Happy teacher's day!

Yesterday, November 26th the educative administration on Murcia gave teachers a free day to celebrate our TEACHER'S DAY. All the week we've been making a different sort of activities in our centres intended to be a special day for the appreciation of teachers.

As read on Wikipedia, the idea of celebrating this day happened independently in many countries during the XX Century. In most cases, each county celebrates a local educator or an important milestone in education. 

In Spain, we still have a difference between the grades we teach in. So, Pre-Primary and Primary teachers celebrate their teacher's day on November 27th, the day of Saint Joseph Calasanctius de Calasanz (the founder of the Pious Schools in Rome) [so, we got free this day as a prize of the "Consejería de Educación"]; professors on Secondary celebrate the day of Saint Thomas of Aquino (considered the model teacher for those studying for priesthood on January 28th.

The majority of countries all over the world takes October 5th as the date to celebrate this day, because this day the UNESCO with the support of OIT adoptd the Recommendation concerning the status of Teachers.

Why does Spain, a secular country since the Spanish Constituion of December 29th, 1978, keep on celebrating teachers' or professors' days related to the lives of saints?

Why does not Spain, a member of the UNESCO, unify October 5th as the TEACHING DAY?

I'm waiting for your comments.

Learning Foreign Languages with YOUTUBE

We formerly studied listening to a "radio-cassette" or using a microphon or a tape recorder in order to improve our "foreign" language. I can remember the pronunciation of several words after having listened to one of those already dead tapes.

Now you can learn with a CD player if you buy a language learning method or if you download it from the internet (from several pages we're going to visit in proper posts).

But nowadays one of the most important and popular system to learn a language is watching and listening to videos on YouTube. You can find a varied sort of educative videos from universities or from high schools around the world, but you can also use the musical videos or the personal videos, uploaded by people like you and me, to improve your learning.

For instance, I am attending to a course on French for non-French teachers in Murcia and our teacher used YouTube to work our imagination and vocabulary. That's why we had to start giving words that the tittle of the song suggested us, before watching it.

Afterwards, we got ashamed because none of the words told by us were any kind of relation to the video we watched.

Our teacher played and stopped it every time we wanted or needed and then she asked: "What is that?", "What has she said?", "What is she wearing?", "Where is she?" or "What's the weather like?".

This is one of the things you can do, but not the only one. You have the opportunity of finding some subtittled videos or with a karaoke version, so you can use them to reinforce the acquisition of vocabulary and the perfection of you understanding on your listening.

The video is in French but I think it's worth watching it. Its tittle is: "Le poisson rouge". What would the tittle "The red fish" suggest you?

Modern society and web 2.0: FLASH MOB

Everyday we can appreciate how we need the ICT  in our lifes and how we use them: some of these are eMails, mobile messages and web services like youtube or blogs.

This is how people use the social nets to get in touch and to organize shows in the middle of a railway station or in malls: they are FLASH MOB.

I think that the mostfamous flash mob is the one set in a railway station in Antwerp (with a choreographied song from The sound of Music), or the last in an Underground station in Madrid with music of Michael Jackson.

Enjoy yourself:

  

Player list with BigContact

I haven't had time to find a podcast on the theme of my blog, but I suggest you to listen to this player list from RNE. It's the funniest and most interesting podcast you can listen to about surfing the Internet.

The program is "El buscador de Radio 5"

Using voki.com to add a sound player in my post

I'm using my new identity, Simon got in voki's web to speak about the same site I mentioned in my previous post.

I hope you enjoy yourself a little...


Get a Voki now!

New post transferring text to audio with SonoWebs

This is my first time using this service, but I find it extremely useful in order to improve the accessibility to to our blog . I tried with the description of a blog related to English teaching as a second/foreign language. This is the Spanish version:




You can get more information visiting Isabel's web

Sound playing with DivShare.com

Now I'm using the service offered by DivShare with a file uploaded by me.



It's a well-known nursery rhyme in English: The Alphabet Song. You can try to play it to your children because I'm sure they can sing it.

Entrada con reproducción de sonido de RNE

Estudiando Inglés: Pick-it-up, unidades 1 -6 (06/11/2010) UNED

Una forma de estudiar Inglés a partir de la mediateca de RNE en colaboración con la UNED.

Using issuu.com to add pdf files / Usando issuu.com para añadir archivos pdf

Once we've finished with the use of slideshare we follow with issuu.com, and that's the way we add a file got from this service:

Open publication - Free publishing - More ict

Después de haber acabado con el uso de slideshare pasamos a cómo usar issuu.com para añadir archivos pdf en nuestro blog:

Open publication - Free publishing - More multimedia

Adding presentations with slideshare.net / Añadiendo presentaciones con slideshare.net

Now it's the time to practice with adding a Powerpoint presentation or similar, taken from slideshare.net:

Web 2.0 And English

View more presentations from Karen Melhuish.

Ahora es el turno de añadir la presentación de slideshare.net sobre el tema de mi blog pero en español:

Utilización en clase de las nuevas tecnologías para la enseñanza de los idiomas

View more presentations from edubourg.

Post with videos / Entrada con vídeos

I've made this selection because I found them interesting. First you have this one in English:

ICT is fun in Learning.

Tras el vídeo que seleccioné en inglés, tienes ahora la oportunidad de ver esta película en español:

Bienvenidos a TICs aplicadas a la Educación

Post with images / Entradas con imágenes

Now, I'm making my new post with some images from Flickr:

Sunset in Murcia

Santiago de la Ribera (Murcia)

Ahora, estoy haciendo mi primera entrada con algunas imágenes de Flickr:

New York in London

London: St Paul's Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge.

Second post: using links / 2ª entrada: uso de enlaces

With this post I'm learning how to use the links, so you can read something about ICT on wikipedia.

Con esta entrada estoy aprendiendo a usar los enlaces, así que puedes leer en wikipedia sobre las TIC.

Welcome message!

This is the first post in my new blog focused on ICT for English teachers:

www.ictticforenglishteachers.blogspot.com

I hope you find it useful.

Suggestions are kindly accepted.



Esta es la primera entrada de mi nuevo blog centrado en las TIC para maestros/profesores de Inglés:


www.ictticforenglishteachers.blogspot.com


Espero que lo encuentres útil

Se aceptan sugerencias.