Monday, 2 September 2013

The potential of Web 2.0 resources for EFL learners

Hello! Today I want to remind you about the importance of using web 2.0 tools in EFL teaching classroom. Web 2.0 allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social network, in contrast to web 1.0, in which people were limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, video sharing sites, and web applications to name a few. Teachers and students can master many of these tools in minutes.
To summarise the differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0, I share this chart with you:

Web 1.0
Web 2.0
Reading
Writing
Individual users
Community
Home pages
Blogs
Taxonomy
Folk
Owning
Sharing
You find news
News finds you

Having said this, I would like to present some web 2.0 tools that you can use in your teaching.

Voki - It is an educational tool that allows users to create their own talking character. 


Create your voki here: http://www.voki.com/create.php

Wordle – It is a visual representation of text data, typically used to depict keywords. The importance of each tag is shown with font, size, and colour.

I used wordle with a student who was practising wh-words to make questions. It worked wonderfully!


 Create your voki here: http://www.wordle.net/create

Shoulders to the wheel!!!

6 comments:

  1. I liked the way you presented the main differences regarding Web 1 and Web 2. Very simple and plain, easy to understand! And I also agree with you on the fact that using "Wordle" for practicing grammar is really helpful!!! And novel! Great way to engage our kids! Thanks for sharing your experience Sofi!

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    2. Yes Ro! It was really helpful for my student since she was a beginner and she was just starting to learn some English words. The idea was for her to be well-acquainted with the spelling of those words and using wordle helped her a lot. She had to look attentively at the wordle and write the words letter by letter.

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  2. I followed your advice and created my own Voki avatar!
    Copy and paste the following link on a new entry and listen to it!

    http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=8529672&height=267&width=200

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  3. Vero I loved your avatar. It definitely represents your style. I agree with you; using Voki is a great way of introducing ourselves in the classroom. It's engaging and it catches students attention. Thanks for sharing your avatar.

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