Virtual Dice

Using virtual dice can be a great idea to engage your students and provide some fun language practice. A great site I learned about from Eva Toth through my participation in 'Developing transversal skills through eTwinning projects' run by Alenka Miljevic and Arjana Blazic was this https://rollthedice.online/en/
Below you can see the dice I created.

BookSnaps Challenge

The significance of a PLN is really great to me. Having a PLN provides you with free Professional Development from people you choose to follow and share ideas with. It also offers learning at your own pace! One of the persons in my PLN I appreciate a lot is Peggy George. I met her on twitter and I feel so lucky for that. She always shares excellent posts with resources, tips, and tools, helpful to any educator. Peggy is one of the hosts in classroom2.0 live free webinars. During one of the #liveclass20 sessions, attendees were introduced to Tara Martin  and her idea of  SnapBooks challenge. In short, Tara's idea is for readers to take snaps of the books they read and interact with the text by providing their reaction to what they read. This can be done by readers adding emojis, stickers, text boxes or speech bubbles with their thoughts and feelings, highlighting a key idea and so on. She suggests tools you can use for this purpose; some of them include Snapchat, Seasaw, photo apps such as Fotor or even google drawings/ slides which may have been prepared by a teacher and then edited by a student. You can read about the Booksnaps2018 Challenge Tara Martin organized for 2018 HERE.
This year some of my EFL students participated in the SnapBooks2018 challenge and here's one of my students' booksnaps based on an English book she read.

 Next year I would like to integrate this idea into my lessons early in the year so that my students will have the time to engage in the process to a greater extent.

Professional Development through Podcasts curated in Google Drawings

One of my most favorite persons in my PLN is Don Yerks. He is a Google Certified Educator (level 1&2), a lifelong learner and an awesome person! I got to know him through Tony Vincent's online classes (Classy Videos and Classy Graphics). I always enjoyed the perfect assignments he submitted for the classes. I was also fond of the constructive and encouraging feedback he provided to his 'classmates'.

I've recently stumbled upon one of Don's twitter posts and was really amazed at his new creation using Google Drawings. I adored his fantastic work for many reasons. First of all, its content was something I was immediately attracted to. I always try to find ways for engaging in free Professional Development. The podcasts Don suggests on his image are worth listening to for any educator! Second, I loved the combination of colors, the clever design with the mobile screen, the fonts and the text drop shadow use. And ... I should not leave out the most important reason I liked Don's Google Drawing so much; it is interactive! This is so amazing! You can access each podcast he suggests by clicking on the relevant small image. Try it out HERE!

I am so grateful to Don Yerks for allowing me to share his awesome work on my blog! Thanks Don!