Teaching has changed dramatically in the 21st century with the advent of Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs and podcasts just to name a few. Technology has modified the landscape of information and knowledge. Learning in this scenario poses new questions for teachers. Anyone with access to Internet has the ability to create videos, text and audio that can be shared with a global audience.

How can teachers be inspired to gradually start incorporating technology in their daily teaching?
Internet has become a big challenge for teachers and if used correctly is an empowering phenomenon. But most teachers internally ask themselves why should I start using technology. My answer to this question is that technology is here to stay. Integrating technology is not putting computers in the classroom without teacher training. Technology should be used effectively and efficiently to allow students to learn how to apply computer skills in meaningful ways. Consider the power you have as a teacher to start sharing students work with a real audience that is considered to be any student from the world.
Recently ARCALL (Argentine Computer Assisted Language Learning) has been relaunched with the clear goal to help teachers integrate technology. We know that there are many compelling reasons to start integrating technology .

ARCALL is a group of innovative language teaching professionals from Argentina which aims to:
teaching professionals from Argentina which

• increase the use of educational technology in EFL (English as a Foreign Language),

• collaborate in the integration of ICT in Argentina in ways that are effective and appropriate,

• assist teachers in integrating ICT into their daily practices and as a means of developing themselves professionally,

• train teachers on using computers and the Internet in English language teaching,

Another possibility is to create your own blog and share your experience with other colleagues. As head of a blog, I should say that the journey on how to integrate technology in your classes is full of obstacles and rewards. If you are about I´d like to invite all teachers, who have not already incorporated technology in their classrooms, to give it a try.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

I´ve tried to update some of my on-line discoveries and adventures but it was just impossible to keep an organised track of a very rewarding year.
As I look back at 2011, reflecting on achievements, I can safely say that I´m grateful to have enjoyed a busy year full of new goals and challenges.

It´s time to share with you the reason why I´ve been away. The events are not in chronological order.

- Invited to participate in the first free IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG. Please check this Photopeach video http://photopeach.com/public/swf/story.swf

-SBS International sponsored me to attend Faapi in Santiago de Tucumán. I deliverd a pre-conference workshop of 6 hours together with Rita Zeinstejer and a joint presentation at Faapi.
-Awarded with the BESIG scholarship to attend IATEFL in Glasgow in 2012.
-Delivered a very short presentation at TeachMeet International where I had the chance to meet amazing teachers worldwide.
-My blog was added to http://blogs.onestopenglish.com a service offered by www.onestopenglish.com.
-Selected by Essarp to share my online experience training teachers from Switzerland with the rest of the Teachers Trainers in Buenos Aires.
-Chosen to share my blog posts with teachers from India http://www.englishteachingdaily.com/2011/11/using-visuals-to-introduce-halloween-activities.
-Invited to work with Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, Özge Karaoğlu Ergen, Esra Girgin,Shelly Terrell, David Dodgson and Michelle Worgan in the upcoming free EVO online workshop: Digital Storytelling with Young Learners! An incredible group of educators!!!
-Moderated Jazz Up your Classes with Technology an online course offered by ESSARP (Argentina) and ETAS (Switzerland).
-Invited to join The Round with an amazing group of ELT professionals http://the-round.com/2011/10/the-round-takes-shape/. Together with Özge Karaoğlu Ergen we are writing our first ebook.
-  Invited by ETAS English Teachers Association in Switzerland to give a webinar on “Global trends in Language Learning in the 21st century” on September 17.
-Move Up in Rosario invited me to deliver a face-to-face workshop in Rosario.
-Won the Reform Symposium Teacher Learning Community Prize ))
-Attend APIBA’s 40th Birthday Celebration! http://photopeach.com/album/19q7n82
-Delivered my first presentation for the  Ministry of Education in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
-Invited as a guest speaker at III Jornadas Internacionales TIC aplicadas a la enseñanza de la lengua in Córdoba http://www.lenguas.unc.edu.ar/tics/acerca.html
-Finally sat for the Swiss citizenship exam in French. Had to study most of the summer to be able to speak in French.

-Winner of a scholarship to attend a course at NILE Norwich Institute for Language Education in London in July 2013.
-Delivered the first online presentation for URUTESOL.

-Interviewed by Shelly Terrell after obtaining the Consultants-e scholarship on ICT in the classroom validated by Trinity College.

-Stephen Downes helped my language class http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=55436

-Had my second radio inteview with Baires Capital.

-Created Techools4educators together with Rita Zeinstejer to help teachers integrate ICT in their daily teaching scenarios. It was a huge success. SBS Argentina hired us to deliver several Webinar for free locally and internationally.

-Started a Master´s degree in Environmental Management. Passed 12 subjects in one year. It was hard work but really work the effort.

-Invited to represent Argentina at the British Council summer school to be held in Buenos Aires on February 2012.

Maybe I am missing several things but just wanted to share with you some of my achievement in 2011. I hope everybody a wonderful 2012 full of joy and happiness.

May all your dreams come true

Finally I ´m back online devoting some time to my dear blog.

This is the first time I submit nominations for the 2011 Edublog Awards. My personal and professional life is enriched everyday by the diverse woldwide range of voices and talents in the ETL world. I want the thank all those wonderful EFL teachers who inspire me to become a better teacher. Here goes my nomination:

* Best individual blog An A-Z of ELT by Scott Thornbury
* Best individual tweeter @ShellTerrell
* Best group blog Teaching Village
* Best class blog The FCE blog

* Best ed tech / resource sharing blog Nik´s learning technology blog
* Best twitter hashtag ELTchat
* Best teacher blog Box of chocolate
* Best free web tool Jing
* Best educational use of podcast Podcasting for the ESL-EFL classroom
* Best educational wiki Cool tools for school
* Lifetime achievement Ken Wilson

To improve communication effectiveness

To improve audience’s perceptions of presenter

To improve speaker’s confidence

After reading this research I started using some really motivating and visually attractive websites with young learners to engage them in Halloween activities.

Feel free to use these websites with your students.

1) Learning chocolate offers a wonderful link with engaging activities for young learners.

Click on the image

2) Allow your students to review the previous vocabulary by using Taggalaxy to search for new vocabulary.

3) If you are a very busy teacher just download these ready-made presentations on Halloween

Click on the image

4) Make your students guess the Halloween jigsaw puzzle image

Click on the image

5) Allow your students to create their own Halloween story

Click on the image

6) Read a Halloween story created by a student online. Inspire your students to create and share their own story.

Click on the image

Such has been and still is the nature of the reception computers have met worldwide. Yet, slowly but steadily, people are gradually realizing the vast array of information provided by the Web is unmatchable. The EFL classroom, however, has stayed relatively unchanged. Many teachers are already using Internet as a source of information, but most of them have been sceptic about the legitimacy of claims advocating the integration of CMC (Computer Mediation Communication) tools into Language Learning. And EFL Teachers in Argentina have not been the exception –not until 2011, when face-to-face and online seminars, as well as webinars are starting to be populated by dozens of English language teachers, including teachers of other languages as well.

Where to start?

The Internet is constantly generating opportunities to hone ICT (Information and Communication Technology) skills by allowing interaction between students and teachers using new programmes and applications which foster, not only individual production and growth of personal skills, but also the development of cohesive online Communities of Practice (CoP´s).
Unprecedented ways of getting to know like-minded people are being launched every day, allowing language teachers not only to meet other teachers of English anywhere in the world and socialize, but also to share views on common queries, problems, findings and experiences, using the English language.
We can now choose to join from a wide variety of Discussion Forums and Listservs, made up of teachers willing to carry out online projects with their students, both synchronous and asynchronously. And we can learn the how-to’s and techniques the use of different applications and programmes entail, becoming more and more ICT literate, so that by learning through doing ourselves, we can gain the necessary training to pioneer experiences in our own classrooms.

As members of Webheads in Action, Jennifer Verschoor and Rita Zeinstejer met online some five years ago, and decided to pool their knowledge and experience to work together from their respective cities –Jennifer in Buenos Aires, Rita in Rosario—to help their colleagues in their country integrate Internet tools into their classes.

Jennifer´s and Rita´s previous experience

Rita became interested in Technology and in exploring the tools it offers to educators after attending a course in Cambridge, England, on “The Use of Computers for Language Learning”, by Gavin Dudeney and Gary Motteram. From then on, she devoted her spare time to attending seminars, both f2f and online, joining groups of colleagues worldwide, and doing research, until she decided to share her gains with colleagues in her home town, and to participate actively in Congresses in different countries, both as an attendee and as a presenter.

But Rita´s main concern has been putting her findings into practice, so she started integrating many tools into her own classes, as she worked with upper-intermediate students of English in a private Institute in Rosario, where both teachers and students have always directed their aims and methodology towards “learning English to sit for an international examination.”

Rita opened her first blog in the year 2006 at http://caeb2006.podomatic.com/ , where she motivated her students to participate using text, images and voice, also integrating some exam practice and some additional tools to enhance her first adventure. However, the richest experience was a Tandem project she organized with a teacher of Spanish in Ohio, USA, for their students to get together online using synchronous and asynchronous tools. The project was a big success, and all learners were delighted to learn about each other´s lifestyles, education and culture using English in Rita´s blog and Spanish in the blog opened by the teacher in the States.

As from 2006 on, Rita has tried different online spaces: blog hosts, wikis, virtual classrooms, to gather learners and help them realize that the language they have been studying for around ten years now gives them the chance to communicate with likeminded learners and teachers from all over the world.

In 1999 Rita opened the Multimedia Centre at ARCI for all teachers to have the necessary training to be able to integrate technology. The Centre is now a big success, catering for all levels, and aiming at the development of the fours skills.

These are some examples of online environments Rita has been housing her projects in:

• http://arciteachers.wikispaces.com/ARCI+TEACHERS+Home+Page+Wiki with teachers opening their first online environment

• http://caeb2007.podomatic.com/ with her 2007 group, where she carried out “The Serendipity Project”, which allowed her students to understand the potential of “Podcasting”, as well as the integration of moviemakers

• http://callsig2006.pbworks.com/w/page/13080809/FrontPage , a wiki she opened to share her knowledge with colleagues in her area, thus starting the first CALL SIG for teachers of English inRosario.

• http://ritamz.ning.com/ , a blog with 2008 students, where her project “Sharing Cultures” became one of the most memorable experiences as she plunged her students into the Korean culture

• http://caeb2008.pbworks.com/w/page/7576502/FrontPage , a wiki where she gathered ten teachers of English from different countries to interact with pairs of students on lifestyles

• https://sites.google.com/site/triptoengland2011/ a Google Site to organize a group of students travelling toEngland in January 2011

Jennifer became interested in the integration of technology while she was studying to become a University Professor at a local University in 2003. At that time the course was on distance learning and she joined the vibrant online community called Webheads in Action while doing a search online. The purpose of the community is to help learning professionals understand the potential benefits of the appropriate integration of available Internet technologies into their teaching practice by first experimenting and learning in a hands-on, low-risk online environment before engaging their own learners.

Jennifer created her first class blog in the year 2007 at http://colegioarmenio07.blogspot.com,
in order to show students a different way of learning English and with the main goal of stumbling the classroom doors by participating in International Project. Students participated in Learning Circles, a project-based partnership among a small number of schools located throughout the world, offered by IEARN International.

These are some examples of on-line environments Jennifer has been housing her projects in:

• http://www.vickylearningenglish.blogspot.com A blog created in 2006 for her daughter when she was 4 years old, to learn English and play at the same time.

• http://englishtraining.pbworks.com This wiki was created in 2008. Its purpose is to help Business English students to be able to continue learning online after their face-to-face class.

•   http://arcall.pbworks.com The purpose of this wiki is to share and learn how to integrate technology in our classrooms to help increase the use of educational technology in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching.

• www.igcseenglish.ning.com A Ning created for students to continue learning about the IGCSE English exam at home.

• http://avealmec.org.ve/ First online conference offered by two Latin-American CALL associations building online communities and social networks.

• www.web20digitalnatives.pbworks.com Currently using this wiki as an online platform for Kinder, Primary and Secondary school students.

How do Argentinian EFL Teachers prefer to learn about Technology?

Belonging to a Community of Practice has enriched both our professional knowledge and personal lives. Both of us have learnt about new programs which allow us, teachers, to manipulate different tools to create different tasks, aiming at weaning teacher-dependent students. We have added the use of new, most effective strategies to our teaching procedures. We have shared projects with students of English living in Kuwait, Venezuela, the USA and Portugal, learnt about their needs, exchanged cultural differences and reached conclusions with their teachers. We have sung a “tango” from a home microphone on an Argentinian Sunday evening for Taiwanese students in their language laboratory on a Monday morning. We have answered questions from a Mexican board of accountants willing to understand and witness the marvels of voice chat and implement it in their school curricula. We have carried out project work with my CAE students in Argentina and Japanese students of English in Texas, with students and teachers in USA, in Korea, in Brazil. We have given them the chance to chat with EFL teachers from other countries, and have spurred them into using English in safe online environments, using resources that contain authentic rather than scripted speech.
We have participated in virtual presentations, conferences and congresses, for free, attending lectures and posing queries on the screen, using text and voice chat, with teachers from different countries, from home, and could even watch the conference and all other participants having their webcams on.

Unbelievably enough to many, we have built up our own office online in a “moo”, an online building lodging private and common cybernooks to share with other members in the community, and furnished it our way, with excerpts and quotes on walls, and an open door to visitors… We have provided instructions to newcomers as helpdesk, and showed the way to students, asking for directions. And we have shared our work with colleagues from all spots.

However, little is known about CoP´s in Argentina. Language Teachers prefer to attend f2f workshops, where experienced colleagues will show them the how-to´s, and where they will find a supportive environment, with personalized guidance in a collaborative style.

Joining Forces

Aware of the importance of having a paradigm shift in education in an era when the web has invaded all fields of knowledge, and when electronic devices are already extensions of our selves, both Jennifer and Rita decided to join forces working towards our aim together in a common environment, and thus opened http://techtools4educators1.blogspot.com/ , where we pool ideas and offer guidance and assistance to teachers –mainly in our country—and where we publish the dates and information about the webinars and workshops we offer in different regions in the country.

We have also been invited by SBS Argentina, a prestigious bookshop in our country, to give webinars, presentations and workshops in our area, and we opened this space https://sites.google.com/site/sbsworkshops/ , where we offer them for free. It is our main aim to meet teachers needs in everything connected with Technology and its integration into Language Learning, including the latest tools and gadgets online, and helping them become proficient in their use and implementation.

Both educators have won scholarships to attend Congresses, Jennifer in Japan and Rita in the USA, as shown in their respective CV´s.
Rita is also a Google Certified Teacher, after attending a Google Course in Manhattan in 2008, and is Steering for the CALL-IS  TESOL 2009-2012 Committee, which she was asked to join to share experiences with colleagues in the States.

We may wonder how our ancestors reacted when they replaced face-to-face meetings with the telephone, until they got to see differences and advantages. Most probably, they found fault with the change the new means of communication started to imply, and rejected the idea of shifting away from deeply ingrained habits.
In a country where authentic situations are rarely met by learners in the streets, teachers need to overcome resistance to appreciate and resort to the magic of Internet, and to furnish students with the necessary instruments to communicate with the world, exploiting free sources and resources for genuine interaction. Only by plunging into real situations will learners succeed in using the language effectively, meaningfully and accurately.

Jennifer Verschoor                                                         Rita Zeinstejer
www.jenniferverschoor.pbworks.com                                  www.zeinstejer.com

I´ve just read about Blog Action Day and would love to add a small contribution to this wonderful project.

What is Blog Action Day?
“Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts us all.”

This year the topic of discussion is FOOD.

I would like share some of the websites we have been using this year on Food.

Great activities and Games on Food

Spin and Spell is a great day to teach your students how to spell. Choose the option “What we eat” and they´ll have a lot of fun learning and playing at the same time.

Free online games to learn about food safety and kitchen hygiene.

Fruit and Vegetables Vocabulary Using visuals to learn vocabulary.

The food chain game

Nutrition for kids Nice game to teach young learners everything about Nutrition.

This is my humble contribution to Blog Action Day as now it´s time to celebrate Mother´s day in Argentina.

My students really enjoyed creating their videos and they were highly impressed by all the different people who voted worldwide.

Take a look at the different countries that participated and voted.

• Argentina

• Canada

• Hi, I’m from Singapore. The students were in a more relaxed setting, and they certainly spoke with confidence. Excellento!

• Prague, Czech Republic, Europe

• I am from a little town in Buenos Aires,Argentina, called Ranelagh

• Barcelona

• İzmir, Turkey.  Karin

• I’m Argentinian but currently living in Lima, Peru

• Bahía Blanca, Argentina.

• I am from Mexico. Look for @dantorsan

• South Africa

• Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

• Hi! I’m from Slovenia and I enjoyed all the 3 videos very much. Way to go! Sasa Sirk

• Because it has subtitles – the sound quality on the others caused me to stop listening after 10 seconds. Brill stuff. Keep up the good work! David.Callaghan@edgehill.ac.uk

• England

• Ecuador

• I´m Sandra, a teacher from Derqui, Pilar. I´d chosen 3 because it offers the dynamics visual material should respect.

• Illinois, USA – Video 3 had more visual interest and was developed for easier understanding. Terry Smith

• I´m a teacher of English from Banfield, Greater Bs.As. Congratulations on your work. The three videos are excellent and challenging for other students.

I think that Stephen Downes summarizes this experience very clearly:

Thank you to all the different teachers that voted and took their time to view my students´ work. You have made a diffference in the lives of my students!!!

The winner was video 3. A big cyber clap to this group of students and to the rest because they´ve all done a wonderful job

I need your help to choose the best video and  to show my students the importance of having their work published even if there are some mistakes.

Please if you can take a few minutes to watch the three videos and choose the best one. Click in the link a the bottom of the four videos to cast your vote.

Thank you so much!!!

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Video 4

Click on this link to vote for the best video

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the       workings of his heart?                                                  Pablo Casals

This year students are really enjoying the work done in the wiki and they keep learning after school. We are using different technologies to support and enhance students´learning.

As there will always be more technology and tools to integrate in our classroom, I would like to share the links I´m using with my students to learn different parts of the body.

You can find these links on the simply box I created for my students or just follow my visual online calendar and choose March.

Feel free to share the websites you are using with young learners.

Kids Learning Games for Body Parts

Puzzles

Parts of the Body: Guess the word

Guessing game

Find out how you move and grow

Interactive website

Body Parts exercise

Interactive body parts

Sing and learn

Create your own face and win coins

Portrait Illustrator Maker

Several different games to learn parts of the body

Part of the body Wordsearch

Crossword with timer

Free body parts worksheets

Vocabulary quiz with images

If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they’ll have with twenty-six.  Open your child’s imagination.  Open a book.

Author Unknown

I´ve been reading some of the many blogs I have online. Last year I used the links below with young learners at school and with my daughters.

Take a look at the endless possibilities you have with online books.

Children´s storybooks

Reading Sites for the Primary Grades: A list of readers for all levels

Starfall Readers: Fiction and Non-Fiction

Storynory: Free Audio Stories

BBC-CBeebies-Story

Online Audio Stories

MeeGenius

Storyline online

Storycove