A present for my new school year - Papershow

My school administration surprised me by giving me a present to be used in the classroom in the new school year. The present is a digital writing set consisting of a special interactive notebook and a Bluetooth digital pen - PAPERSHOW.

image from geek-speak.co.uk

Its version Papershow for Teachers developed for and by teachers can be viewed here. 

The idea of the tool is to enable the teacher write (anything) while walking around the classroom. The teacher's notes are displayed on the screen / whiteboard instantly. (You need a computer connected to a video projector, of course.)

image from thecoolgadgets.com

I have tried it and I like it for the simple reason that it is another way of making the lessons more interactive and technology-supported. The tool can definitely be used also by the students which will increase their interest and participation in the study process.
After I try the tool out in the classroom, I promise an update about how it works and what its benefits are.
   

Where to fish for back-to-school ideas

image by jchip8 from http://www.pixdaus.com

While I was thinking of writing about my favourite back-to-school activities, I realized that none of them are downright my creations, they have all been gathered over the years from different websites, jotted down at seminars, learned at conferences, heard form colleagues.
So what I ended up doing was I decided to post a digest of web links to different sites which offer useful tips and classroom materials for the first lessons of the new school year.

Scholastic is a fantastic website for all things teachers need. Here are a few pages with valuable advice and tips.
Top 5 Ways to Get to Know Your Students - great suggestions for introductions and getting acquainted with your new class.
8 Ways to Welcome Students - help your students feel comfortable in the new class.
Fabulous First-Day Ideas - suggestions for classroom activities on the first days of school.


Another great website for teachers is Education World. Check out these pages.
Fun Activities: Get the School Year Off To a Good Start - will help the teacher get the year off to a great start.
Icebreakers Volume 4: Activities for the First Day of School - teacher-tested ideas for getting to know your students.
Check out more icebreakers and other fabulous ideas in Back to School Archive.

Teaching Happily Ever After is a great blog about creative teaching which has a page on back-to-school activities suitable for little kids. You will get inspired by the pictures of classroom arrangement and decorations, and you can also read some useful tips.


Brainpop has a fantastic Back-to-school page with an interactive quiz, lesson plans, graphic organizers and a Brainpop animated movie kids will love.


A huge list of back to school activities has been published on the TeachersCorner. Be prepared to spend some time reading about "get to know you" and icebreaker ideas, first day lessons, and bulletin board ideas. Printable activities and worksheets included.

There are plenty of websites which offer printable worksheets and lesson activities. Here are just a few of them.

A terrific collection of 80 Back-to-School - First Lesson worksheets is published on BusyTeacher website. The worksheets are aimed at younger kids but you will find many activities suitable also for older students.
 
Freeology website has a great collection of printables including icebreakers, "get to know you" games, and beginning of the year activities.


Finally, check out this video for little kids which is the right choice for setting the cheerful and dynamic mood in the classroom.

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.

  

What to do with words that elude you

This may sound flimsy to a native speaker but there are words in English which do not stick around no matter how hard you try memorizing them.

Let me give you an example. Here are a couple of words which took years to settle down in my memory - procrastinate and serendipity.
Procrastinate has always sounded ominous and evil to me and for a long while my brain could not accept its simple and mundane meaning. I could not believe it is such an insipid word.

Serendipity is a word which up to now has not found a verbal equivalent in my native language. Well, even the English cannot define it properly, they need to use a sentence to reveal the essence of this cunning word. Serendipity, for me, is a whole paragraph, not a word.
There are words which sound plain ludicrous like pundit, and again I took pains to learn its meaning but I still find it funny, probably because it reminds a Latvian word pundurītis which means a dwarf, gnome.
Guru is not much better though.

Students encounter the same problems. Difficult words (gosh, most of them are difficult!) are a challenge to everyone and a perpetual cause of failed tests and bad marks.

Here is a method I used with my 16 year old students last year. They approved of it and we decided to use it next year again.
We picked the most difficult words that we came across at the lessons and placed them in certain spots around the classroom. Thus we placed according to on the green plant that grows in the front right corner of the classroom. We put the word diligent on the window-sill. We sat the word consequently on the OHP and every time I asked them the word (or they chose to use it) they would look up at the ceiling and remember it. Surprisingly, it was great fun and it helped too.
One guy was especially good at this game. He proved to me and his classmates that he could recall most of the complicated words correctly because he had placed them all around the room and he just had to take a look at the spot and the word would come to him.
This should work perfectly for visual learners but I am not so sure about the others.

How do you deal with difficult words?

Using advertisements to develop speaking skills

An easy way to hold students' attention and develop their speaking skills is the use of advertisements.

Hide the text or other objects which reveal the identity of the product advertised in the picture. Display the ad on the whiteboard / screen and ask your students to take a look at it. Give them a few minutes to get an overall impression and then start asking your questions to provoke a discussion.





What do you see in the picture? Where does the action take place?
Who are the people involved in the situation?
What exactly each of them is doing? Why?
What do you think is advertised in the picture?

You may ask the students to provide details seen in the picture to review the vocabulary. Elicit shelves, shoes, shoe boxes, chair (sofa?), laptop, red, blue, purple, orange, yellow, black, sit, stand, watch, try on, fit, choose, observe, interested, eager, bored, excited etc.

When you have run out of ideas, show the advertisement and let those who guessed the product cheer.

Here is another pair of pictures of an ad which I have loved for years and consider brilliant. See if anyone can guess the product. I bet the image will lead them astray!
(click to zoom)

        

Glogster takes the routine out of your lessons

Glogster is a multimedia tool which we all inevitably set about using - sooner or later. I did it later. I am glad Glogster came to my mind when I was trying to make up a CLIL lesson combining geography, history, music and English, namely Liverpool and the Beatles.

Glogster lets you put all the lesson components in one place - an interactive poster - which you display on the screen and show your students the lesson in a nutshell.

How to use this glog?

• Take your time watching the video about Liverpool with your students.
• Ask them to do the worksheet about the video, discuss their answers.
• See the pictures of Liverpool and tell your students what YOU liked about the city when you visited it.
• Read the piece of text about the Beatles craze and discuss it.
• Watch the Beatles video.
• Ask them what they know about the Beatles, give them some additional information. 
• At the end, ask your students to give feedback about the lesson and evaluate the digital poster you made for them.
• Ask for volunteers who could make a glog for the next topic.

Voilà!





Download the worksheet to use with the video about Liverpool.
Worksheet
                     

The evolution of a twitterer (aka tweeter or tweep)

1. You come across the word Twitter in some blogs you have started reading.
2. You hear that Twitter is a site where everyone publishes what they eat for breakfast or where they are sitting at the moment.
3. You decide - no, that's not for me.
4. You catch sight of the word Twitter again mentioned by the people you respect. You start wavering.
5. You go to the website and register.
6. You discover that you are totally at a loss about what to do next.
7. You read Help and calm down, now you know what to do.
8. You spend 3 hours on creating a fancy background for your Twitter page.
9. You are puzzled by the #s and @s and different abbreviations - a totally alien coded language - people are using and get determined to find out what everything means.
10. You learn that you can follow the people who you know from your professional field.
11. You start clicking frantically on Follow.
12. You discover that you are following 200 people while 10 are following you back. You get a little sour.
13. You rack your brains about what you could post.
14. You read the witty, facetious and loaded messages others are posting and realize that you with your English being the third language you've mastered cannot be eligible to the title of everybody's all-time-favourite tweeter.
15. You decide to focus on posting useful links from the sites and pages that you keep finding on the web.
16. The tactic works, people who share your professional interests start following you back.
17. You are overwhelmed with joy and gratitude.
18. You are thrilled to see your first mention or a retweet.
19. You learn that you can acknowledge your favourite tweeters with Follow Friday sign #FF. The first time you are hurt when you follow-friday an army of people and get 3 #FFs back.
20. You spend hours surfing the web to find more and more new pages to share on Twitter. The number of your tweets per day rockets.
21. You discover that retweeting the posts of very popular sites is pointless, everyone has already tweeted / seen them. You don't get any response.
22. You are hurt when you see that the same links you have posted are ignored but are retweeted if posted by popular, fave people.
23. You are hurt and stop retweeting blog posts from people who never ever say thanks to you for popularizing their blogs.
24. You go to the You follow list and unfollow the users who do not post anything of interest to you or who have come into your list by plain chance.
25. The next day you see that the number of your followers has decreased considerably. (Because of your unfollow? So you ask yourself - WHY were they following me?)
26. You have established a tiny group of people who actually TALK to you sometimes. You want to hug them every time they write something for you personally.
27. You have realized that Twitter is an endless stream of bits and pieces of useful information which you can use for your development - professional and personal, and you are content and happy that you are a twitterer.

     

On-screen timers for classroom use

Teachers often give their students classroom tasks, quizzes or tests with a time limit and in such cases online timers or stopwatches which you can display on the screen are indispensable. Here are some of them out of the surplus of available online countdown timers.


One of my favourite timers is a countdown timer here. You can show it full-screen, set any time you need and use Pause if you see that more time is needed. When the time is up, it rings like an old-fashioned alarm clock and the display starts blinking.
The site has a large variety of timers and you may try several before you know which you like best.




Another simple timer is here. You can choose the background colour of the screen, the size of the digits (which is this timer's best feature if you want to use it in a big room) and set the time limit. However, you cannot set your own time, you must use the pre-set time intervals. Not a big problem though, there is a choice of any number of minutes up to 1 hour.

 E.ggtimer can be found here and it shows minutes and seconds written in numbers and letters like this - 1 minute 20 seconds, not a clock face, which is boring if you ask me. On the other hand, if the students are busy doing their task, they will not pay much attention to the screen. The good thing is that the e.ggtimer gives a beep and shows time expired on the screen.

If you want to bring some fun into the lesson, you may choose a fancy alarm clock which does what it says - it wakes you up. It works like a true alarm clock - you set the real time and choose what sound you would like to hear - cockerel, classic clock, electronic, military trumpet or slayer guitar (impressive!), then forget about it and jump when it starts ringing.

                  
You can read about one more countdown timer which I have described before. Check it out here.

Easy classroom management tricks

While reflecting on my work during the school year that has just ended, I went through different classroom management methods I had been using in my lessons and found that some of the most efficient ones were the following:

• Secret student

The teacher writes all the names of the students on separate cards. At the beginning of a lesson the teacher picks out a card with a student's name but does not reveal it. The rule is that this student will be observed during the whole lesson and he will be given an evaluation of his work at the end of the lesson. The thrill of this method is that no one knows who has been picked and everyone tries to behave and do lesson work.

This works well with younger students because they are still naive enough not to guess the "victim" although with time they learn to read the teacher's mind and eyes.
While it is still a new game, it works perfectly. Just don't overdo with it!

• Sit down

At the beginning of a lesson all students are asked to stand up (which I am usually not very particular about) and the teacher asks a question, e.g. Who had a boiled egg for breakfast? The ones who did, sit down.
Questions should be asked until everyone is seated. The teacher has to be rather ingenious to come up with the right question if there is one student left standing not to embarrass him / her.
What surprised me at first was that the students did not cheat but apparently waited for the "right" question to be able to sit down.

Some of the questions I have used are Who rode a bike to school today? Who took the dog out this morning? Who is wearing something new / red / leather... today? Who watched (the name of the movie) yesterday? Who went to bed after midnight yesterday? etc.
The questions I ask depend on the students' age of course.
                 

The annual LATE conference

Dace Miska, the consultant of OUP in Latvia is giving her presentation in 2010

Summer is the time when teachers in many countries have their professional conferences. Latvia is no exception. August is the month when LATE (Latvian Association of Teachers of English) is organizing its annual conference. This year it will be the 19th event in LATE history. For its scale it cannot compete with the major conferences in Europe or other parts of the world but it is the central event in the professional development of English teachers here.

During the previous conferences such speakers as Adrian Underhill (Macmillan), Robert Dean (Pearson Longman), Martin Parrot (Cambridge), Peter Grundy (IATEFL) and many others have shared their knowledge and expertise in educational matters. The best and most experienced Latvian educators always complement the list of the renowned foreign speakers.

This is a unique possibility for the teachers to get updates on what is new in the teaching world, learn about the trends in education, hear about new approaches, methods and tools that can be applied in teaching, and of course meet each other and share their own experiences and get answers to bothering issues.

This year the conference is taking place on 25 - 26 August in Riga.

For more information visit LATE website. And - everyone is welcome!