During this course (Bibliotecas Escolares y el
uso de AbiesWeb) I stumbled upon this Online Cue prompter which might be an
interesting option for students to read out texts and record themselves. With a
bit of brainstorming I'm sure teachers will come up with creative ways of
putting this application (until recently the monopoly of TV professionals) to
good use. A fun way of making students aware of pronunciation, intonation and
facial expression. With a little practice you can say things while it doesn't
even look like you're reading! Ha Ha!
These first words might be part of the script I'm using for this end-of-course video. I would continue like this:
I suppose most of you already know of this
tool, but perhaps you hadn't thought of using it for Reading purposes, so I'm
going to use this prompter for my end-of-course video clip. I'll keep it short because
I know you have to go through a lot of material.
First of all my
thanks to the makers of the course. I thought the tasks were quite challenging
and there were several things I learned about and I'm sure to use in the
future. To start with, this very BLOG gave me the opportunity to learn a bit
more about the system. As you can see I had already made a blog (Jenny's Bear,
for example) a few years ago, but I had quite forgotten about it and the tasks
of the AbiesWeb course encouraged me to pick it up again and become a little
bit more confident around it.
Coincidentally I
had started the blog at the time precisely to work a bit more with the Library
and Abies2 and to get our students a little bit more involved. In the end I did
not show the blog to my students and put the idea away in a drawer, so to
speak. There have been other moments in the past when we tried out different
incentives. Last year we had a Writing competition for Halloween stories. The
first prize was, apart from some cash or a book voucher, that the winning entry was
going to be read out and filmed. At first I thought the author would read the
story (called Betty) himself and I would film it, but he persuaded me to read it for him. So I also
filmed myself reading it and added a few images and sounds. I added a little fragment in my video, but if you're interested you can listen to the complete story if you click HERE.
After setting up
the Blog I learned about importing students and books and other material into
AbiesWeb. I became quite excited about how easy that was and I have to say that
I'm slightly disappointed. Not with the course, but with AbiesWeb in Castilla y
León. Apparently it is not so easy for
me to get AbiesWeb installed in Ávila because the system has not been implanted
yet. I was eager to start with the system and now I can't.........yet.
So of the things I really liked of the things I learned during the course was the Booktrailer, the result of which we have seen under task 3.3 Leer e investigar en entornos digitales. (I made it a link in case you want to check it out). Then there were
the digital badges that was quite fun to do and another thing I had never even
heard of. I designed some myself for writers of book summaries. I made myself small to get inside a book and
recommend it in that way in the Book Trailer I made about a book called The
Measly Middle Ages. I showed some videos and put Medieval Music in the
background. I also made myself small to get 
inside the book, just a way to draw the attention. For this I use the Green Screen or Chroma and I'd like to offer the technique to make similar book trailers with our students. The problem with many of these things is that they are quite time-consuming and it's difficult to get people to do things outside their school timetable at the EOI. It's not like in Primary or Secondary Education where you can find more hours to work on certain projects.
I was very pleased with the way you register students in AbiesWeb and the ease with which you can import Books and other material with the Rebeca database. I'm therefore quite disappointed about the whole thing: I found out tha tin my school I cannot make the move from Abies2 (a platform no longer supported) top AbiesWeb because in Castilla y León it hasn't been implemented yet. I wrote to the people responsible in our Comunidad and they say it's only possible if we have our own server in the building. I hope that CyL is working on a solution. I'm not sure what they are waiting for. The pilotting started somewhere in 2011, I believe.
All in all a
very interesting experience. I'm happy to have done it and I would like some
help to get AbiesWeb in my town. This is all from Avila
Here's my final Video clip. Again, it could be much better if I had some more time......
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