Friday

On our last day we had a look at how to create websites with Wix. It might seem complicated at the beginning, but it isn't indeed.  

I created a nice trial page about visiting York which you can see below. 

Thursday

Today's been quite interesting. We started with Coogle a tool to create mind maps.

After that, we learnt to use quizlet, where we can do quizzes in several shapes (mutiple choice,  matching words with definitions and even games). 

Then, we saw how to use TED Talks and a different thing called TED Ed. In this second website there are plenty of animated videos with lesson plans beautifully prepared for teachers. You can even customized these lesson plans to make them your own and share them with your students, and you can check your students' answers to the attached questions. 

Also, we practised how to edit videos with Shotcut. You can split the videos, add questions to them, among others.

Finally, we learnt about quizizz, another tool to create quizzes for the students. There are some quizzes already made and you can even take questions from a quiz to add to your own.

Such a lot we learnt today!

Wednesday

Using images was our first topic today. Rick gave us some good ideas on how to use images in the classroom.

We also had time to discover how Socrative works, which is a tool to make quizzes for students to answer multiple choice, true or false and short answer questions. The teacher can see the students’ progress and the answers in real time and can display them on the board.

After that, we learnt how to create comic strips with Storyboardthat, which was good fun. Teachers can get the scenes ready for the students to create the story, either in written or spoken form.

And finally we had a try at Kahoot, a very nice way to do quizzes or even tests with our students.

Tuesday evening

On a cultural note, I can tell you that this evening Martin, a teacher at our school in York, took us on a guided tour about the snickelways of this city. He told us a lot of stories and interesting details about the history of this lovely city. 

One of them is that you can find cats in the facades of many houses, since this animal was thought to keep not only rats but also the devil away from people’s houses. 

Another thing about this city is that many streets are called ‘gates’, many gates are called ‘bars’ and many bars are called ‘pubs’. Also, some houses have only half a street number. 

He showed us the shambles too, and how it was a whole neighbourhood in the past. And we had a chance to see the streets that inspired the Harry Potter’s films, not only the right street to buy magic stuff, but also the street Harry went to when he pronounced his spell wrongly.  

And many more things we learnt. It was a great evening. Thanks a bunch Martin! 

Tuesday

Hey there!

Today we saw other interesting tools:

• Edmodo, a kind of social network with closed groups, focused on teaching and learning.

• acast, a website and/or app with thousands of podcasts on different topics. 

• Spreaker, a programme to record and pusblish your own podcasts. I really liked Spreaker with its nice effects. I think my students might find it particularly useful.

We also talked about how to use whatsapp and google maps in the class, and how our stuents can use their mobiles to take close-up pictures of objects for others to guess what these objects are, asking yes/no questions.

Interesting day!

Monday

Today I started my new course on IT teaching tools. So far we've seen how to:

• create polls with Mentimeter, our students can answer them on their mobiles and we all can see the results in real time. 

• set up Google Groups, where we can have a web forum to discuss matters and share pics.

• create our own blogs with Blogger, even the students can write their own. 

• and we've even used a snipping tool to capture screens shots like the one you can see below.

Besides, I'm enjoying life in the nice city of York. This morning I walked all around it and I found it particularly beautiful.