Podcasting

I found few podcasts very interesting and useful. One of them is http://englishconversations.org/which which has practical conversations for the language learners. I really like this podcasts and I think I am going to use it in my ESL class for the following reasons:
a) There are videos and audios for students to watch and listen to the dialogues and speeches on the variety of topics like people and places, countries, cultures etc. This is going to be helpful for my ESL students to not only learn English language but also will give better understanding of the cultures of other countries.

b) This site provides the written dialogues along with the audio transcripts which can help my ESL students to compare their understanding with the written dialogues and speeches.

c) It also gives a complete guide how to use this site, how to download the videos and audios.

d) It also has the English lesson plans for teachers to use in their classroom.

The other podcast I found useful are:

a. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/podcasting-elt

b. http://volkerh.public.iastate.edu/projects/podcasting/

c. http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a4.html

surveymonkey.com

In my view surveymonkey can be a very useful tool for the global cooperation projects created by the students.The students, teachers, and other professional who are involved in any kind of resarch project, do need to conduct surveys. Through surveymonkey we can not only get the templetes of the surveys but we can also collect responses through email, evalute and analyse the results. This can be a great help to prepare the reports for the projects on the global issues like education, health, technology, poverty, economics etc.

www.surveymonkey.com

Global Cooperation Program

I have explored The Global House and Taking IT Global as the global cooperative programs.

Both the sites aim to connect people through technology to collaborate and work on various projects to solve global issues of various natures. Both the websites involve teachers, students and community in meaningful projects where they can learn by exchanging information through technology to develop literacy, communication skills and to encourage teamwork, cooperative learning and multi cultural understanding. The Global House aims to promote 21st century education and invites people to work on the projects on the wide variety of topics. The most interesting part of this site is that it allows schools, teachers, students to collaborate with 90,000 members from 194 countries. Taking IT Global is also very useful site which provides people an opportunity to work on the areas of culture and identity, health and wellness, environment and urbanization, education and learning, peace, technology etc.

I think I can use these sites to encourage my students to collaborate with the other students of different countries, understand their views on the different global issues through discussion and then finally work with them on various projects to find the solutions of the problems faced by the whole world. To encourage them more I might work with them in these projects. In this way we will be crating better policy makers, teachers, economists, leaders etc. in future.

The Global Schoolhousehttp://www.globalschoolnet.org/index.html
TakingITglobalhttp://takingitglobal.org/