My First Day Back at School

I hit the sack early last night in anticipation of my first lessons today with 2 groups of delightful primary and secondary EFL teachers from around the world. I needed my beauty sleep in order to function ok!

How did I feel before I walked into class? Can you guess which is correct from the following answers?

Janet felt:

• absolutely terrified
• a bit anxious
• very eager to begin
• slightly apprehensive

A creature of Habit
I don't really like change much, but I have accepted that in this modern day and age, "shift happens" and so one has to adapt to new circumstances. My abiding fear which still can't be controlled completely, is that a lesson on the Internet lets me down in some way.

Well, today, due to my inexperience with the computer I was using, somehow parts of my introductory lesson did not show up on the screen just when I was proudly saying, "I'm now going to show you an example of an interactive poster, called a Glogster. Here it is".

Instead, a blank appeared ominously on the screen where my Glogster should have been. I hastily apologised and said I would investigate and show the students later. The same happened with my blixy.com activity. The reason could have been that I should have used Internet Explorer rather than Mozilla, or that I simply had to click something special to allow the "Adobe plug ins" necessary to see these particular tools.

Tomorrow I will ask for the help of the very helpful computer technician, so hopefully, I will be able to show the teachers both Glogster and Blixy.com. Maybe if you think too much about your worst fears, they sometimes happen? Anyway, in the past I would have been mortified and dreadfully embarrassed. Today, I just took it all in my stride and moved swiftly on to other activities on the computer, which were all there. The newspaper article in particular, I think was well received. We did the collaborative story building and this is the result in the Wordle below. Each student had a word and then had to create a sentence which fitted in with the story that was evolving off the top of their heads.

Can you work out what the story was about from the wordle below? This will be my warmer tomorrow morning. I will ask my students to reconstruct the story they made up today. The title is "A Collaborative Story".

Absolutely Amazing!
Tomorrow's lessons will focus on "absolutely" + adjectives, with lots of communicative practice, language of opinions/reactions to opinions and discussion. I will also try out 2 activities from Scott Thornbury's excellent F is for First Lessons post, which also includes comments with lots of very nice ideas. I can't wait!

Watch this very detailed guided tutorial by Russell Stannard on how to create a Glogster.