The perfect age to introduce technology to students

Nowadays technology has became in something really necessary in or world since the the adult people to the elderly people, but children are getting more involved day by day because they are getting borned in a completely technological environment; in the past was believed that just adult people could learn something new about technology or that just them would use it, but now children understand and learn even better through tecnology. In some cases we can say that introducing technology to our students is better if we do it since their first years, but we have to be very careful because we can be doing something bad instead of good because children may go in another way and use technology not in the way we want, there is a complete world that children can discover through technology, but as we have a good world we also have a bad one and we have to be very careful to protect them of that and to guide them through we right path in technology; the teacher plays a very important role because he has to check and supervise in the process of using technology. I strongly believe that there is not an exact perfect age to introduce technology to students, but the sooner you start the better will be because students will learn more and in a better way because there are many advantages about using technology because many years ago, particularly before the Internet was invented, people has to go to libraries or buy books just to have the information they need in making book reports, projects, researches, theses, and other related academic papers. For mothers, they have to buy recipe books just to learn cooking new recipes. Fathers have to buy newspapers just to get updated about the latest news. Business people have to buy business magazines just to get updates about economic growth. Fashion savvy people have to buy fashion and lifestyle magazines just to get updated about fashion trends. All these are costly and consume time and effort. Today, all these are eliminated as information is easily accessed through the Internet. It is also important to say that through the use of technology he help our environment because a school is an institution that can be found in every state or country. With this, one could only imagine how many billion sheets of paper are consumed yearly. Apart from it being costly, it also contributes in the faster depletion of the forests. That is why with tablet computers and smartphones, the need to print more books is lessened. Actually, there are now schools that use especially designed computers for their classrooms and libraries. This also lessens the need to reproduce information in black and white. So as a conclusion I can say that the best age in which as teachers we can introduce technology to our students is the one in which they need it and and also the one in which they find that useful; besides that technology would always help students in many aspects, so as I said before the sooner you introduce technology to your students, the better performance they will have in education.

Traditional Classes vs Online Classes

I think this is a very good topic because there's a lot to say related to this. First of all, I want to recall there for years there has been a tradition talking about education of course, specifically with classes, for a long but really long time poeople have gone to school, high school, college or university because that is the way in which we learn things, but technology came to change absolutely everything because in the past it was an obligation that you had to go to school in order to learn; now the story is completely different because you do not have the necessity of going to a certain place and get together with a number of people to listen to a teacher in order to learn things, you can do that by yourself online without going out of your house, work, or any place. The important thing here is that even though we have that modality now of online classes we still have regular clases though so why regular classes or online classes? I will tell you now some advantages of both of them so that you have a better idea. We are going to start with the regular classes; first of all, regular classes or classes that we have in a classroom offers multi-sensory appeal. You can listen to the teacher, receive visual cues through PowerPoint images, handouts or whiteboard lists and participate actively in hands-on activities and case studies. You also have direct access to the teacher in class. Interaction is immediate and you normally have opportunities to ask questions and participate in live discussions. This also allows you to benefit form the firsthand accounts of other students' experiences. If you want to build and maintain personal and professional relationships during your education, classrooms also offer greater personal contact with other students. On the other hand, we have onlne classes an in here you can sit at home or go to a library to do your coursework. This eliminates the need for driving, which saves gas, and in some cases, allows you to take classes from distant schools. Online learners also get to develop their Internet, technology and virtual team skills by participating in online discussions, tests and other virtual learning activities. The ability to do coursework on your own schedule and to manage the pace of your learning experience are also benefits to online students. As we know we have also disadvantages for both of them; in the case of the regular classes learning is normally fairly structured. You meet at regularly scheduled times on the same days each week. This limits flexibility with work and other activities. You generally must be in class to get the learning experience and to keep up with requirements. Unless your teachers record lectures, in-class instruction is not available after the class session is over. Students who struggle to focus may also find classrooms distracting to their learning experience. We have the other case with online classes because students sometimes misunderstand that online classes are less rigorous or time-consuming. Instead, they require more self-discipline, time management and motivation to complete work. Limited interaction and access to instructors and no personal contact with other students are also common drawbacks. While effective online instructors are available via e-mail, phone and web conferencing, you don't have the same interpersonal relationship in most cases. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings is more prevalent online as well, especially given the lack of context and nonverbal messages in e-mail and discussion forums. In the end, I stronly believe that combining both of them is the most wise decision because you can take the best of both in order to make learning more significant to students.

MIND42, YOUTHINK, BRAINSHARK, and MAILVU

There are always ways to improve in everything so that we get better results of everything, and at the time of preparing and giving some classes as teachers we have many ways to improve everything. When we talk about giving an online class or making classes more interactive or in a different way we have 5 more tools that we are going to be telling today so that you can have more ideas at the moment of preparing some clases. The first tool we are going to talk about is Mind42, this is an online mind mapping application that allows users to visualize their thinking using the proven mind mapping method. The name refers to the collaborative features of the product, and is intended to be pronounced like "mind for two." It has been recommended by Freelance Weekly as one of their favorite time-management and organization tools. Then we have youthink that is a community moderated site where you can make quizzes and personality tests, ask and answer questions, create profiles, journals, forums and more. After that, we have Brainshark, this provides clients with a cloud-based software for creating, sharing and tracking online and mobile video presentations. Brainshark provides the ability to transform static content into voice-enriched video presentations that can be accessed anytime. The creater of the presentation gets viewing detail reports that will allow analytic evaluation of usage to determine the overall effectiveness of the presentation. It has been a great time till now becase we are learning that there is complete world of tools that we can use to improve our teaching style, but we haven't finished. Now we have another tool called mailVU; mailVU is an easy to use video messaging service developed by A2Stream Inc., a software company based in Charlotte, NC. mailVU has been named to the Top 101 Most Useful Websites on the Internet, and has been used by over one million people in 200+ countries and territories around the globe. You have many services with this tool, you can private video messaging service for individuals, subscriptions plans with branding, incoming testimonial recorder, and other advanced features, video contest service that you can run from your website, video API for developers to add our video messaging service to their app, and private label service for companies wanting to offer service under their own brand. As we have seen there are many ways in which you can make a class different using an infinite number of tools to get the results you want.

Prons and Cons of using Youtube

If there is one website that is known by almost all the people around the world that is Youtube. YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video content, including video clips, TV clips, and music videos, and amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos. This is a huge website that as everything, it has come advantages and disadvantages and we are going to see some of them. First of all, it is important to say that Youtube has some advantages, the first one is that to reach the media is cheap and easy, we can also say the the service is clear and clean, then we have that Youtube has a wide variety of videos and you can express your creativity through this website. Besides that you can even meet people using Youtube, you can learn many things by using it, and the amount of information in short time is amazing, you can become a member in easy way and use the website is very easy too, and the last one but not less important is that it saves money on marketing if you want to announce something.

We have talked about the advantages and now we are going to see the disadvantages, the first one is that the website is public so anyone can see you there, you do not know who posted a video, sometimes there is violence in the videos and also there is explicit content in the videos, sometimes we find animal abuse, and there could be copyright issues there. Despite all the good and bad things this website can have it is very important to say that the popularity of Youtube has grown with the years and it seems that it will continue in that path for some long time.

How can we use Hot Potatoe with children, teenagers and adults?

One of the biggest concerns of a teacher is how to make a quiz, and with this I mean a variety of things that can contribute to make a quiz good or bad, but beyond if the test or quiz is good is this way to see this kind of activities because almost every body is tired of the same monotonous way to make a quiz, so for all the people who have thought like that there is Hot Potatoe! Firts of all we have to be clear in what is this; the Hot Potatoe is a set of Computer- Assisted Language Learning tools that lets teachers easily create interactive web-based exercises. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for non-profit educational users who make their pages available on the web. The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises and make them available on a web page.

We can develop many things with this program, Include an optional reading text in one frame and the quizzes in the other. Data for creating the reading text may be directly entered into the software, or imported from external text or HTML files; besides that you can control the appearance of the Web Pages.I believe as the program is basically a test maker the advantages it has can applied for all the people whom which we are using it, not mattering the age, but it is also important to say that some kind of activities are more appropiate for some levels of education talking about kids, teenagers and adults, such as JCross for example that is something better for kids because it is more fun but it is also something good that some adults like to try. With this program progressive feedback is given to the student either as hints or allowing checking of their answers in phases. This allows the student to be involved in a more cognitive process and to figure out the correct answer in a constructive manner. I have to say that in my experience using this program I could prove myself making the tests and also designing the tests because let me tell you that both were really fun because you can add as many things as you can so that learning is more significant to the one who is making the quiz you choose.

Inversion

Inversion

Mixed-up sentence exercise

Put the parts in order to form a sentence. When you think your answer is correct, click on "Check" to check your answer. If you get stuck, click on "Hint" to find out the next correct part.

Quiz

Monuments

Nature

Choose the best answer

Monuments

Monuments have been created for thousands of years, and they are often the most durable and famous symbols of ancient civilizations. Prehistoric tumuli, dolmens, and similar structures have been created in a large number of prehistoric cultures across the world, and the many forms of monumental tombs of the more wealthy and powerful members of a society are often the source of much of our information and art from those cultures.[3] As societies became organized on a larger scale, so monuments so large as to be difficult to destroy and the Egyptian Pyramids, the Greek Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, Islamic Indian Taj Mahal or the Moai of Easter Island have become symbols of their civilizations. In more recent times, monumental structures such as the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower have become iconic emblems of modern nation-states. The term monumentality relates to the symbolic status and physical presence of a monument.
Monuments are frequently used to improve the appearance of a city or location. Planned cities such as Washington D.C., New Delhi and Brasília are often built around monuments. For example, the Washington Monument's location was conceived by L'Enfant to help organize public space in the city, before it was designed or constructed. Older cities have monuments placed at locations that are already important or are sometimes redesigned to focus on one. As Shelley suggested in his famous poem "Ozymandias" ("Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"), the purpose of monuments is very often to impress or awe.
Structures created for others purposes that have been made notable by their age, size or historic significance may also be regarded as monuments. This can happen because of great age and size, as in the case of the Great Wall of China, or because an event of great importance occurred there such as the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France. Many countries use Ancient monument or similar terms for the official designation of protected structures or archeological sites which may originally have been ordinary domestic houses or other buildings.
Monuments are also often designed to convey historical or political information. They can be used to reinforce the primacy of contemporary political power, such as the column of Trajan or the numerous statues of Lenin in the Soviet Union. They can be used to educate the populace about important events or figures from the past, such as in the renaming of the old General Post Office Building in New York City to the James A. Farley Building (James Farley Post Office), after former Postmaster General James Farley.[4]
The social meanings of monuments are rarely fixed and certain and are frequently 'contested' by different social groups. As an example: whilst the former East German socialist state may have seen the Berlin Wall as a means of 'protection' from the ideological impurity of the west, dissidents and others would often argue that it was symbolic of the inherent repression and paranoia of that state. This contention of meaning is a central theme of modern 'post processual' archaeological discourse.

 

1. What is a monument?
   1.   A type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or important event
   2.   Structure that has become important to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage
   3.   Something you can find in any town where you go
   4.   Something extremely smart that someone has said
2. Etymology use of the word "monumental"
   1.   monumental sculpture
   2.   reference to something of extraordinary size and power
   3.   funerary act
   4.   to advise or warn
3. What is an example of a monument?
   1.   Salvador del mundo
   2.   Cristo Redentor
   3.   Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
   4.   Taj Mahal
4. Where is Taj Mahal?
   1.   India
   2.   Afganistan
   3.   Israel
   4.   England
5. Where is the Eiffel Tower?
   1.   England
   2.   Italy
   3.   Argentina
   4.   France
6. is a lost city and is located in Peru's mountains. It is also one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.
   1.   San Lorenzo
   2.   Troy
   3.   Stonehenge
   4.   Machu Picchu
7. is the longest man-made monument. It is also one of the Seven New Wonders of the World
   1.   The pyramids of Giza
   2.   The Effeil Tower
   3.   The Great Wall of China
   4.   The Pana Canal
8. is a big bell in London
   1.   Big Ben
   2.   Nine O'clock Gun
   3.   Glockenspiel
   4.   Kalki Temple
9. is a famous statue that is "half-lion"
   1.   The Great Sphinx of Giza
   2.   The Statue of Liberty
   3.   Apollo Belvedere
   4.   Christ the Redeemer
10. is a famous tower that is a very popular tourist attraction in Italy
    1.   The Colosseum
    2.   The Leaning Tower of Pisa
    3.   The Pantheon
    4.   St. Mark's Cathedral