Let's Create a Badge in 5 Minutes!

Learning English as a foreign language is not an easy job. I always try to motivate my students intrinsically by providing them a variety of opportunities to use their English inside and outside classroom, but it is not the only type. I also motivate my students extrinsically by giving them extra marks, presents, or certificates. This is very great for the traditional learning environment. 

What about the online classes? 

In this semester, I'm working with my students on a blogging project and it doesn't work without an extrinsic encouragement. That's why I thought of creating some badges. I tried to find a way to embed a system that generates badges automatically for free, but in vain. After searching, I found an online website that allowed me to create badges, hearts, and ribbons as well.

Try ChatButton to Get a Chatbox for Free!

Retrieved Dec. 24, 2013

My students badly needed a way to get my instant help when blogging for the first time. I just wanted to put all things together in the class blog to make this experience easier and more interesting. I spent a lot of time trying some tools for live chatting, but unfortunately most of them need accounts. Of course, this is a kind of headache when it comes to signing up for many websites to do a certain task. Then, I found ChatButton. It is a free and easy-to-install chatbox for use anywhere. 

Hover over Words to Get the Meaning for Blogger and WordPress

Retrieved Dec. 20, 2013 from here

I'm working on a blogging project with my first-year high school students. During this experience, there are a lot of things that I have to learn. As a sharing fan, I decided to write a series of posts to document every skill I acquired and every tool I explored to accomplish the aims of this project and meet my students' needs. Among many things that my students need is a way to find the meaning of the new words that they encounter in the required tasks. I thought of some ways like linking the class blog to an online dictionary, and embedding a Bing or Google widget to translate the whole site, but they didn't work well with my students. 

Cool FREE Site 4 Creating Cool Logos

I'm working on a new blog for my students. I'd prefer to build it from scratch. That's why I search for some tools and codes to add more features and touches. I always choose free and  simple tools, so students can use them easily without any problems. Cool Text is one of these tools that helped me create a simple, but an impressive logo. It is a FREE graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need a logo without a lot of design work. 

Please follow these simple steps below to create your first logo: