ELT Experiences - March Teacher Interview

I am delighted to announce that I am featured in the March Teacher Interview on Martin Sketchley's very informative blog ELT Experiences! It is a great honour to share this platform with his other ELT guests.

I have known Martin ever since he first started on his blogging path.  It has been a pleasure to follow his posts, and see how he has developed into a very successful and influential teacher and ELT blogger.  His posts always contain a lot of very useful and pertinent information regarding ELT methodology, and you can find many of his great lesson plans and viewpoints on his website. 

The questions provided a great opportunity to review my past,  present and future in my lifelong career in ELT.

Please do go over to the post called March Teacher Interview: Janet Bianchini

Whilst there you can also read the previous insightful interviews for 2013, which include:

January Teacher Interview: Adam Simpson

February Teacher Interview: Lusine Avetisyan
  
If you have time, please do look through the 2012 interviews as well - you will find out a lot more about some very prominent ELT Bloggers.

Many thanks, Martin for the interview :-)

Guest Blog Post on Ken Wilson's Blog!

I have had the huge honour recently to write a guest post for Ken Wilson's blog. I wrote about my experiences in the former German Democratic Republic, where I lived and taught for a year from 1981-82. It was a character building year for me and one which taught me a lot about what life was really like beyond the "Iron Curtain." Below you can see the opening lines from the blog post and the interesting connection that Ken and I share.

Please do hop across to Ken Wilson's blog in order to find out more about Living and working behind the Iron Curtain. Some clues are hidden in the Wordle below.

I can assure you that you will learn a few interesting facts about what life was like there 30 years ago!! You can see some of the many books I own connected to learning German in 1982, and some books on life in the GDR.

You can also find out what it is like to learn German in the modern era of 2012, written from Ken's unique perspective as a language student!

Guest Post by Karenne Joy Sylvester

3. The Best Edu-Bloggers Write Often

Whether you aim to write 200 word thought pieces or 2,500 word academic essays, as I mentioned in part 1 of this article, it takes time to blog.

Unless you're paid to blog and tweet on behalf of a company or you're currently in between jobs/ are an ex-teacher/ part-time trainer or superman, then it is unlikely that you will have time to blog daily.

When you're starting out, it can be incredibly daunting to discover that 800 word articles take 8 hours to write.

Add to that time the time you need to edit, to rewrite your posts because you've just got to get them perfect - there'll be other teachers/ students reading it after all - well, you might end up feeling like packing up shop after just three or four posts. Might as well stick to writing for teaching journals.

But here's the thing, you're honing a craft.

A very special, emerging craft.

You're developing a life skill and trust me, after you've been doing it for a while, those 800 words will begin to fall from your fingers in less than an hour. Over the months, once you've stuck with your blog, you'll find yourself organizing your thoughts way before you hit the page and you'll become more confident in the strength of your voice; more in touch with your style with its stable (or diverse) personalities and you'll lose the (ego)attachment to perfection:

you can always edit, it's yours, you know - it's online - it doesn't matter if that that i wasn't dotted or that t wasn't crossed, most people don't mind, and if they do...

keep focused,

keep in mind that blogging is a written conversation which occurs within a community and as in speech: we forgive, on the page: we forgive.

Many other niche areas of blogging have readers in the millions. To stay fresh for their readers they do need to post obsessively, on the hour, but our readers are mostly made up of other educators or students or our parenting communities - many of whom are regular and loyal readers and they simply do not have the time to listen to your thoughts, participate in your conversations at the same rate of output - to be honest, if you do this, apart from burning yourself out, you might end up finding some of your followers actually becoming a bit irritated with the feedburner's delivery of your posts into their in-boxes/Google readers, watching you fill their twitter stream every day.

However, if your goal is indeed to move on, beyond from blogging as a hobby or from using your page to make announcements of your upcoming training sessions, boast about recent achievements, awards or the place where you go to rant about life's injustices but instead you've decided that you would really like to become a lead blogger in your edu-niche or the sub-sub-sub niche of that, then you really must persuade your stubborn, lazy fingers to tap at that keyboard more than once a month.

You must arrive at the page as often as you can make the time to do so.

*click here to read full-sized + legend

Why?

Well...


a.

practice....

.......makes

perfect.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, refers to 10,000 hours as being the time required to become truly successful in anything that people set out to do and all those who made it there, started out with their first hour and then one hour after that, and another hour after that...

b.

Google is a hungry beast: it needs feeding with fresh content regularly or it'll dismiss your blog and all of its posts and in the end, send you packing, out to the outer realms of the nether-sphere.

c.

Your readers will get completely bored with you if you're constantly apologizing for, yet again, writing to say you have nothing to say. Schedule slots, regular chunks of time into your diary, fix an editorial calendar to the wall and take it seriously; convince yourself that those deadlines are as important as anything else in your life.

In fact, ask yourself:

• How can I make the time to provide content consistently?
• What commitments do I currently have that I can get rid of?
• What television programs do I really not need to watch?
• Can I wake up an hour earlier? (I did that for a year)
• Can I go to bed an hour later? (I do that still).

4. The best edu-bloggers understand that

Content is King

Content is everything and don't let anyone tell you different(ly).

Above everything else, what you have on your page and within your archives is what determines, what separates an amazing Edu-blog from other blogs. It isn't about what connections you have, privately or via social-media, it isn't the back-links you have or don't have, it isn't what you have done or haven't done in your life up to the point when you enter the 'sphere.

And seriously, I mean - how can I say this strongly enough - completely forget about stupid, illusory things like counting the number of hits you receive; do not count how many comments you get versus how many another blogger got.

Your own personal readers might not feel like commenting, are shy, don't feel like they have anything to add - some people don't like to be the first commenter or commenter number 15+, some people only comment on blogs written by VIPs (to get their attention) so ignore this.

In fact, never,
ever, ever, ever
compare yourself
to someone else
who you think
is getting more attention
than you are.

Abandon those thoughts.

Hits, number of visitors, they are not important and they take a really long time to build.

This is not why you entered the blogosphere. In today's long process, this journey towards the democratization of education, in this level playing field you have now entered or are considering entering, you lone blogger teacher: you are writing with not against your peers so even though competitiveness can be healthy, don't let it shape or cause you to abandon, your work.

To become a truly great edu-blogger, stay true to your purpose and passion: you are making a repository of articles, you are honing your skill, you are learning your craft. You are creating a body of work and this will astound you, once the years past and you look back and see your own professional growth.

If you remember this - keeping it as your priority - you will never become discouraged.

And all the other stuff follows, in its own time. Once the world has realized that, indeed, you have made with your own two hands something worthy of commenting, praising, reTweeting, conversing, sharing with friends and linking to from other blogs, then you will still be there, still with both feet planted on the ground and you'll be able to keep churning out the good stuff.

Any questions?



image credit
Google in the afternoon, after Gari Melchers by Mike Licht, Notions.com

This post is part of a new series: Thoughts on Edu-blogging. For part 3 of this particular article, please visit Berni Wall's blog (coming soon). For glossaries related to some of the jargon mentioned in this article, see Mike Harrison's blog and Sue Lyon Jones on words related to the word blog. Please view Nick Jaworski's blog for "The Dogma of Blogging".

(c) KarenneJoySylvester, 2010
Karenne is an ELT-edu-blogger, a ESP:IT teacher, EdTech teacher-trainer and materials writer, originally from Grenada in the Caribbean. She currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany and blogs at Kalinago English (Bab.la/Lexiophile's #2 Global Language Teaching Blogs) and BusinessEnglish~5mins.

Find her on Twitter as @kalinagoenglish.

I am very honoured to have Karenne do this amazing guest post on my blog. She is my inspirational mentor. I owe a lot to her generosity of spirit. Her continuing quest to help fellow edubloggers is awesome. My heartfelt thanks, dear Karenne.

Multi-Tasking:The Way to Keep Busy!

Picture above shows Multi Janets Tasking!

The past few days I have literally been making hay while the sun shines, getting up unfathomably early, in order to take the dogs for a walk, then hack away at the ever growing jungle at the back of our home, sorting out 3-4 compost piles, building my huge haystack in the middle of the land ready for a future blog post (I'm not joking!). In addition, I have had to constantly check up on the 5 incorrigible "Amigas" and sort out the never ending trail of devastation that they leave in their wake. Several cucumber plants trampled, tomato plants decimated, pepper plants pecked at and well, a lot of other misdemeanours. Anyway, apart from all these daily tasks, I have been as busy as a bee online!

As this blog serves as a personal diary for me as well as my personal development portfolio, I would like to share links to the following posts and say a big thank you to everybody that is mentioned.

A Journey in TEFL:Guest Post
My dear friend Eva Buyuksimkesyan from A Journey in TEFL, invited me to do a guest post on her blog a few days ago. I didn't hesitate in accepting. I wrote the post "The A - Z Files: The Secret to Organising your TEFL Life! in a very short time, because I felt inspired by the subject and I wanted to share a few of my secrets to keeping organised.

On this post I revealed that I have started a wikispaces A- Z folder where I keep all my bookmarks in alphabetical order of subject. It is a private and personal reference sheet for me but you are welcome to browse through it and check out the links if you wish. I won't be accepting contributors to this venture for the time being as it is purely intended for my own CPD and for ease of finding sources at the drop of a hat.

OUP ELT Global Blog:Guest Post
I have just written a guest post for OUP ELT Global blog called "Renew the Passion and Go with the Flow!". I enjoyed writing this post very much, as it made me think what useful tips I could share with teachers. Please do share your thoughts with other practical tips you have in the comments section on the blog post. That would be great!

Teaching Village:What you Can Learn from Barbara's PLN Quiz 2 (June 18th)
I was delighted to be one of the 4 winners of Barbara Hoskin Sakamoto's first PLN quiz What you can learn from my PLN -1 (June 13th), which I took last week. Barbara now has her 2nd quiz up and running on her Teaching Village blog and you can find it on What you can learn from my PLN Quiz - 2 (June 18th) . I am thrilled that one of the five posts selected for this week's quiz includes a post from me called Do It Your Way. Please do try out the quiz and you could win some lovely chocolate and goodies!! I'm looking forward to receiving mine in Oxford soon. Thank you very much Barbara for creating such an inspiring way for us teachers to learn more about each other and to share resources.

Teacher Reboot Camp:Future Guest Post
All in all, a very busy but rewarding few days. Why has there been such a flurry of guest posting activity? What has motivated me? What has urged me to get out of my Comfort Zone? There is a clue in Shelly Terrell's inspirational The 30 Goals Challenge Continues This Summer post on Teacher Reboot Camp. After I have checked up on my menagerie, done a bit more land work, I will be writing a post for Shelly, one of the most inspirational people you could ever hope to meet. I haven't met her, but I feel as if I know her. Watch Shelly's space!

Enlarge this document in a new window

Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide
I am putting the final touches to my next book review -Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide by Paul James Gadsdon published by Packt Publishing. Watch this space!

Teacher Reboot Camp:Guest Post

I have had the great pleasure of writing a guest post on Shelly Terrell's awesome "Teacher Reboot Camp" blog. I was delighted when I was invited by Shelly via Twitter a few weeks ago. I immediately knew what I wanted to do. I was in the middle of creating another Powerpoint presentation, one on Phrasal Verbs. I decided it would be a good theme to expand for a more in-depth post. I wrote my article directly onto Teacher Reboot Camp and did all the research whilst writing the draft there. I will confess now that it's all up and running fine, I was a bit afraid of accidentally deleting stuff, as I did in "Gone with the Wind". It's one thing to mess up one's own links, but to do so on someone else's blog, was absolutely unthinkable and not really an option to consider. I have asked Shelly's kind permission to present my guest post in full on my blog. The embeds and animations are now all in one easily accessible site for me to re-use and show to teachers and students in the future.

An Xtranormal Kind of Introduction

Teaching phrasal verbs is my favourite activity of all! Why is this so? Well, in my experience, I have found that students generally don’t like studying them because they find them “too difficult, miss!” I set out from elementary level to train my students not to be afraid of them, but to look forward to showing off their newly acquired knowledge of them. To stand out from the crowd. To use phrasals in a natural way. In the correct context. How do I do this? I will explain.

I encourage them to chill out during the lessons if I see they look a bit stressed out. I ask them to come up with ways of using new phrasals both in class and outside of class. I encourage them to ask each other this question as a natural starter “Have you come across this word? Do you know what it means?”, if for example, they don’t know the meaning of a word. Instead of asking me all the time, students are encouraged to ask each other first, always using this phrasal verb until it becomes instinctive for them and of course, second nature. On a Monday morning my first question is inevitably “What did you get up to over the weekend?” Students then ask each other in pairs and dialogue ensues following this prompt. Another question would be “Did you get through the weekend homework?” I make sure that these questions are all in context and provide opportunities for practice.

Slideshare

Below is an example of a Powerpoint presentation converted to Slideshare. I have created this in order to maximise opportunities for student discussion. This would either be used as an introduction to this set of verbs, or as a review and recycling activity. I have introduced 18 phrasal verbs with some follow-up activities at the end. I have experimented with whole pictures as background for added interest.

Fun With Phrasal Verbs

Bookr

Bookr by Pim Pam Pum is a nice tool for exploiting images to enhance your phrasal verbs lessons. You can easily create a “book” in minutes by selecting pictures, according to the theme you want to explore, and then simply dragging them into the pages of the book. You can write a short sentence on each page. The example below is one I created especially for this post to demonstrate how it can be used.

Dvolver

This is a great site for dialogue exploitation. The animations are easy to create with a set group of characters. There is a choice of background music which adds to the special effects. There is no sound for the characters.

Go!Animate

This is another cool site for creating animations. Go!Animate can be used by students to recycle phrasal verbs learned or indeed, any item of vocabulary that needs to be reviewed.

GoAnimate.com: Getting Down to Phrasals by Janet Bianchini

Create your own at GoAnimate.com.

The ZimmerTwins

I registered on the ZimmerTwins site for the purpose of researching for this post. I was surprised at how intuitive and easy it was to create my very first animation. I have a feeling that students will love this tool!

Have a look at Phrasals in the Jungle!

ToonDo

I love ToonDo because it’s easy to create cartoons for any topic you like. Students enjoy creating small dialogues or comic strips. Here’s one I created which has a phrasal verbs theme. The cartoons can be easily embedded into your class / student blogs or posted via email.

Create your own Toon!

PhotoPeach

The last on my list of favourite e-tools to make teaching and learning phrasal verbs fun is PhotoPeach. I was able to create a simple quiz using my own photos. You have to select a synonym out of the 3 options given for the verb in the picture. I hope you enjoy it!

Test your Phrasals! on PhotoPeach

Challenge

I hope I have inspired you to use some of these cool sites with your students. You can adapt them to suit whatever theme you are working with. Why don’t you try one of these out for your next class? I am sure your students would enjoy creating short animations and dialogues or short books or indeed quizzes to test each other on new vocabulary or structures they have learned with you.

Have you had experience with any of these tools? If so, I would love to hear from you to learn how you and your class got on with them!

I would like to thank Shelly for giving me this wonderful opportunity to write for her Cool Sites series. It’s a great honour for me to be here.

Mirror Posts Galore!

Beautiful Venetian Mirror image found on www.InvitingHome.com
It's been my great pleasure to be a guest blogger on the Bits'n'Bobs Blog, which has recently set up an excellent series called "Mirror Posts". I was the first guest to kick off this fascinating series on 12th March with the title "Through the Looking Glass 1". In it I "mirrored" Chris' blog posts by picking up on a word or title he had used in his previous posts. Victoria below is mentioned as a very elusive and indeed "Spooky" look-a-like cat to Chris' cat of the same name.

One of my all time favourite books is "Brave New World" and here is another "Mirror Post" reference which uses this title. Chris also wrote a post called "The Breach of Berlin's Wall" which was similar in theme to my post "1989 - The Berlin Wall". All these are coincidental items published at varying times over the past year or so.
You can read all the posts in the unique series here.

Alice in Wonderland Theme

Press here for Photo source acknowledgement

Anne Hodgson from "The Island Weekly" blog recently invited her readers to "come and play a game". This game consisted of a group collaborative story expanding the title "Alice in Wonderland". You can see how this fabulous and fun idea evolved by clicking here. Many bloggers from around the world immediately jumped to the challenge, including myself. If you missed out on the first game, then you can have more fun and more focused practice by clicking on this latest activity called "Altering Alice".

Sue Lyon-Jones from "Esolcourses.com" has written a brilliant spoof parody poem called Alice in Wonderland 2.0 - Twitterwocky". She has very cleverly used Web 2.0 terms within the rewritten poem. I recommend you have a look as it is an inspiring read!

A Magical Mystery Tour
Recently I have been busy trying to locate a birthday parcel from my best friend Marion sent to me from Dresden on 18th January. We finally had to go to Pescara to collect it on March 8th, almost 2 months later. The parcel had travelled over 2,000 kilometres and had gone back to Germany, before we tracked it down. The courier responsible for delivering the parcel sincerely believed that I lived in this thoroughly picturesque albeit abandoned, wreck of a "house" below.

You can read all about it via moto-abruzzo's post entitled "Return to Sender" or "How to make a parcel disappear". It's a cracking read! Eeerily atmospheric and original photo courtesy of KRB.

Teaching Village: "Stuff All EFL Teachers Should Know" series

I have recently had the great honour to write a guest post on Barbara Sakamoto's excellent and informative Teaching Village blog. Barbara has been running a very successful series called "Stuff All EFL Teachers Should Know". I was invited to write up a guest piece (via Twitter) and I immediately accepted without any hesitation. I sat down and thought about the title first and the rest came flowing. You can read my post "Do It Your Way" here.
Other recent guest posts have been written by Anita Kwiatkowski, Vicky Loras and Hadley Fergueson, to name but a few. I have enjoyed reading this series on Barbara's blog as well as another series called Stories From the Frontlines of EFL. Read through them yourself and be greatly inspired!

Future Guest Post
I have also written a guest post for the innovative and groundbreaking Bits'n'Bobs/Show and Tell blog. I believe my post will be published soon in March. Watch this space.

Forthcoming Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques Book Review


I have been invited to do a book review of "Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques" by Susan Smith Nash and William Rice, published by www.packtpub.com. I look forward to reading it and I plan to publish the review sometime in March.

R U Listenin?

I will also be reviewing "R U Listenin"? by Terry Bianchini. This book imparts a powerful message. I will reveal more in my book review, coming soon.

And Now There are Five!
Dearly departed Nikita has been replaced with 2 more of the same ilk. I hope they will last..... Kelly has taken to guarding them very closely, which I trust is a very good sign?