That lovely bunch of smiley faces is my family. Four of the eight adults are or have been English Teachers. So usually when I hit a brick wall or need help on a topic I pull an E.T. and call home.
However, the internet has truely changed how I can react. There is help all over the place, though I still call my mother quite often. While most of my friends plan their upcoming weddings (real or imaginary) on pinterest I tend to find the some great teaching ideas and graphics on pinterest...and what an easy way to organize them!
For example I have a bunch of pictures/comics related to punctuation: http://pinterest.com/carisita/punctuation/ some of them I have found and some of them I have raided of other people's pinterest boards.
I also have board for each of the classes I teach so later I don't
need to remember what that article I used last year was, or where I
found that great comic that one time.
Anytime someone likes or Re-Pins one of my suggestions I get told. That is helpful since most people who like things that I like are probably collecting things that I can also use in my classes!
Do you use pinterest? Should I be raiding your board? Please let me know if there's anything about Pinterest you that I am missing!
Oh TOEFL TOEFL TOEFL. Well, this year I have taught my first TOEFL class ever. It went... well. The class was a TOEFL class and a writing class. Not as many students passed as we would have liked, so when I give the class again in the Summer it will just a be a TOEFL course.
I am in the process of re-writing the course (with supplementary materials to make a 3 hour daily TOEFL course slightly less boring)
I am trying to add some songs whenever possible Madonna's Love Profusion for when we review uncountable nouns (and more importantly the quantifiers that go with them) and mainly because I LOVE the music video "5 people 1 guitar" I used Somebody that I used to know for Subject / Verb agreement.
My final assignment for my Lengua Extranjera class was to make a cheat sheet for something we had covered. One student did a fantastic job! She made a relative clause sheet that reviewed the basics. I uploaded it to busyteacher (I love this site!).
Check it out, or leave a comment and I'll e-mail it to you if you have problems with the busyteacher site.
I took the lesson and changed it to be able to use a music video (we all know how I love music videos in class). I recently used "Earl had to die" in class to review Cause and Effect. A fellow teacher friends of mine who teaches the same level took the idea but used Lily Allen's smile. A video that I LOVE and am glad she reminded me of. So, this activity uses that:
First, students watch the video and we talk about getting revenge and such (which they like, as we seem to end up on this topic quite a lot).
NAME: CLASS TIME:
First, underline all of the participle phrases; then circle the noun they modify. Half of the sentences are grammatically inaccurate. Re-write them correctly below (include the number).
1. While remembering her ex-boyfriend, Lily gets depressed.
2. Leaning against a wall waiting for a man, the man approaches Lily and she gives him money.
3. The gang, having nodded in agreement, takes money from the man.
4. He was hit by them laying on the floor.
5. After telling her he was just jumped, Lily invites him to coffee.
6. As they are finishing their coffee men are destroying his apartment.
7. When going to the bathroom, laxatives were put in his coffee.
8. Needing to use the bathroom he ran to the toilet only to find it filled with his clothes.
9. DJing he discovered his discs were all ruined.
10. Lily smiles feeling very happy with her successful day.
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
Later students watched Daniel Poweter's Bad Day video and had to describe it using their own sentences. Some of them:
Closing his eyes he playes[sic] the piano.
Smiling she draws on the wall
Having a bad day he rolls out of bed.
Some of them used the lyrics and got pretty creative.
(Copy of the Lily Allen worksheet can be found here: http://busyteacher.org/8539-lily-allens-smile-and-participial-phrases.html )
I was recently introduced to this great site by Sara Davilawho isaCirriculum builder (and has been for the past ten years!) she also does teacher training. She lived in Korea from 2002- 2010 as well as having worked in America which means she is familiar with plans that can be adapted to many cultures (key for me!). The main area where her materials are posted is here:
http://saradavila.com/front/?page_id=740
They are also clearly labeled based on level, type of activity etc.
For example, we all know I am a big fan of TBL, well she has quite a few options that have been tagged as TBL
Since I am heading to teaching college and high school I figured I'd look at some of her advanced activities.
Today started off with Ronnie Burt who works with edu-blogs now. Think of edu-blogs as a sort of teachertube of blogger (although I am sure they have a better marketing tagline). Most schools allow edu-blogs through their security filters when other blogs (like mine: http://www.blogger.com/) would get stuck. Which makes sense, I remember when youtube was blocked in Korea for a week. My lessons were dependent on those videos, I had to run home download a program that would save youtube videos to disk. Transfer those to my mp3 player and then plug that into the computer to make it work...basically it would have been much easier if I had been using teachertube and not had that stressful ordeal.
We went over embedding (which I manged to work out when I used my personal blog) and review some of the other fun web 2.0 things the Internet has to offer
Glogster Which I've checked out before, but at the moment is a bit too graphic for me. Perhaps I'll play with this later tonight and post something tomorrow. (update: Dec 10 2011 I still am not a big fan of Glogster for me, but find it a great took to give to students)
Vokis are essentially speaking avatars. I had never really thought of implementing them into ESL before, but I think I am beginning to stir up some options. Will probably mess with this tonight as well.
watchknow Is sort of like a moderated twitter for videos. Moderators essentially keep a running post of videos they think you should watch. But the catalog is AMAZING
So not only could I perhaps find a video I have my students watch as homework about a difficult grammar concept(or use it to brush up myself before the lesson!). I could give them actual authentic content for History or Science in English! Or have them watch a video on hobbies and have them try to replicate it with their own hobby using photostory 3! Really excited about this as I see it as something that can save me a lot of time I usually spend looking through youtube videos.
Wordle isn't a new concept to me (people use it in couchsurfing a lot) but for those unfamiliar: You basically go to the website and either copy and paste a bunch of words, or a link to a web page which has words (in this case I used my blog) and it makes a "cloud" of words. The more a word is used the bigger it is (so my blog is pretty student centered I suppose). It is nice to make one for students before a lesson and use it as a quick attention getter/prediction task.
you can mess with how things show up if you like (colors, font, orientation etc).
So the one above is the same as the one below (as far as content) it just has different preferences.
A few more things and then I'll stop rambling :)
There's "Wall Wisher" where you can create a wall where people can leave sticky notes. I am not sure I really see the applied differences between this and a blog, but I suppose it would appeal more to visual and kinesthetic learners. For now I am envisioning something like this:
There's a theme (in this case regret) and students would need to post relevant videos, songs or stories. In case they need something to start I posted a song in L1 that they could refer to in the target language.
Vimeo is essentially a youtube (video sharing service) but it allows longer videos and seems to have stricter rules...I am not sure would have to look into it.
LAST THING!
So many of these websites you just want to try out before you sign up, right (like a test drive BEFORE you buy the car)?
I was reminded of an older website I used to use http://www.bugmenot.com/ It is used for free accounts online. Essentially you go to bugmenot and put the website you want to access. If someone has already gone through the hassle of creating a "shared" account you can just take that shared password and username to try the site out. NOTE: This should NOT be used if you plan on using ANYTHING private. As you are using a username and password accessible by anyone ANYONE can access what you do within your account. But I usually use it BEFORE I make an account for a new free service (like Prezi) to see if it is even anything that I would be interested in joining.
The first presentation started with Glen talking about his job. He's been a distance teacher for about 6 years. His students live in small villages where it is too inconvenient or expensive to get teachers, so he teaches from the computer.
He went over some ways that he uses eluminate with his students to keep it interactive and not just presentation.
Then we went through the basics of photoStory 3. It had gotten some great results from his students who felt that it was "more fun than writing an essay" (even though it still uses the same basic skills). So using some old photographs from Korea I put together a basic video.
Not fantastic, but I get how it can work with students. My one fear is that they may spend more time on effects than the language content. Sometimes we see this happen with pen and paper assignments. The artists make the fantastic elaborate posters with very little language content and the artistically challenged (me) do stick figures and gigantic paragraphs (theirs always looked so much better!).
Well I figured out what re-mix semiotic practices means! Thorne's presentation was really cool! You can still check out the recording and I HIGHLY recommend it. I'll actually try to make another separate post on it because it hits on some of the things I studied in Communications back in college so I'd like to be able to link to some Communication theories (which means it shall take a bit longer than the other summary/reflection posts).
