Cloud computing

According to en.wikipedia.org  is a "kind of Internet-based computing", where you can share and deposit all your data, information and any kind of document. Moreover, you can access them from any electronic device if it is connected to the Internet. 

Nevertheless, I honestly believe that there are some advantages and disadvantages. 

Among the most important advantages of using the Cloud, we find its cost, because yo can use it for free and, if you need more GB, you can pay a small amount of money. Apart from that, I must highlight that there are some many important plus sides, such us its agility and independence that it provides; its hability to share resources with whoever you want and wherever you and other people are, and those are the main reasons that we can consider the cloud a dynamic tool that increases the productive capacity of its users. 

But, when there is light there is also shadow, and I believe that the main downside of the cloud is its security. More often than not, our data are hosted on servers located in countries with different laws from ours and where our security is not as guaranteed as we assumed. 

Despite this seemingly huge disadvantage, I use the cloud every day inasmuch as it allows me to work on the same document from different devices and to share with my colleagues date, information and all kind of documents, music and videos. 

In conclusion, I believe that the cloud is a extremely useful tool that we can use every day, even in the classroom!

https://en.wikipedia.org

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/cloud_computing.html

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-computing

http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Cloud_Computing

Interaction in class

If we want that our students have a significant learning, we have to use the appropriate methodology, which must be based on motivation and interaction. How will students interact with me and between themselves? In my history of Spain lessons I will use:

• Blog: I will use the blog of the subject as a meeting point outside the classroom, when my students are at home, for instance. On the blog, they can keep working and talking with me and other students, even from different classrooms.
• Wikispaces: it is a web where students and I can do some collaborative activities, such as the creation of a story or some debates on different aspects that relate our history and current life situations.
• Discussions and debates about activities: the methodology I will use in my lessons goes from the specific things to general ones. I will give my students different kind of documents, made by me or historical documents, and they must work with them at home, discussing about the content at classroom during the lessons.
• Group work: some activities will be done by my students in group, therefore, they must organize and communicate themselves to get a good mark.

The main advantage of using motivation in class is that the students can learn by themselves, that is to say that through interaction they can debate about the most important issues of the subject and the can learn and teach at the same time and from the teacher and even from each other. Thereby, students can get a significant learning.

However, interaction has also a main downside, time schedule. Maybe, students debate about some issue and the debate can extend in time and it can change all the planning.

Despite this disadvantage, I believe interaction is a key tool for 21st century education.

wordle.net

Corpora

Other resources I want to talk about are corpora. According to en.wikipedia.org "in linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). they are used to statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rilus within a specific language territory". Therefore, between this compendium of texts we can find expressions and it can help us to be sure about their meanings and correct uses. 

I've try with the expression "a shoulder to cry on" and I've introduced it in two corpora, http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ and http://www.linguee.es/. 

In the first one, I've found 11 pieces of writing where it appears, so we can see in which contexts we can use it, like "And you promise that if you need a shoulder to cry on, you'll come to me first?". 

In the second one, apart from these kind of examples, there is the translation. For intance, in the first column there is: "they need a shoulder to cry on or someone to boost them up", and in the second "necesitan un hombre en el que llorar o alguien que les levante el ánimo". 

Now, you must try with the expression you choose!

Thesaurus

On the Internet we can find a large amount of resources. Apart from dictionaries, we can also find encyclopedias like http://global.britannica.com/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, where we can find interesting articles abaout words or terms we neet to know deeply.

But, what about synonyms and antonyms? Sometimes, when we are writing we want to avoid repeating the same word every once and again, and this is the main reason why we should know synonyms.

A extremely helpful resource is Thesaurus, a tool that help us to know synonyms and antonyms of every word. You can try introducing any word in http://www.thesaurus.com/. I've tryed with the word "history".

Firstly, I've could see the synonyms (like past or ancient times) and then the antonyms (in this case only future). I've could also find words related with "history" (such as, narration or detail) and I've even could use some filters to choose the most formal ones (forexample, olden days).

Do you dare to try with any other word?

Let's compare dictionaries

It is very interesting to compare the definitions of the same word that appear in different dictionaries.
We must choose the definition which fits better with our subject or the thing we are studing.
For example, we can choose the word "archaeology" and these are the definitions:

According to http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ it is "the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other remains". Its origins are in the "17th century (in the sene "ancient history"): from modern Latin archaeologia, from Greek arkhaiologia "ancient history", from arkhaios "ancient". The current sense dates from the mid 19th century".

Accordind to http://www.merriam-webster.com/ it is "the scientific study of material remains (as fossil relics, artifacts, and monuments) of past human life and activities".

According to http://www.wordreference.com/ it is "the scientific study of ancient peoples and their cultures by analyzing their remaining tools, utensils, and other objects". It is also defined as "the scientific study of historic or prehistoric peoples and their cultures by analysis of their artifacts, inscriptions, monuments, and other such remains, esp. those that have been excavated" and as "the study of man's past by scientific analysis of the material remains of his cultures".

Finally, I've used http://www.learnersdictionary.com/, where it is defined as "a science that deals with past human life and activities by studying the bones, tools,... of ancient people".

Which of these definitions is the closest to the definition we have studied in our lessons?
I prefer those that appear in http://www.wordreference.com/ because archeologist study all the remains of past and current societies in order to how the people lived and live.

What do you need to know?

Studying a subject in a language that is not your mother tongue can be a difficult task and that's the main reason you must have a certain number of tool you will use everyday during our History of Spain (2nd of Bachillerato) lessons.

But, what about the contents? Here they are:

1.- HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SPAIN. 

     Unit 1.- Our roots. 

     Unit 2.- Al-Ándalus. 

     Unit 3.- The Christian kingdoms (VIII-XIII).

     Unit 4.- Late Middle Ages. 

2.- THE MODERN AGE.

     Unit 5.- The reign of the Catholic kings. 

     Unit 6.- The Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century. 

     Unit 7.- Spaiin during the Baroque. 

3.- FROM THE "ANCIEN RÉGIME" TO THE "LIBERAL STATE".

     Unit 8.- The arrival of the Bourbons. 

     Unit 9.- The crisis of the "Ancien Regime". 

     Unit 10.- The "Liberal State". 

     Unit 11.- The Restoration. 

     Unit 12.- The crisis of the Restoration. 

4.- THE WORLD BETWEEN THE FIRST AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

     Unit 13.- The Second spanish Republic. 

     Unit 14.- The Civil War. 

5.- FROM FRANCOISM TO DEMOCRACY.  

     Unit 15.- Francoism. 

     Unit 16.- Political transition and democracy. 

What should you do to understand the content? You must know: 

- How to develop a conversation about history 

- How to write a composition

- How to analyse historical documents 

- How define important terms of each of our teaching units

- The most important historical processes.

For that, you have to develop some skills you have acquired over the years in your English lessons like: 

- Identifying the tipe of text.
- Hypothesizing.
- Writing argumentative texts, descriving past situations. 

- Using the correct language register. 

- Expressing your opinion in a clear way in oral and written form. 

- Learning new terminology and using it correctly.

- Create classroom debates (questions and answers), exchanging information. 

NOW, KEEP LEARNING!!

ICT & teaching

My new post includes a video about teaching and the ICT use. The video was created by the Norwegian Centre for ITC in Education (www.iktsenteret.no) and it wants to contribute to the realization and the development of ICT policy.

I want to share this video with you because I totally agree with it, inasmuch as I believe that teachers are enslaved by the traditional way of teaching and we must change our minds and try to teach using ICT. 

What is a Blog?

According to www.britannica.com (1), a blog is an "online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities, thoughts, or beliefs".
www. webopedia.com (2) says that it is "short of Web Log [...], a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Tipically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author".
Nevertheless, on the website www.dailyblogtips.com (3) we can read that it doesn't have to be a personal blog, there are several different types.

But, apart from personal ones, how many types of blogs are there? Here there are the main types according to Wikipedia (5):
      1.- Collaborative blogs or group blobs: a blog where more than an author can writte. The vast majority of them are based around a single theme.
     2.- Microblogging: we do that when we post small pieces of digital content, like videos, links,... on the Internet in order to being in touch with friends or sharing useful resources. We can do that through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
     3.- Corporate and organizational blogs: these blogs have the aim of improving the communication between the members of a company and being known externally.
     4.- Aggregated blogs: these blogs are made by the aggregation of different ideas. They allow us to understand different points of view on the same issue.
     5.- By genre: we can find blogs that focuses on a single subject, like fashion, books, animal, health, cooking or education.
     6.- By media type: it is a classification by the content, for instance, if they comprising videos are called vlog or if they comprising links are called a linklog.
     7.- By device: referring to the type of device for which it has been designed.
     8.- Reverse blog: blogs are usually made by a single blogger or the association of several. However, this kind of blogs are composed by its users.

But, what type of blogs are the educational ones?
As I said before, educational blogs are in the fifth group and Wikipedia (5) says that  an edublog "is a blog created for education purposes. Edublogs archive and support student and teacher learning by facilitating reflection, questioning by self and others, collaboration and by providing contexts for engaging in higher-order thinking [...]. Blogs can be useful tools for sharing information and tips among co-workers, providing information for students, or keeping in contact with parents".
Therefore, by using the blog, our students can achieve higher and better goals, and learn who to use their mobiles or computers to learn, not only to enjoy or chat with friends.
The authors of the guide Innovation in Learning and Teaching Interaction, Reflection and IT (6) assert that, through the use of edublogs, students can get to develop their oral and written communication skill and to be able to contribute to an online project workspace.

To put things in a nutshell, I absolutelly agree with John Saddington (4) insomuch as I believe that, nowadays, a blog can be whatever you want, a learning tool, a way to express your thoughts or a place to meet fasion trends.

 I am going to use it as a learning tool. 
What are you going to do?

Sources.
(1) http://www.britannica.com
(2) http://www.webopedia.com
(3) http://www.dailyblogtips.com
(4) http://john.do
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org
(6) https://moodle2015-16.ua.es/moodle/pluginfile.php/42153/mod_resource/content/1/guidelines2.pdf

Hello everybody!!

My name is Sara Gosálbez Sarrió. As some of you, I got my degree in History at the University of Alicante some years ago and I have worked as an archaeologist since then. Nowadays, I'm trying to become a teacher and studying the English C1 level, and those are the main reasons I'm doing this course.

I love archaology, history and English, and I enjoy running and spending time with my friends and family. Moreover, as all of us, I'm always in contact with them through social networks or Whatsapp.

Although I've never done an online course before, some years ago I attended a seminar and I learned how to create a blog. Since then, I've been improving my blog, trying to use tools like Youblisher, Youtube, Prezi, Educaplay, Pinterest, Dipity,... inasmuch as I belive that history lessons can be more interesting with these tools and I'm sure that the e-learning will make easier the communication with my students and the communication between them.

So, I'm really keen on learning about ICT because I know that it's an essential tool for developing our work as teachers and to draw our students' attention.

See you in the next post!!

Sara