flynn089

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice. Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can later return to, share and reflect on again. For me Penzu is a really good tool which can help me and my students or trainee teachers to do this. How to create your learning journal Go to: https://penzu.com/ and click on ‘ Sign up ’. You will need to create a password and enter a username, email address and agree to the terms of use. Then you just click on ‘ Submit ’.  You can then start creating your journal entries by adding a text and title. Each entry is dated automatically and you can move...

WordMagnets is a really useful tool that students can either use alone on a computer, or that you can use in class with a projector or IWB. Here's a short video showing you how to use it. You can download a copy of the video here and copy suitable for iPod here . WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange. Here's a text that I quickly copied in from an article about J. K. Rowling. I clicked on 'Next', then ignored the opportunity to change the background and clicked 'Next' again and I had these randomised word tiles that I could then drag to recreate the text. This is a great tool that has some really useful features. You can type in and add words to the text, or you can delete word tiles from the text by clicking on remove then clicking the words you want to get rid of. You can also change the colour and...