I teach Educational Technology-related courses.
Last month, I was invited by Barbara Sawhill to speak to her students at the
Oberlin College in Ohio. Barbara teaches Spanish as a foreign language and
she wanted her students to have contact with native speakers.
The students were interested in learning about the political situation in Venezuela,
and that was the topic of our conversations. They posted questions on their blogs and
I replied to them. We also had a synchronic session in Skype for more than 2 hours.
It was a very interesting meeting ;-)
This is Barbara's thank you letter to me:
Dafne:
Well, this is just an experiment to solve a problem we seem to be having to upload Word documents.
This is the Program of our "Herramientas de la Web 2.0 workshop "
Ok, the problem is solved thanks to Howard (Motime help). I sent him a message this morning, and this is his reply regarding the problem we had when uploading Word documents:
Let me explain how the system is supposed to work in order to separate out what may be a malfunction from what may be a misperception of how things are supposed to be.
The doc.gif that you see is a "placeholder" for the document and is there because the file system is used 95% for photos and videos, not necessarily Word docs, and a thumbnail of the image is of primary importance in those cases. When dealing with files of all types, we use the standard icons for the file extension to show their presence. The mouseover (hover) title is the title of the document itself. It may be viewed on your mediablog directly, or posted to your blog. In each case the document is always represented by its icon.
If you would rather not display the icon, the simplest way to do that requires some basic knowledge of HTML. Post the document as you have done, then go to the edit interface of your blog and choose "edit" for the post. The click on the "source" button in the editor.
You will see the HTML code that calls for the gif file in the "img" tag. You may eliminate that part of the code and replace it, for instance, with the typed name of the document. When you post this edited code, the text that you used will appear in the post as a link to the file in question.
Clicking on the graphic or the link will allow viewing of the document in the browser, opening of the document in Word or downloading the document to your computer depending on the OS, browser and style of mouse-click that you use.
Having said that, I'm not sure if I answered your question, because I am not sure if I understood your question correctly. But this should get us started!
Please let me know if you have further questions or if there is something that is simply not working for you.
I understood his explanation, so after posting the document to the blog, I went to the HTML code, deleted what had to be deleted, and I was able to make a link to the program of this course. It could have shown only the URL, but I personally prefer to have a hyperlinked word.
I will show you how to do this on Friday, in case you don't understand what I did,
Daf
Dear colleagues,
I need to share this with you. Teresa, a webhead colleage from Portugal (who will be our guest soon) has a blog for her students in 5th grade. They went to the zoo and wrote some descriptions of their trip. I posted a comment saying I would like to see photos of a giraffe. Well, one of her students, Gonzalo, took some pictures, and posted them on the blog, just for me.
This is the message Teresa sent me:
"Dear Dafninha,
These are the wonders of blogs 
hugs,
Daf
Well, here I am after our second class :-)
In this session, we had a special guest speaker, webhead
Rita Zeinstejer 
from Rosario, Argentina:
Rita's synchronic presentation, about blogs, took place in the Webheads Elluminate room at Learning Times.
As participants got to our computer lab, they started registering to Learning Times, and little by little they entered the v-class where Rita was already waiting for us.
With her usual friendliness, Rita shared with us her knowledge about blogs and with online presentations. Her multitasking skills were shown with her expertise in presenting, managing the PPT slides, the web tour, while, at the same time, answering the questions asked in the text chat.
Thanks a ton, Rita for accepting our invitation!!!
This is a very useful article about blogs that you might want to read, to complement Rita's presentation:
-Stanley, G.(2005). Blogging for ELT. Teaching English, 7 Mar. 2005.
"This article takes a look at blogging, which is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool. It gives an overview of blogging websites, suggests why you might want to use them, and gives some practical advice on setting up blogs for use with your own classes."
Daf
Hi everybody!
I have decided to create a new blog for this "Herramientas web 2.0" workshop, and I chose Motime because it seems a very friendly blog. So, here I am trying it out. I will try to report on our sessions, and I invite you to write your comments too :-)
I have to confess that I was very surprised with the number of colleagues who replied to the message I sent announcing the workshop. I said that the maximum number was 10, and I did not think that we would get to that number. My mistake ;-)
I am glad that everybody was able to register in Moodle, and even to complete your profiles. Way to go!!
Let's see what happens in our second session 
Btw, the avatar is a self-portrait I create using Groupboard back in 2002 ( I think).
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