One thing I really believe in is that we must also look outside the EFL/ESL world for our teaching ideas. Well, there are lots of great ones out there for teaching foreign languages I think that we often underestimate our students ability to think and reason in a second language. That's why I am always on the look out for stuff that English speaking teachers use in their L1 classes. so, here is a link to www.teachit.co.uk which is full of great teaching ideas which I've used over the years for post FCE (b2 level) students. This particular link has a lot of ways to teach discursive, persuasive and argumentative writing. I find that the advice that most EFL books is sorely lacking and amounts to little more that copy this model essay.
A couple of days ago I mentioned an idea for using audio tours as the basis for an efl/esl lesson. The actual lesson plan was for more advanced students and perhaps would not be useful for many teaching situations. So here is another idea which can be used for post beginners/intermediate students and can be more easily organised in a classroom context.
Lesson plan
1 Explain what a audio tour is. Ideally, have one ready top play on your mp3 player/mobile/PC etc. Click here to see a list of Lonely Planet Travelcasts to get some ideas.
2 Students listen to a short, easy section and then ask them in groups to discuss how this could help a tourist or visitor to their country.
3 Now explain that they are going to do their own mini audio tour/podcast/travelcast. However, this is not going to be about historic sites or landmarks but about their own home.
4 To help them with this work on the kind of vocabulary needed to describe the outside of somebody's home. Elicit ideas for categories;. For example;
type: flat, two bedroomed semi, etc. size: small, huge, square metres, etc. location: in the centre, next to a park, on the corner, etc. other: old, modern, etc.
5 Students then write a short description (2 to 3 sentences) and check it with each other. the teacher quickly has a look to help or correct student work.
6 Now ask students about ways in which they can describe the inside of their home. What would we need to know?
rooms: kitchen, living room etc colours, light yellow, bright white, shape: square narrow, low, atmosphere: friendly, cosy etc.
7 Explain to students that they are going to give a tour of their home and record it. The easiest way to do this is to use a mobile phone. Most models now have the ability to record audio which can then be transferred to a PC (though this is not necessary).
8 To help students oragnise their thoughts get them to draw a floor plan of their home. It maybe necessay to draw one of your own on the board to make sure they get the right idea.
9 Students then outline the route the tour will take on the plan.
10 Help them with useful phrases such as;
On the left you can see.... straight ahead is the...... just opposite...... etc.
11 Students write out their descriptions, either in full or in note form. Remind them that they are going to talk for just a few minutes and that they do not need to describe everything in too much detail. However, do get them to add a few personal details such as;
"This is my study where I revise for my exams etc."
12 Students record their descriptions on their mobile phones. Encourage them to repeat the process until they are happy with their presentation.
13 The descriptions can be posted on a class/personal blog along with either pictures or video if the students wish . Once again the mobile phone is an ideal way of doing this.
As you can see this lesson allows students to revise many areas of vocabulary such as shapes, colours, rooms, housing vocabulary, adjectives describing personal feelings etc. In addition it allows them to personalise their learning experience and finally, the act of recording and listening is a wonderful way to improve speaking skills.
Put simply, a blog is a site on the internet that you can set up in about ten minutes which costs nothing. There are currently approximately 70 million blogs and thousands of new ones are created every day. They can be about an conceivable subject, anything from the state of modern Chinese politics to what I did at the party last night. The majority of people who have a blog are below 25 so it is very much something to appeal to young people like those we teach.
What I hope to do today is show you;
–some compelling reasons a blog can help your students learn English,
–how to set up a blog for yourself and your students,
–work on some teaching ideas that incorporate blogging in EFL.
WHY BLOG ?
Perhaps the most important reason why your students should know about blogging is that it gives them the chance to reach a wider audience than just you and their classmates. When I started my blog about 31 people read it in the first month. That figure is now 1500 plus. Likewise students now have the opportunity to reach out to a potential audience of millions.
Imagine if their piece on football teams in Thessaloniki could be read and commented on by say, somebody in Brazil, and of course, visa versa. That has got to work as a far greater incentive than simply getting a grade from you.
Another added bonus is that since the blog is going to be read by “real people” i.e. Not just you, the teacher, there is an added incentive not to make mistakes, to get things right so as not to appear stupid.
As blogs can literally be about anything students can write about any subject they like. Films, sport, parties, gossip can all be included on a student's blog. This also means that virtually every level of English can be catered for.
Finally, the blog offers a permanent record of our students work which can be reviewed by the student and seen by you at any time. Also it can form the basis of any future e-portfolio.
HOW TO SET UP A BLOG
Today we are going to set up our own blog as a group using Blogger. There are other sites that offer the same service and I've chosen this one simply because I'm most familiar with it. You could also look at
Don't worry about writing all this down as a transcript of this talk along with all the site addresses will be posted on my blog. I will give you the address at the end of the talk.
What I'd all like you to do is write a short description of yourself, a kind of professional autobiography in 50 words or less.
E.g. My name is Diana Jones and I work in X school of languages. I graduated y university in 1996 and have taught xyz levels etc.
5 CHOOSE ONE OF THE STUDENTS AND ASK THEM TO WRITE THEIR BIOGRAPHY ON THE BLOG.
6 Take the student's photo and show them how to post that on the blog.
7 Now add a photo of the Capsis hotel to the blog.
8 Post and view the blog.
REMIND PEOPLE THAT WITH THE USER NAME AND PASSWORD ANYONE CAN ADD WHATEVER THEY LIKE FROM NOW ON. PARTICIPATION IS NOT LIMITED TO THE DURATION OF THE SEMINAR.
THINGS STUDENTS CAN DO WITH A BLOG.
1 What I'd like to do now is show you examples of various exercise I have done with my students on their blogs.
My visit to ..... Film review
A description of my holidays
My friends
Round the world trip
2 Now all of these activities all very much text based with some photos added. That reflects the fact that most internet connections here are slow so we can't do things like add video or mp3s yet. However, all of that is set to change in the very near future.
When that time comes we can ask students to prepare videos using a digital camera or their mobile phone, put songs and discussions on their blogs, use more complicated web tools such as YouTube or Odeo.
Here are some ideas that I've been playing with and hope to use in the very near future in my classes.
Now what I'd like you to do is get into groups of three or four and think of a way you could use this stuff in one of your lessons. Remember that as well as text and photos many of the latest mobile phones take record video and audio.
school hobbies favourite places sportfamily grammar points vocabulary areas writing skills
If time permits get them to write up ideas on the blog.
I would like to thank Ewan McIntosh especially for letting me steal shamelessly from his presentation ideas. If you can, check out his podcasts at his website.
Like most EFL teachers I do private lessons to supplement my income and I think that like most teacher I initially saw this as just simply a way to get more money to pay the bills.
If you love teaching then the classroom is your canvas, your stage, the chance to create and perform in front of others. It is the place where you can really express yourself and help others. The perfect amalgam of self - interest and aultruism. I love it. Rare is the class that I don’t leave feeling better than when I went into it. Sometimes I even feel guilty that I get that much out of my time there.
On the other hand private lessons take you away from that limelight and put you into a far more intense form of learning. When I first started doing a lot of them I found them intensely difficult. What exactly do you do for one or two hours with, say a 13 - year old teenager whose lifestyle, interests and attitudes are so different to your own ? Sometimes the time passed so slowly I could have sworn that that I’d discovered a new variation on Einstein's theory of relatively. It seemed to stretch endlessly.
However as I did more and more private lessons and spent more and more time with my students I started to realise that there were hidden opportunities here that I did not have in the classroom . First and foremost, I had the opportunity to try out new teaching ideas and techniques which would have been ‘verbotten” in most of the schools in which I had taught. Films, music, internet at first, then later on blogs, podcasts and so on. All of the things I love doing in class were tried out first in my private lessons.
On a more subtle and I guess, more personal level, private lessons gave me entree into a whole new world. A world which I would only have been vaguely aware of. Chatting and getting to know my students allowed me to see things through a whole new set of eyes.
In a way it reminded of the hitch - hiking I had done when I was a student. I’d get a lift from people who’d tell me stuff they wouldn’t have told their nearest and dearest. It was a unique way to gain insight into other peoples’ lives.
The upshot of this was a deepened respect for the people I teach, whatever their age, and a better idea of what it means to be a student, to stuggle with new ideas and meanings and all the other stuff people have to deal with.It also made absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as the perfect approach or method (including my own pet favourites). That, as a teacher I have to be able to call upon a whole range of techniques and methodologies if I want to help student achieve their aims in ways that suit them best
Over the last few weeks I have had the chance to see the way technology is being received here in Greece in two very different areas. Just over two weeks ago I attended a conference on participatory journalism (blogging, citizen journalism etc) and its connection with more traditional media (click here) and currently I'm following an interesting SEETA online course on applying new technologies in the classroom held by Gavin Dudeney.
At first there seems to be little in common with teaching and journalism yet the interesting thing was seeing how the internet is starting to make itself felt in Greece and how that growing influence is being fiercely fought against by the old guard and its young supporters.
In the case of teaching the internet is marginal in Greek education. Although schools have been linked up to it for some years the quality of the infrastructure is so poor in most cases that it is practically non-existent. In addition the use of internet and IT in general has yet to break out of its computer lab ghetto. Quarantined, lest it infect the serious business of learning from books.
Similarly, EFL/ESL (teaching of English as a Foreign/Second language) classrooms have, for the main part, struggled successfully against the menace of technology to a such an extent that we still use audio and VHS cassettes. They have resisted the siren call of such diabolical distractions such as the CD and DVD.
Even when such heresies have been permitted every effort has been made to neutralise the effects by treating the new innovations as little more than an electronic book or a simple 80's style arcade game.
Wikis, Moodles, blogs, Ning, podcasts, vlogs, Second Life, Skypecasts are virtually unknown here in educational circles. When they somehow get raised in conversation or discussion they are roundly denounced as mere distractions, or worse. The critics trot out a collection of well - worn cliches that have been polished to perfection by an endless stream of moral panics seen on TV or published in newspapers. You know the ones; the internet isolates people, we need teachers not machines in the classroom, the internet is too dangerous for young people etc.
Hidden behind the obvious technophobia lies, I think I deeper, more worrying cause. The rise of the internet and the ability to not just access information but add our own thoughts and ideas to a global debate has as a consequence the questioning of the authority of the teacher and school book as sole arbiters of what is right and wrong in the classroom. With a few minutes on Google we can double check any claim made.
Of course there are still many who claim that on the net anyone is free to write anything and so we never sure of how accurate our sources are. True, but even school books are not without this problem Indeed the latest high school ones published here in Greece included whoppers such as the Second World War ended in 1949(!) and that one of Greece's leading writers, Stratis Tsirkas published work at the age of three (pushy parents, I guess).
A healthy skepticism towards all sources, including officially sanctioned ones is, however,a deeply subversive idea and especially so in educational systems which reward conformity, and view knowledge as a never changing list of facts to be remembered but not questioned.
I saw exactly the same attitudes displayed at the Participatory Journalism: Blog and New Media conference held at the Aristotelion university here last month. The same ideas concerning validity of sources, the same fear that if you give people a chance to reply, they will, the same distrust of people in general. Underneath all the cliches the lurking terror that the professor's / journalist's role will be undermined and that their days of being able to monopolise debate are drawing to a close.
The interesting thing is that none of what they say matters. Like passengers on the Titanic arguing over who gets to dine at the captain's table they cannot stop what is about to happen. The changes brought on by the internet are already taking hold with those Greek teenagers who are going online now for the first time. They are the first generation of digital natives swimmingly effortlessly through a sea of data and information.
How long will the old guard be able to teach or report using the technology from the forties and ideas from the nineteenth century? In the end the next generation will exercise their power to simply tune them out.
Here is a TED Talk video by creativity expert, Ken Robinson which challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types.
The school year has more or less finished for me here in Thessaloniki. My students have taken their exams and the language school where i work has closed down till the summer courses begin in June. So, I suppose this is as good a time as any to look back at what the year like was for me in teaching terms. Think of it as a State of the Union address for EFL/ESL in Greece.
In many respects this year has been just like last one. Although I have learnt an enormous amount about using internet an computers in teaching my ability to translate these skills into practical classroom practices has been hampered by a number of problems which haven't disappeared since May 2006. Technophobia, lack of equipment and a widespread ignorance of computers and internet has meant that in school my attempts at introducing new computer based ideas into the classroom stalled.
It's very hard to teach using the internet if there are no PCs or indeed any kind of technology that wasn't invented in the 70's. Audio cassettes and the occasional VHS video are about the limits of what is acceptable. This meant that that I was reliant on students being able to have access to a PC and internet at home. Yet even using this as a means of teaching was frowned upon and it was made very clear to me that it was not approved of. It distracted from the more serious goal of getting students their certificates.
Once again the lack of control over what I teach in class meant that integrating more up - date methodologies was limited and this, of course included the use of "new" technology. Exam practice, endless discreet grammar exercises, long word lists were once again the order of the day.The fact that students do well in their exams is, I suspect, despite all this not because of it.
On the other hand the students I tutor privately benefitted from using technology in a more creative way. I used blogging, vlogging, DVDs, digital photography, video and social networking tools to allow them them to use their language skills in real life situations. I think that their blogs alone (see here and here) show how much fun they found this. So much so, that Some of them have been teaching friends how to blog.
As far as next year is concerned I think that I'm not going to use the internet in school. The obstacles are too many and the resistance to innovation too fierce. I work too hard and my commitments too many to waste my energies on battles I cannot win. This is such a pity as I really wanted to explore the possibilities that things such as the Horizon project offer school. However, without the backing of the administration this is not feasible.
I will continue using the internet with my private students as I do believe it has really made a difference in many situations, especially with learners who have become bored with more traditional teaching approaches. I have seen disaffected teenage boys who loathe learning English work their butts off to improve, simply because we started doing activities on the computer that were based on their own particular hobbies and interests, be they football, cars or Star Wars.
I thought I'd sit down and look at what I have managed to achieve over the year as far as the application of new ideas in the classroom. Probably best to start with blogging.
Someone once defined the blogosphere as 23 million people who can't spell "definitely". Bad spelling and satire aside, I still believe that blogging is a powerful teaching tool which can help our students achieve their goals.
My experience of blogging in the classroom
I have to admit that as far as class blogs are concerned the results have been mixed to say the least. While we started the year with lots of enthusiasm and a lot of student contributions, however, this died off drastically after Christmas and didn't really recover. So for the majority of my students at school blogging had little or no effect on their English language skills.
Possible explanations
1 Lack of access to PCs and/or the internet. With just one computer available at the school, access to blogs was virtually impossible. As a result teaching the basics of blogging such as using hyperlinks or adding photos was difficult and so when students ran into problems at home they gave up in most cases.
2 Blogger is not the most intuitive of programmes, it has a plenty of quirks and definitely needs practice and patience.
3 Teacher input. Whilst I have become an enthusiastic blogger I failed to show the same enthusiasm with my student's blogs, which meant that the students probably got the message that blogging was unimportant and therefore unnecessary. For a long time I kept on reminding students to do various exercises I had set them on their blog but time and time again there was little or no response. As a result I demanded less and less from my students as far as blogging was concerned.
4 Lack of integration of blogging in to the rest of the curriculum. I made the mistake of assuming that somehow once students learnt about blogging they would continue with little or no encouragement from me. This turned out not out be true. Blogging was seen as unconnected with the rest of the course which prepares students for the CambridgeFCE/CAE/CPE exams in May (we have an enormous amount of material to cover in the course which means extra stuff such as blogging is never our first priority).
In part, this is because blogging is very much my idea and not one implemented by the school in general.
I think that students felt that blogging was just a novelty, irrelevent to their goal which was an exam certificate. And to a certain extent they were right. As this was the first time I had tried to introduce the internet into classroom teaching I had overestimated its appeal to others.
As far as my private lessons are concerned the results were much more encouraging. Many of my students are producing wonderful work on their blogs and have embraced the technology. I have even had a couple of cases of my students teaching friends and siblings how to blog.
I put down this success to the fact that in my private lessons I create my own curriculum which is less reliant on course books and also I got to integrate blogging more effectively. Of course, as the lessons are one-on-one it is much easier to monitor progress and correct any problems as soon as they appear.
Lessons to be learned
1 Blogging, like any teaching technique, needs work. It is not a magic wand which will solve all your problems. It a major investment in both time and effort.
2 At least as far as class blogs are concerned, students need to be given a clear, achievable goal. This also needs to be monitored carefully.
3 We need to set aside time to teach the fundamentals of blogging, don't take it for it granted that your students have even basic computing skills.
4 Make time in lessons to help students what they want to write on the blog in class. Remind students that a blog needs pictures and links to make it more interesting.
5 Explain, explain and explain why blogging will help them pass exams, You'll need to do this throughout the whole year.
At long last, my lonely struggle as Greece’s premier - (read only) edublogger has paid off. Yep, I’ve been awarded Time magazine’s person of the year award. I know, it came as a shock to me as well, I didn’t even know I was even in the running.
Just kidding, It seems “you”, faithful blog reader have also been given the same honour, so let’s congratulate you on this unexpected recognition of your valiant efforts.
Actually, this has been my year as far as the internet is concerned. Even though I’ve been using the web on and off for nearly a decade, it has only been over the last year or so that I’ve really felt that it is a tool I can use actively, an area in which I can express myself and contribute.
Blogging is the most obvious expression of this new found confidence, however, I have also been posting things on YouTube, Flickr and Wiki. All in all, I feel that the claims I have heard repeated so many times over the last decades about the potential of computers has finally come true. Finally, science fiction is becoming everyday reality.
For me the most amazing thing about all this for me, personally is the fact that that blogs, videos and photos and wikispaces I’ve posted have had 30,000 visits during 2006. Not a large number for those who regularly get those kinds of visits in a week or a day, but for me it is a mind blowing number as I never in my wildest dreams thought that so many people would be interested in what I had to say or show.
This year I think I’ve learnt more than at any other time in the last ten years, not since I finished my masters in teaching have I been exposed to so many new ideas. As far as teaching is concerned I’ve seen an acceleration in my application of new ideas and approaches in the classroom.
I feel that this just the beginning and that in the next couple of years I’ll throw off the shackles of my old style teaching practice in order to really make the web 2.0 tools available really work to their best advantage. That means seeing the internet tools such as blogging, vlogging, podcasts, wiki and the like not merely as away of enriching course books but a way of completely changing our teaching approaches.
I haven’t got there yet as I’m still learning - it’s a pretty steep learning curve- but also because I’m waiting for Greece’s internet infrastructure to catch up with my ambitions. Broadband still remains a novelty and prices for simple dial - up connections high. Hopefully, that will change in the next couple of years and so I’ll be able to rely on students having access to fast connections at home. Who knows, the school may even buy some PCs so enabling me to show students in more detail how to use the internet more effectively.
As part of the SEETA (South East European Teacher's Association) moodle discussion on the uses of L1 in the EFL/ESL classroom, Penny Ur made a call for teaching ideas that allowed students to use their own language in the classroom but allowed them to learn English more effectively. At first this may seem like a contradiction in terms as the more students use English the better they become. However, to ask learners to totally abandon something as important as their mother tongue is neither practical nor desirable when teaching.
So here are some ideas to integrate both L1 and L2 in ways that encourage learning.
1 - Play Telephone. Give a short passage in English, either spoken or written to a student.They then translate it into their own language and then pass it on to the next student. This student then translates it into English and then passes onto the next person in line who translate it into their own language and so own and so forth until the message ends up back at the beginning with the teacher.
You could then discuss what happened to the message and why perhaps it changed in meaning.
Then ask them to translate a cartoon or comic from their own language into English. Check out Arkas as an example in Greek. If possible compare their examples with other official translations. Is it faithful to the original? Is it still funny? Can it be improved?
3 Watch a short part of a film on DVD without sound but with the subtitles in the students own language. The students then translate into English the dialogue, utterence by utterence. This could be down by students working on their own at first. Then they get into groups and compare their versions and agree on a common translation.
4 The students then watch the film (with or without English subtitles, depending on the level) and discuss why their versions are different. Is it a matter of right and wrong? Or are there other matters at issue such as the inability to translate between languages without losing some of the original meaning?
In this particular activity a badly translated movie is just as useful as a well translated one.
As far as teaching ideas are concerned there is nothing new under the sun. Blogging is just an updated version of the diary or class yearbook, podcasting, our generation’s version of amateur radio, and of course home video has been around for at least 30 years. However, the major breakthrough has been the vast increase in usability of such technologyy and an equally impressive decrease in cost. The result being that ideas that were developed only for the most privileged parts of the developed world’s educational systems can be used in a much broader context as the cost and ease of access to these tools has changed.
The $1000 dollar video camera has given way to the $60 dollar digital camera, the complexity of say, ham radio, which meant that free, long - distance communication was the preserve of a tiny, techno-savvy minority has been replaced by the demotic simplicity of the internet.
I think that the technology has matured enough to be used in every aspect of our classroom experience, it's not necessary to have a computer lab full of the latest PCs, one medicore desktop or even our own laptop can transform a boring book or lesson into a wonderful learning experience.
For the last three months Ive been doing private lessons with young learners, ten year olds with just one year of English. To tell you the truth, it's not something that I really wanted to do as teaching this age group requires a completely different approach and as I'm used to working with teens and adults I wasn't sure I could do it properly.However, my friends insisted and I felt that not to do so would mean letting them down.
Now, here is the strangest thing, I really love doing this. It's incredibly hard work and I have to work twice as hard as I usually do, but the pay off is the great deal of enthusiasm that my younger learners bring to the lessons. It's a real buzz. I'm lucky in that I have a course book that really is a joy to teach. The Chatterbox series embodies all the teaching ideas that I think are vital to language learning, irrespective of age; fun, engagement, use and action.
However, I thought I'd add my own hi-tech twist by using my digital camera in the lessons in order to record them doing the various songs and comic strips that the book has. I, then put them on my ibook and let them see them. If they are not happy with their performance then we do it all over again. It's great feedback
In contrast with older learners, my younger students love seeing and hearing themselves.
As the academic year is almost over I have been putting down my thoughts on what has and has not worked in terms of the new teaching ideas I have used over the last nine months. A few days ago I talked about blogging and the classroom (mixed results),now it is the turn of podcasting.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to create any podcasts as of yet. The limits of a slow dial-up connection have meant that it still remains just a promising idea. There is little use creating material if it is going to take hours to upload it. However, I am hopeful that over the next year broadband will drop in price and become more available.
On the other hand I have been able to download podcasts from the net and have used them widely in my lessons with a reasonable degree of success. I mainly use stuff taken from professional sources such as the BBC, CNNetc rather than amateur podcasts but when I have the chance to download at faster speeds I will branch out more to see what else is out there.
I have also used various audio books (see Librivox) which have really helped my private students with their listening skills. They are an interesting (less painful?) alternative to traditional readers.
How I have used podcasts in my teaching
I used podiobooks such as Earthcore, Ancestor and The Pocket and The Pendant as a alternative to traditional readers in order to both expose students to a wider range of language than the course books offer and improve listening comprehension. Usually, the students listen to chapter every week and write a summary of what happens.
2 Short CNN, BBC podasts were used in class as the basis of various listening exercises (see previous posts). They have the advantage of being topical since you can use the latest news.
3 I used movie extracts downloaded from American Rhetoric to help improve pronunciation, by asking students to imitate the actors as closely as possible and record themselves.
5 I created a class podcast library on DVD which I asked students to copy and circulate. This was especially appreciated by students preparing for the higher level exams over Easter as the DVD had a wealth of extra listening material they could use.
6 I have also talked about other possible uses of podcasts on the blog over the year but I haven't had the chance to put use them in class yet. for example localising Orson Welle's War of The Worlds broadcast. i.e. downloading the script and the radio show and then changing the setting and time so that it become a Greek drama (no pun intended). This could then be rerecorded using the students voices.
As I now realise I have only just begun to utilise the possibilities of podcasts and podcasting. still, every journey starts with one step.
Problems faced
1 Most of the problems have been technical ones. First and foremost, the problem of access to the internet and the speed of connection put off most students from downloading stuff at home.
2 Lack of computer skills is another problem that keeps on cropping up again and again. There are time when I'd like to find a Computer Studies teacher and demand they give back the money they have "earned" "teaching" their students.
3 Mp3 players are still a novelty. While it is possible tolisten to podcasts on your PC the idea of sitting in front of a destop listening to a programme for half an hour is not appealing, it is most more useful for students to download this stuff onto an mp3 player and have it with them while doing something else such as walking to school, laying in bed etc. However, mp3 players are dropping in price and more and more mobile phones have mp3 capability so the technology is becoming more widely used.
In keeping with the spirit of this time of year I’ve decided to compile my own top ten sites on the internet for 2007. They are in no particular order and represent no more than my own personal preference. They are all ones I’ve visited or used regularly over the last 12 months.
1 - YouTube. Whether it’s looking for an obscure music video or finding a forum to display your latest mini - epic then this is the place. For me the site has given my two great opportunities; as a teacher it allows me to show students a way to share their own videos and so gives them an incentive to get to grips with the often complicated technology involved. As a budding film maker (hey, stop giggling there at the back!) it has meant that I can try out ideas that I’ve had floating around for years and see what people think.
2 - Flickr - Since I got broadband my use of Flickr has really taken off. It has reawakened my love of photography that has lain dormant for nearly 20 years. I’m now starting to use the site in my teaching practice, both as a means of getting student reaction and a way for them to reach out to the outside world by sharing their photos. See here and here to see some examples.
3 -In Our Time - This BBC podcast, hosted by Melvyn Bragg has been a source of joy for me over the last year. Every week Bragg hosts a discussion on different topics, which range from the role Indian mathematics to the fall of Constantinople. Philosophy, science, art, history and politics are all discussed in way that neither excludes the non - expert nor patronises them.
4 -Ted Talks - I can’t remember where exactly I came across the link to this site, but I do remember the blog saying if you listen to two or three of these ( you can either see them as video or listen to them as a podcast) in a row then it will change the way you see the world. A big claim but one I feel is true. Every year TED holds a conference and ask people with new and innovative ideas to talk for just 20 minutes. The results are amazing. What to recommend first? Check out Bono’s acceptance speech (he won a Ted award in 2006) or Negroponte on the 100 dollar laptop. Do yourself a favour and set aside time to see two or three talks - you won’t regret it.
5 - Cool Cat Teacher’s Blog - Whenever I want to know what I would like to do in the future as far as the web and teaching goes then all I have to do is go to this wonderful blog full of inspiring and practical ideas. It shows what “ordinary” teachers can do if they have drive, enthusiasm and imagination. If anyone is pushing the envelope in education then it is Vicki Davis. I wonder if her students realise how lucky they are?
6 - Mabryonline.org. This school site, or to be more accurate collection of blogs cobbled together to look like a unified site is another inspiring story. Originally set up by the headmaster of the Georgia middle school it gets more than 1,5 million visits per month. It is a great example of how a few dedicated people using limited resources can produce a fabulous place for their students to express themselves. It has really opened my eyes to what I could do with blogs.
7 - Sitemeter - This addictive site is everything a narcassistic blogger could want for. Find out everything about people visiting your site from what screen resolution they’re using to how they found you on Google.
8 - Skype video - I still find this technology as amazing as if they’d brought out a tractor beam or matter transporter.Chatting with my family In England on their video service is an awesome experience, epecially when you consider that it costs nothing!!!!!!!!! Also try out Skypecasting as a way of getting in touch with other people across the globe.
9 - Dekita.org is a site dedicated to allowing student bloggers to get in touch with one another wherever they are in the world. I have just started to exploit the possibilities this offers with my students. Next year is going to see some really exciting possibilities as far as my own student bloggers are concerned as they start to get feedback on their class and individual blogs.
10 Technorati is to blogging what Google is to search engines and so has been one of my favourite destinations on the web. It’s a wonderful way to see into thousands of disparate lives, to flit across the face of the planet in a matter of minutes or truly discover what it is to be a different person for hours.
At long last the exam frenzy is over. The alphabet soup of FCE/CPE/CAE/ECCE and ECPE that we have every year has come to an end. My students have taken their exams all we can do is simply wait for the results over the summer. I was thinking about what to do over the next few months there are so many things I wanted to achieved over the winter but didn't have didn't have time. So here is my summer wish list. If I finish just one of them I'll be happy;
- Write a movie script. I know it's a crazy idea but going around the city photographing various weird and spooky places an idea came to mind which I'd love to develop.
- Learn how to Moodle. I'd love to develop a place where all my private students could come together and share ideas.
- Learn more about journalism. I've been writing stuff for NowPublic.com for a while and I'd like to do it better.
- Put on my own underground photography exhibition. I know I said I would a few months back but then I ran into all kinds of practical problems which meant I put the idea on the back burner.
- Write a Wikispace guide on how to use blogs to promote political causes and promote your particular cause. The idea came when somebody asked me for my help to let people know about a ecological disaster near Mount Olympus.
- Come up with some more weird and wonderful teaching ideas. It's been a while since I last posted stuff. Now that I have some time to think rather than act I hope to come up with some more interesting lesson plans.
I think that there is going to be a sea change in the way we teach in the next few years and I believe that this will depend on three factors: Cheap laptops, mobile phones and easy access to the internet via wifi.
If Negroponte's $100 dollar laptop comes a reality and wifi networks follow the same kind of growth patterns that mobile phone use has in say, Africa then we are about to see a revolution in the way every subject is taught. I think that this change will take place in foreign language teaching first as the subject is all about communication and so less burdened by a prescriptive curriculum.
The ability to freely download excellent materials combined with the opportunity to talk using voip and write to other all over the planet with web tools such as blogs or wikis will mean that everyone will be plugged into one global classroom. A wall - less teaching space in which the only limits are the imagination of the teacher and student.
Mobile phone features such as mp3, audio recording capability, digital and video cameras and the like will soon become standard features on even the cheapest models. As a result students will have the ability to create more than just text for the web. Once again the teaching and learning opportunities are endless ( see here for some ideas of my own). Podcasting, vlogs, blogs and wikis are just the beginning, once a billion extra internet users enter cyberspace, imagine what riches they will bring, what stories and ideas will flow through the net.
It's a sign that the holidays are gradually drawing to a close that I have started to have some more teaching ideas. After a three month hiatus from all things teacher orientated I am now starting to get in gear for the coming school year.
Anyway, one of the things I experimented with last year was digital story telling (see here and here) and it seemed to be something that my private students enjoyed (see here) since it allowed them to produce videos that could be put on their blogs. As well as getting them to practice their English it also gave them the chance to become comfortable with the technology (never a given).
Yesterday, I happened to come across a great post in Joe Dale's blog which links to a great site which has 50 different web 2.0 ways to tell a story. It includes ideas of how to tell a story, how to find tools to use and where to get pictures if you don't wish to use your own.
With the widespread adoption of mobile phones with camera and recording capabilities mean that students are now in the position to produce their own videos/photo stories with the one thing you can guarantee they'll have with them.
I think that sometimes we reinvent the wheel as EFL teachers. Here are some some sites from the big, bad world of education that can be very useful for us. www.teachit.co.uk
This site is aimed at UK students and covers an enormous range of subjects and levels. It is very good for language arts. I have used their stuff a lot for Proficiency and FCE essay writing. Apple has a site for educators which is a bit more multimedia orientated. Even if you don't use a Mac you can take their ideas and use Windows - compatible programmes instead.
The BBC has a series called On This Day that treats recent historic events as if they were breaking news. This gives some excellent raw material for several possible teaching ideas.For example this exercise focuses on tenses and in particular the changes needed when talking about recent events compared with those which are over and done with i.e. the differences between the use of present perfect and past tenses, I know, it sound very dry but the idea is to make those concepts more concrete to the students by using real examples.
You'll need to have;
1 Two photocopies (no more than one page each, one of which is from the BBC's On This Day and the other a more conventional historical account (Wiki would be my first port of call). The event should ideally, be something that the students are already aware of. In this lesson plan I'm going to use the fall of the junta in Greece in 1973.
2 A photocopy with details from a historical event that student know about.
Lesson Plan
1 Ask students what they know about the 17th November 1973 (which is a holiday for students in Greece). Students work in pairs and write down what they know. Tell them that if they don't something in English, you'll translate.
2 Elicit answers from the class.
3 Ask them what they know about the 25th November 1973. Odds on, they'll not know much. Explain to them that you will give them a handout which gives some information about the event.
4 Divide the class into two groups, give one group this page from the BBC and the other this extract from the Wiki page on the Greek junta (from The Ioannidis Regime to the end).
5 Tell the students that they should read it and it is their responsibility to figure out the vocabulary as a group.
6 Then they form pairs with one person from each group.
7 They compare the different versions on two levels;
a the information given b the tenses used
8 Now choose an event from history that your students are familiar with e.g. The Fall of Constantinople ( see here for the Wiki entry - The Siege and Final Assault of the City). Explain to the students that they have to imagine that they are journalists reporting from the city on the events mentioned in the photocopy. Make sure that they are clear on the use on tenses in this case.
9 This can either be done in the form of a BBC On This Day style report or you could record it as CNN live report on a digital camera/mobile phone and post it via itunes as a podcast or YouTube video on the class blog.
I thought I'd share this with you as I'm deeply impressed by the effort my student put into creating this poster and by the quality of the final result. In a way it represents everything we do in our lessons as I have come to the realisation that for many language learners the years following the intermediate stage are spent treading water, endlessly repeating lessons already learnt with less and less effect.
Instead of employing what their students already know teachers insist on treating them like automatons who must be spoon feed yet more grammar, vocabulary etc. The result is dissatisfaction, active rebellion and an enormous waste of creative energy which could be used more productively.
I have been moving away from this failed model to something which combines learning in its widest sense and the realisation that languages are such complex systems that simply using a rule based method of teaching is a recipe for disaster. If languages were just about learning a list of rules and words we'd have dumped our keyboards and have been chatting away to our PC years ago.
The poster you see is the latest in a series of projects I have set my student and have involved photography, videography, design and advanced writing skills. No mean feat for anyone, least of all a bright but easily distracted 14 year old. Instead of teaching English as English we have been using the language simply as a means of communicating in order to achieve other goals. The results have been fabulous as we have had the chance to engage our interests, passions and intellects so as to produce something special.
One of the reasons I decided to give up teaching in language schools was the absolute lack of faith in creativity, the assumption that that utilising anything other than our analytical skills was an utter waste of time. I watched class after class of students struggle with material which was insipid, narrow and ultimately ineffective before I finally realised that the whole thing didn't work for many, if not most of those I was teaching.
The poster was made using GIMP an open source version of Photoshop which can be downloaded from here. It can used on Windows, Mac and Linux.
No, its not time for us to chow down but rather use existing media and programs to make something new. This could mean using our own videos and photos along with stuff we find on the internet.
So what has this got to do with teaching English? Recently, I have been working with my students on different projects in which they use video as an extension of their writing assignmments. We work on traditional skills such as writing a discursive essay or story telling then use turn these formats into something more visual such as a mini - documentary.
In every such case I've tried to adhere to these rules.
1 - The project has to be connected with some more traditional language learning skill and/or be useful in getting them ready for external exams (e.g. essay writing, interview skills, debating etc).
2 - The technology has to be easy to learn and use.
3 - All programs have to either free and/or open source. Nobody is going to pay me hundreds of euros to buy software.
4 - Personalise the project in order to suit the students' interests and level of competence in English.
My most recent venture has involved using video taking off the internet from sites such as YouTube so that students have footage to use in their projects. This forms background to their narratives which are either recorded using a microphone or done straight - to - camera.
This doesn't require specialised equipment just access to a PC, a microphone and a video camera/webcam or cell phone. The software used was Real Player (which allows you to download videos off the net), Winff which converts .flv video files (that is the format used on sites such as Youtube) to AVI or WMV format (which can be edited). Finally, we used Windows Movie Maker which comes as standard with every copy of Windows.
Taken all togther this sound like an imposing list however the programs are easy to use and I think that an hour ir two is all you need to invest in getting the hang of them. It's time worth investing as the skills you pick up can used endlessly in lessons.
I would love to show you some of my student's work but they choose not to put their videos on the net. For more of my teaching ideas using video, internet etc. click here.
