New tools for the new school year

You know, teachers celebrate a New Year twice every year, in January and September, the 2nd this year in Latvia. And it pertains to think a little about how you are going to spend it.

My simple and straightforward aim is to use more technology in the classroom because I am sure my students will be waiting for something new and exciting, as most of them are used to working online.

There are loads of web tools that I am going to use, both for preparing my own resources and materials and for involving my students in using more technology in their daily studies.
Here are a few web tools that I would like to employ in my work.

I and my students are definitely going to use Google Drive, documents in particular, for essay sharing and feedback, and I will use voice comments as a very convenient way of giving my opinion. We are also going to try collaborating on a piece of written text or presentations in the Drive.

I would like to teach my students better collaboration skills and for that purpose I will try using Mural.ly which is a great tool for creating attractive non-linear presentations that can be made individually or collaboratively, in pairs or groups.

There is another great web tool which has aroused my interest - Living Junction. It is a tool for creating media rich online magazines which can easily be turned into presentations. We'll see what we can do with it!

For fun and for younger students I am going to use PosterMyWall which will be a perfect tool for creating different kinds of posters.

As a teacher, I will try out StudyShuffle which is a tool for creating interactive flashcards. I intend to use it for making studying vocabulary more exciting and productive, hopefully.

Finally (and I mean finally for this moment only), I have discovered a superb website Language is a Virus where there is a section of text manipulation games, a fantastic web page with lots and lots of writing games, such as Visual poetry, Text collage, Sentence builder, Word medley, Text weaver etc. Some of the games may be too hard for non-native speakers but they are worth a try!

Summer holidays and computers

Image by Spree2010

I have been trying to accustom my students to using online sites for creating their personal pages. They started with wikis a few years ago, went on to using class websites and ended up with writing their blogs.

As an example, you can take a look at the class website of my 15 year old students which was mainly used for posting tasks and (sometimes) asking for their responses. Students learned to write comments and read what other classmates had written. Very often an online task was accompanied by a follow-up at the next lesson to ensure they would read what the others had written.


My 17 year old students tried out blogging last summer which you can see here. I created a class blog and each of them had a page (some students did not feel like doing it, the others worked all summer, so I did not insist). They could post on their pages their summer reflections and pictures. For all of them it was the first time they published something on the web, and they unanimously declared it had been a wonderful experience, though not exactly child's play.  


On the last day of school I discussed with my students what they could do online during the long summer holidays (on rainy days, on being-sick days, on I-am-bored days) and, not without a bit of resistance, we made a deal - they create their own page of choice and I give them grades in autumn.

I made several suggestions about the websites and tools they could use, depending on what they felt comfortable with.

Beeclip is a website for creating a personal scrapbook. If you gather your summer impressions in pictures and don't feel like writing a lot, that's the right tool.
Update! Beeclip has now been updated to Biteslide. It is a beautiful site for creative projects and presentations, and students can work on them collaboratively.

Diary is a free, personal online journal which is available to anyone older than 13 (Terms of Use). Write entries and post images on your page, keep it private or show it to everyone.

Penmia is a free, secure online diary for capturing your impressions, reflections and thoughts. Penmia lets you upload pictures and attach links to your posts.

Notepub is a free online notepad which can be made public or kept private. It allows you to write posts, upload pictures and attach files. It is simple and easy to use which makes it great for students.

Orbs is an excellent option if you'd like to share editing and posting on your page with another person. It allows to create a webpage with 2 editors for free so it's a fantastic opportunity for two best friends!

September will (or won't) bear fruit and I'm keen to see how tech-minded my students are.
 

Put your story on the cube

When I learned about CubeCreator from the readwritethink website, I thought it might easily be used with students to make the tedious learning process more attractive.

Students can make three types of pre-designed cubes and the fourth possibility is to make their own cube.

For their first cube my students had to use the BioCube template to create the biography of a famous athlete. As you can see, they produced great cubes and enjoyed themselves in the process.

The next cube they are going to create will be MysteryCube. As for the mysteries - it's up to my students.

#ELTBITES Challenge

Richard Gresswell, the @inglishteacher, has invited the teachers to share their bite-size lesson activities. The activity should be done with minimal resources, just some paper and a pen. Great idea and useful at that!

Here is mine, adaptable to any age.

Spy Adam!

The aim of the activity – to practise describing someone’s daily activities.

1. Divide the students into 3 groups.  Try to put an equal number of students in each group.

Each student in the group has to describe Adam’s (pick whatever name you prefer) activities for a certain period of the day. Tell the first group the time – from 6am till midday, the second group – from midday till 6pm, the 3rd group – from 6pm till midnight. If you wish to include the night, stretch the period.

2. At the beginning of the lesson read an introductory paragraph about Adam. Give Adam’s background, mention some peculiar features, e.g. Adam is afraid of the dark, he is scared of bees, he hates hamsters, he plays the flute, he knows Swahili, etc. Students have to include this feature in their stories. Encourage them to make up funny situations and strange incidents.

3. Remix groups - pick one student from each group and put them together in new groups of three. Students read their stories to the other group members and they decide if they have got a realistic story.

4. At the end of the lesson, the teacher decides which story has been the most coherent or captivating.

Looking forward to new ideas from other teachers and Richard himself.

Short writing activities for exam classes

Writing is one of the most difficult parts of the English exam for non-native speakers. While they are coping with speaking and reading tasks quite easily, writing exam may cause much distress and anxiety to a number of students. Teachers can do a lot to help their students to prepare for the exam.

Here are a few suggestions how you can raise students' confidence by using short and effective writing activities.



1. Expand the sentence
Write a short sentence on the board and ask your students to expand it by adding adjectives, adverbs, intensifiers, modifiers, clauses and so on. Ask your students to build a pyramid of the sentences in their copybooks and after they have run out of ideas, ask them to read their final (longest) sentence and vote for the best one. This activity can also be done orally, then the sentence "travels" round the classroom until it is complete, i.e. no more words can be added.

Example: The boy ate a sandwich ✒ The hungry boy ate a big sandwich ✒ The hungry little boy ate a big ham sandwich ✒ The hungry little boy hurriedly ate a big ham and cheese sandwich ✒ In the kitchen, the hungry little boy hurriedly ate a big ham and cheese sandwich and asked for more, etc.

2. Write a chain story
Tell your students that they are going to write a ghost story (an adventure story, a crime story, a love story, a horror story etc). Write the first sentence of the story on a sheet of paper and pass it on to the nearest student who then writes the second sentence and passes the sheet on to the next classmate. Each student writes one sentence.
To involve more students simultaneously, put them ir groups and give the same starter sentence to each group. In the end read and compare the stories.

Starter sentences: It was a dark and stormy night... / Somewhere in the house a floorboard creaked... / The house looked abandoned and bleak but...

3. Write the opening sentence

Tell your students the topic of an essay for which they have to write the opening sentence. Give them 3-4 minutes and then ask them to read their sentences. Discuss which was the best and why. Be prepared to read your own sentence.

Example: Surveillance cameras are a threat to citizens' privacy.

Variants of the opening sentence: a) Today surveillance cameras are everywhere b) Today citizens are being watched, spoken to, and analyzed by CCTV cameras c) Surveillance cameras are used for prevention of disorder or crime, etc. 

4. Associations

Tell the students one word, eg. yellow, and ask them to write a quick sentence describing their accociations with the word or the first thought that comes to their mind when they imagine the word.

Example: I was standing in a huge field of sunflowers and listening to the hum of bees.

5. Picture description

Display a picture on the board and ask your students to write all the words that they can think of while looking at the picture. 

To give the task some structure, be specific - first ask them to write nouns (the easiest category), then adjectives, verbs, adverbs and finally ask them to make up a long sentence using the words they wrote down. As usual, listen to the sentences read out by the students and pick the best one.
If you have time, you may ask your students to write a longer description of the picture or invent a story based on the scene. A variant of the story: Describe what happened before the moment in the picture.

Sample photo:

The image was taken from my favourite website http://pixdaus.com/ where you can find fantastic pictures on any topic.


Here is a brilliant website for you and those students who would like to spend more time on developing their writing skills:
http://www.writingforward.com/

You may read my older post about developing writing with the help of journals.

  

Exploring the possibilities of Storybird

Finally I've got to making my first story on Storybird which I had been planning to do for a while. Easter break gave me this chance and I did not get disappointed. Working on the story got my creative juices flowing and though I realized I can hardly be an author who writes perfect stories in English, I managed to build my first tale. Here it is.

A night in the city on Storybird

What I like on Storybird is the amazing, fantastic and awesome artwork offered to the writers. The pictures are varied in colour, theme, characters, atmosphere, style etc. I went through tons of images and loved so many of them that my initial problem was to choose the most attractive ones for my first story.

But, as I was trying to decide on which pictures I would be going to use, I realized that it is not us who decide on the idea of the story but the pictures which lead us where they want, and we just have to follow them.

For a story you get an assortment of pictures and you can choose only from them, no possibility of adding images from another bunch or replacing them. It may be considered a drawback if you do not like any restrictions but such are the conditions on Storybird - take it or leave it.

If you are going to use Storybird with your students, they will probably be grateful that they are offered a ready-made set of pictures which certainly makes it easier to decide on what to use. You may start with a very short story, no longer than 2-3 pages to show the students the way it is done and get the knack of digital storytelling. I am sure they will take to it eventually and create original, witty and sparkling stories.

Meanwhile, I have composed another story, and while I am now waiting for it to be approved by the site administrators, I am asking myself - has Storybird got me enchanted?

April 27. Here is my second Storybird - The cat who flew to the moon.

Developing writing with monthly journals

image by gregoryhogan

Time to share one of my favourite writing practice tasks.

I have been using this type of tasks with my students for many years and it has always proved to be successful. Students have always given positive feedback and even those who usually don't feel like writing anything at all, eventually hand in their product and eagerly wait for the grade. They admit it is a challenging task but it might also be one of the reasons why they like it.

What is it? It is a monthly journal with a short task for each day of the month.

I put the daily tasks in the table which represents one calendar month, week by week, day by day. This particular task was created for December 2008 when the 1st day was Monday.

The students are asked to write a short paragraph, an opinion, a list of words, a definition etc - one entry per day.
They are encouraged to use dictionaries and encyclopedias, eg Wikipedia or any other. The tasks require browsing reference and looking for information. I allow the students to draw pictures or colour the pages if they want.

I create a grading scale depending on the total number of points I am going to give. Usually it is 3-5 points per entry. Each teacher can devise his/her own marking scale.

Here is the worksheet to download but you will no doubt create your own, if only because of the dates.
Though this task is more suitable for students whose English is a foreign language, I am sure a modified task can work well with other students too.
The teacher needs to adjust the difficulty of each (daily) task depending on the students' level.

More presentations on creative writing

Following my presentation on writing mini sagas, here are two more presentations giving quick tips for writing diamond poems or diamantes and limericks.

A diamante is a seven line poem, shaped like a diamond, hence the name. It is perfect for revising adjectives, participles or gerunds.
To learn more, see my presentation.

Creative writing: Diamond poems

More PowerPoint presentations from baiba svenca

Limericks are short poems of vague origin but the name most obviously has been borrowed from the Irish town of Limerick which is why limericks are often associated with Ireland.

This presentation gives examples and suggestions how to write a limerick.

All these forms of creative writing - mini sagas, diamond poems and limericks - are suitable for developing students' creativity, imagination and thinking skills. They work well with students of all ages.

Mini sagas

Recently I have noticed the literary term mini saga appearing here and there. As a relatively new type of creative writing (first mini sagas appeared in 1982), it has not been widely used, and I wonder why.

Mini sagas are easy to use in the classroom with students of all ages. The themes will differ but not the format which is exactly 50 words. Twitter messages are very long in comparison. Students may like this type of class/home work because it is short. On the other hand, in the beginning they won't know that it is rather difficult to create a meaningful and coherent text using only 50 words. Why not give it a go?

I made a PowerPoint presentation which explains the idea and gives some examples borrowed from the internet.
See if you may find it helpful in your teaching.