On Monday I will have the pleasure of teaching face to face with 2 groups of students at the Lake School of English. A possible "getting to know you" introduction to myself will consist of this Wordle. Students (in pairs or small groups) will have 5 - 10 minutes to discuss what connection the words have to my life. They will get a point for each correct fact they guess about me! The students will then in turn create a wordle of their own. In small groups, they will show their wordles to each other and discuss the connections to their lives.
Addendum All due credit due to the amazing inspiration behind this simple activity comes from the fab "Powerpointing Me" lesson by Karenne Sylvester. Many thanks, K!!
It was my great pleasure yesterday to present at the first TESOL seminar of this new school year for Tesol Italy in L'Aquila, Abruzzo. This meeting was organised by Annamaria, the co-ordinator of the Tesol L'Aquila group, and it was lovely to meet her in person. She welcomed me and K (who was my personal chauffeur for the day) very warmly, and then helped me to set up the computer in the designated room, which was in the newly born Resource Centre for Teachers of Foreign Languages, hosted by Scuola Media "Dante Alighieri" of L'Aquila. This fabulous resource centre has been equipped by Tesol Italy with all kinds of materials available for the teachers of L'Aquila.
The session lasted approximately 2 hours, and there were over 20 teachers who were able to attend. My presentation was entitled "Effective Images for Powerful Activities". I showed a combination of slides I have used before, and a few additional new slides. I have embedded a Slideshare below.
Feedback and Analysis It was an absolutely amazing and very moving experience for me to be with teachers, who have been through so much. I was very happy to see all the participants joining in the activities with such a lot of enthusiasm. It was a very interactive presentation, and I liked the fact that I was able to move around everyone and see how they were getting on with the tasks I set. I think we all had some fun and the time literally flew past!
The participants did the following activities amongst others:
brainstorm adjectives beginning with "C" to describe qualities of an effective teacher
discuss the qualities of an efffective teacher
20 questions "guess the famous couple" (Romeo and Juliet)
retell the story of Romeo and Juliet in under 50 words in pairs / groups
retell the story around the class with each participant using only one word (this was fun!)
guess the story of how a couple met
create a poem/short paragraph from a picture prompt
read a poem out aloud with correct stress patterns
complete half a text to recreate a full text
guess a famous person (George Clooney) - relevance to Abruzzo being his latest film "The American"
briefly touch upon the implications of "teaching unplugged" via a picture prompt
Some Web 2.0 Tools I introduced and showed examples of the following tools (amongst others), which I had used to create special effects and or edit my own images:
The mind map below is one I have just created highlighting the lovely qualities of the teachers I met yesterday. Please press on the image to make it bigger. This has been saved as a .jpeg file.
Below is the same mind map, but it has been saved as a moving file, which is quite fun. This was embedded very easily straight from bubbl.us to my blog. Which one do you prefer?
Teaching Unplugged I discussed the fact that teaching "unplugged" is a topic which is very topical at the moment. To teach with a coursebook or not / to teach "Dogme" style lessons or not. I introduced this topic briefly by a tuxpi - edited image of myself teaching back in 1981 (!!) in the GDR. Of course, back in those long distant days, I did literally teach "unplugged". Eg I had no internet, no OHP, no modern gadgets. Just the plain old, but incredibly useful, blackboard you can see behind me. The excellent "Streamline Departures" was the coursebook I used with all my Beginner level groups of students for the whole year. That is why after 30 years I still know the book inside out. I have very fond memories of it indeed!
I also showed the following image to generate a short discussion topic on "guess what is Janet saying to her students in 1982?"
As an addendum to our brief discussion yesterday, I would like to add the following excellent blog posts, which are currently featuring the subject of "Teaching Unplugged" principles:
I was very touched when at the end of my presentation, Annamaria presented me with a beautiful book on the history of L'Aquila. I will treasure this book forever.
Many, many thanks Teachers of L'Aquila for your wonderful participation in my seminar. It was a huge pleasure to meet you all. Hope to see you at TESOL - Italy Rome National Convention next month!
Taking part in the 3rd Virtual Round Table Conference this weekend was an amazing experience and one which I thoroughly enjoyed. The array of guest presenters was fantastic and the choice of sessions was huge and varied. A very big thank you to all the organizers, Heike, Shelly and Berni. They did brilliantly! Below is a slideshare of my Phrasal Verbs presentation. Here is a link to the recorded sessions, which are currently being updated. Here is a link to a Google Docs with useful notes and further links to all the sessions. I have a lot of viewing to do over the next few days, as I wasn't able to view all of them. I hope you enjoy them as well.
You can see a recording of my talk, alongside Russell Stannard's excellent Web 20. Tools presentation, here. I have to add that most of my learning about new web tools has been entirely self taught from watching Russell's excellent step by step video tutorials. So it's a huge honour to be in the same recording as my virtual teacher!
I came across the word "entropy" recently and I had to look it up in the dictionary. Lo and behold, very shortly afterwards and by complete coincidence, entropy cropped up in a fascinating blog post by Terry Freedman, entitled "In Praise of Entropy".
I am thrilled to be presenting on Saturday 9th October at the 3rd Virtual Round Table Conference, together with many other presenters from around the world. I have created a short Animoto preview video of my phrasal verbs presentation. My Power Point is all ready, and contains some of the images on the Animoto video. I will be speaking from 9.30 am to 10 am (GMT). You can check the time zones on the Virtual Round Table list of speakers.
You can view the full, exciting programme of events below. It will be an action-packed 48 hours of fantastic talks, workshops and presentations, with a Pecha Kucha on Friday evening and on Saturday evening as well! It will be amazing!
On Monday I will have the pleasure of teaching face to face with 2 groups of students at the Lake School of English. A possible "getting to know you" introduction to myself will consist of this Wordle. Students (in pairs or small groups) will have 5 - 10 minutes to discuss what connection the words have to my life. They will get a point for each correct fact they guess about me! The students will then in turn create a wordle of their own. In small groups, they will show their wordles to each other and discuss the connections to their lives.
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