Blog Post # 12

Assignment watch the following video, discuss its usefulness for you and your classmates as future educators. Explore the educational blog created by the video's speaker, Jose Picardo. Give information on what you have learned from his blog, including a little about Picardo and a few resources he listed.

Video: Top Ten Tips for Using Technology in the Classroom

This video is useful for future teachers because the things that Picardo suggest for integrating education into the classroom are simple, but very useful. He talks about many things that we have done ourselves in this class, like creating blogs, using social networking, and creating podcasts, but he also has other ideas. He suggests streaming videos and using music to get the students interested and engaged in their education, by relating it to something that interests them. I think that this is a good idea that I hadn't really thought of before. He also suggests tailoring interactive exercises to your students by using free internet resources. He suggests this because you can make theses activities specific to your students' particular strengths and resources rather than just a generic activity designed by someone else. He points out he usefulness of social networking to communicate with students, and the usefulness of blogs and wikis for sharing student work online and giving them a focus. All of his ideas seem like good ones, many of which we have already worked with or read about in this class.

The creator of this blog is Jose Picardo, head of Modern Foreign Languages at Nottingham High School in the United Kingdom, where he teaches German and Spanish. In addition to his own interest and use of technology in the classroom, Picardo also wrote the ICT Outlook 2008 and 2009 for the Languages ICT website, in collaboration with CILT, the National Centre for Languages, and ALL, the Association for Language Learning and currently presents News Time Spanish, a weekly podcast for intermediate to advance learners of Spanish, and continues to lead workshops and talks about the effective use of technology to engage students.

On his blog, Picardo provides an alphabetical list of free online resources for teachers. It is constantly being added to, but right now contains probably hundreds of links with ideas ranging from acapela.tv - a sight for creating text-to-speech animations, to Zooburst, a tool which allows anyone to create their own 3D popup books.

Mr. Picardo's blog is definitely one to check out for those interested in bringing technology into the classroom and I encourage you all to check it out!