TED Community » Zoe French

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Teaching and all that encompasses it. Recently I have started to focused on digital technologies as I believe this is the future of education.

An idea worth spreading

Do parents need to become more involved in education? In my country there seems to be this attitude of the teachers being responsible for the entirety of a child's education. As a teacher I know that education isn't confined to a school and that a persons education should be supported and nurtured at home as well. However, are parents equipped to do so? Should we be teaching essay writing not only to students but parents as well?

People don't know that I'm good at

Providing innovative ways to incorporate technology into teaching.

Comments

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  A comment on Conversation: Can you share any innovative education techniques that you have used or know about?

  Mar 7 2011: I’m worried that education systems aren’t adapting to the new time and technologies fast enough. At the moment the sheer amount of digital education tools is overwhelming and these are growing at an exponential rate. I doubt professional development is keeping up with this nor are universities which are very entrenched. I subrsribe to a ridiculous amount of blogs and I also blog myself which exposes me to a wide range of innovative education ideas and share them myself.
  
  How am I using new media to engage students in learning?
  I focus on using free web based media technologies to help me teach papers and support children’s learning. I’ve outlined a few below:
  Fakewall – this allows you to create fake facebook pages, great for character analysis
  Wordle – create word clouds
  Scratch – online gaming software, why not let students create games and use them to tell a story?
  Glogster – interactive media collages
  Podcasting – there are a lot of websites that let you do this for free, no software required. I usually get students to create radio shows or do newscasts.
  Virtual Corkboards – Sites like Wallwisher or Spaaze allow students to share and learn collaboratively.
  
  There are links to these on my website: www.digitalenglishteachers.com