each other’s posts and enhance our support system for each other.

Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours!

Challenge:

Create a list of quotes, songs, images, videos, and more that inspire you to be a great educator.

Did you reflect on this goal? Please leave a comment that you accomplished this goal by either posting your own video reflection on Youtube, using the hashtag #30Goals, posting on the 30 Goals Facebook group, adding a post to the GooglePlus page, or adding a comment below!

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

Lately, I have discovered many cool free apps that are incredible for creating digital stories, reading stories, and interacting with stories. These apps are incredibly engaging and meet the needs of our diverse learners. They allow learners to interact with the plot, characters, and even design of the story. They also support multiple learning styles because they are visual, have sound, and animation. Students can even begin to craft their own stories using their voices, drawings, images, videos, and so much more! Check out each of the apps in the playlist I created with a really cool free tool, Mentor Mob, which helps educators organize online learning content into a simple Learning Playlist platform.

Lesson Ideas

Below are a list of the apps and a few activities. You can visit each app by clicking on the playlist above.

• Woices.com Location Based Audioguides- students can create tours about various locations around the city. Have them research the history behind a place and tell the story behind that place for others to listen to when they visit.
• Animation Creator HD Lite For IPad- students can create their own animations for a story. They can use this app to create the characters for a story and even add audio. Have them create dialogues, flesh out characters, or create graphic novel type stories with the animations they create.
• IAnimation I App- instruct students to take a series of pictures for a story they will be creating. Students can use this app to animate these stories, then string these together for a digital story.
• Bubble And Pebble Story- kids will love helping these lovable characters undergo adventures. Kids can then create their own Bubble and Pebble drawings of a new adventure then share these stories and drawings with their peers.
• Toontastic – students can create stories based on cartoon characters.
• Journal Jar – students simply shake this app to get a writing prompt. Give them about 5 to 10 minutes to come up with stories based on this prompt.
• StoryKit App- students can create detailed books about their lives, what they imagine, or change the ending of a classic story. This app allows students to take old classic books like the 3 Little Pigs and edit the pages. Students can even tell the story from a different point-of-view.
• Fotobabble App- students take a picture and tell the story of that picture. Have students take a picture of their favorite place and talk about it or if you are reading a story, have your students take a picture that reminds them of a scene from the story and explain why they chose that picture.
• VoiceThread- students can post videos, drawings, images and more then have their classmates comment on what they upload.
• Choose Your Path Free – students finish this Choose Your Own adventure type of story.
• Videolicious- have students create video stories about themselves. They can try a 3,2,1 introduction where they list 3 places they would like to visit, 2 of their hobbies, and 1 embarrassing moment.
• Posterous- have students create poems or audio stories.
• Flixlab – another great app for making movies.
• Sock Puppets- great for collaborative stories in pairs.
• Puppet Pals
• Animoto Video Creation App
• Shmuppet – students create a podcast or tell a short story with a puppet and send them to their friends via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Bunsella Bedtimes Story- students narrate a children’s story and send to a children’s class in the local elementary or a younger brother or sister or for children in another country. They children then can respond to these read stories.
• Audioboo- create a podcast of local news around the school
• Create A Comic Android App- students can create comics about any topic you choose
• App Store – Narratavius Story Engine – Interactive Fiction And Text Adventures- a choose your own adventure story
• MindBlowing App For Idevices- students collect audio and video clips as well as images under any theme. This is a multimedia mindmap app.
• Talking Tom & Ben News Reporters- students create dialogues that reflect any news item worldwide and around the school. Kids will love when Tom and Ben report that news.

Challenge:

Use one of these ideas in your classes!

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Challenge:

Use one of these ideas in your classes!

If you enjoyed this post, you may want tosubscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

One of the first toys we play with when we are young is a phone. I remember playing with a phone that automatically dialed the numbers to the Sesame Street gang. I loved talking to them and hearing their messages. I remember having pretend conversations with them and these pretend conversations helped me learn to communicate with others. I was mimicking conversations I observed my parents and siblings have or those I saw on the television. Nowadays, children will play with cell phones and I think this is because these devices are one of the most incredible ways to learn about communication. As a language teacher and teacher trainer, I try to find the best tools to help my learners communicate effectively. For this reason, I am a huge supporter of using cell phones and mobile devices for learning. They are powerful learning tools, because:

• the majority of learners have them so they offer us a chance to have a classroom full of technology with little or no cost
• they are portable, which supports kids getting out of their desks and exploring. Too many times children spend the majority of their school days in desks and for me that is not effective or engaging learning.
• they put the learning into the learners’ hands. Teachers have to hover over a student using a cell phone. This dynamic means that many activities with cell phones will be student centered.
• they are used at home. This means that we show our kids that these devices can be used for learning and we help them realize that learning is all around them.

There are several more reasons for mobile learning in the classroom which you can find in my Present.Me presentation below on using cell phones with learners. I hope I have encouraged you to try one of these ideas!

Free Mobile Learning E-books & Guides

• Effective Mobile Learning: 50+ Quick Tips & Resources by Shelly Sanchez Terrell
• Mobile Learning Reflections by Jackie Gerstein
• Hot Apps for HOTS by Tony Vincent
• Mobile Learning Guide Pt 1: Designing it Right by Kineo
• Beginner’s Guide to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad in Education by Slide2Learn
• New technologies, new pedagogies: Mobile learning in higher education
• The Universal Design of Apple Mobile Devices
• Kathy Schrock’s Guide to iPads in the Classroom

Challenge:

Use one of these ideas with your young learners!

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Today, I have participated with over 30 presenters worldwide in an online Teach Meet! In case you missed this fabulous event you can find more information here, Teach Meet wiki. You can find a list of all the presenters and their Twitter handles here!

Below is my 3 minute presentation about The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators. Hope you enjoy it!

And here are the slides:

“The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.” ~ Alice Wellington Rollins

Short-term- Aim to create a lesson this week that will inspire your students to explore a question that has no answers or has several answers. The idea is to inspire our students to focus on the journey of exploration and to show them that in life there will be many questions that often have several solutions. The path should be the focus and whatever mistakes they make along the way will teach them more about themselves and leave them with more questions.

Long-term- Investigate the role of questions in your classroom. Do we give students enough time to answer difficult questions? Do we inspire our students to ask questions that derive from their curiosity? Do we encourage the exploration of many options or do we punish our students with grades for not finding the solution in the book? The way we question, support questioning, and assess students will determine how much critical and creative thinking they will do. Studies show just by giving our students 3 to 7 seconds to answer questions will increase their critical thinking skills. The links below will help you improve questioning in your classroom. These ideas helped me become a better teacher and helped me to get my students to critically think in my classroom. I continue to try to use great questioning techniques to help my learners.

Resources and Ideas

• You can use a soft beach or Nerf ball to throw to your students in class to answer questions. If they do not know the answer, they simply ask a friend for help, ask the question again, then throw the ball to a friend to help. If the student knows the answer, the student then asks another question. The idea is to get your students to always ask a question when throwing the ball.
• Let your students know that you will give them a period of 3 to 7 seconds to answer difficult questions. This is wait time that is critical to get your students to process the question and help them develop critical thinking skills.
• Benefits of Wait Time
• Mind Tools- How to ask questions effectively!
• ChangingMinds.org- several questioning techniques listed here.
• Always Asking Questions by Steve Wheeler! Great post!

IMPORTANT NEWS

• Lisa Dabbs and I have decided to change the hashtag to #30GoalsEdu because we have noticed some sports people using the hashtag. Please make the transition.
• I have been traveling a lot so sorry I missed last week’s goal. This week I will update the Pinterest boards and begin commenting and sharing your posts so please continue to share!
• This year we are focusing on 1 to 2 goals a week in order to have time to really reflect on the tasks and respond to each other’s posts and enhance our support system for each other.

Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours!

Challenge:

Create a list of quotes, songs, images, videos, and more that inspire you to be a great educator.

Did you reflect on this goal? Please leave a comment that you accomplished this goal by either posting your own video reflection on Youtube, using the hashtag #30Goals, posting on the 30 Goals Facebook group, adding a post to the GooglePlus page, or adding a comment below!

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!

Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.~ Arnold H. Glasow

Short-term- Create a list of quotes, songs, images, videos, and more that inspire you to be a great educator. Share this list with us. Then let us know where you will place these sources of inspiration so that you will see them daily and they will fuel you with the passion and motivation to be an inspired educator.

Long-term- You have other personal goals to accomplish. Begin to find sources of inspiration for those goals and place them where you will constantly see them. Begin to have rituals such as running and listening to a playlist that will help inspire you to live life on fire. Have your students create these lists as well and motivate them to feed themselves with inspiration to accomplish their goals.

Ideas of How to Feed Your Inspiration Daily

• Create a collage of your sources of inspiration and hang it on the wall.
• Leave post it notes with inspirational quotes in your car, bathroom wall, or any other place you frequent.
• Have your favorite images and quotes on your screensaver and set it to where it comes on enough times for you to be able see it throughout the day.
• Post these sources of inspirations on your classroom wall.
• Set-up Google alerts with special messages.
• Post the message on your bathroom mirror.
• Place these on the refrigerator.
• Share one of these ideas daily on Facebook.

2012 Changes

• This year we are focusing on 1 to 2 goals a week in order to have time to really reflect on the tasks and respond to each other’s posts and enhance our support system for each other.

Other Posts

You may like this post of my sources of inspiration!

Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours!

Challenge:

Create a list of quotes, songs, images, videos, and more that inspire you to be a great educator.

Did you reflect on this goal? Please leave a comment that you accomplished this goal by either posting your own video reflection on Youtube, using the hashtag #30Goals, posting on the 30 Goals Facebook group, adding a post to the GooglePlus page, or adding a comment below!

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe for FREE to receive regular updates!