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!
   

Spice up your lessons with educational jigsaw puzzles

There are many good ways how to enliven your lessons with attractive elements, for instance, using jigsaw puzzles. These puzzles can be created and played online. Not only younger students but also older ones might enjoy a fun activity with serious learning content which is supplied by the teacher.


The Jigsaw Planet website lets you create a puzzle using an image of your choice and save it for playing it online privately or publicly. The puzzles are embeddable as you can see in the example below. You will need Java to make it work.

Teaching about social media

I used a picture with different logos of social sites to discuss the topic of social media at the lesson. When the students have done the puzzle, you can ask them which sites they recognize, which sites they are using and which ones are completely new to them. Then go on talking about the less known sites and social media phenomenon in general.

You can embed the whole puzzle on your website or your Moodle site but I am not doing it here not to slow down the traffic.
Click on the puzzle or the title to go to the website and play it online.


Social Media






As the next step ask your students to do the second puzzle where I have used the definition of social media turned into an image which is used to create a puzzle. This puzzle is more difficult because the students have to read and try to put the words and sentences together.


Definition of Social Media



When the students have done the second puzzle, you can read and discuss the definition of social media and proceed with your teaching or homework as you find necessary.

You can successfully apply the flipped classroom principle to this activity asking your students to do the puzzles at home and come to the lesson ready for discussions and reviews.
 

Flowers from my students who have just finished school

I just came back from the graduation ceremony which is a traditional event in schools here. The official part consists of the headmaster's, mayor's, teachers', parents', benefactors' speeches and handing out of the documents, awards and gifts to the school leaving students. They in return give flowers to the teachers.

This is one of the not-so-frequent touching and heart-warming moments. I captured the beauty of my flowers in pictures. The collage is made with Photovisi.

Off to the dance party now - the second part of the event!
 

State exams - where have we teachers failed our students?

Students in Latvia are taking the school leaving exams in June and I have been marking the student speaking exam recorded on CDs (which is the procedure for the centralized state exams here). I have a stack of CDs with recorded answers of anonymous students from different parts of Latvia whose speaking skill I have to evaluate.


Task 1 is Interview - the student has to answer the questions on a certain topic read by the teacher.
Task 2 is Role Play - the student has to interact with the interviewer following the script on the exam paper.
Task 3 is Monologue - the student has to give a summary of an extract from an article and his own opinion about the theme.

It might be a coincidence that the students whose exams I have been marking come from the "weak" schools where the majority of learners have poor knowledge and learning skills in general. However, considering the hundreds of answers I have heard, the conclusion is depressing.

Student answers to the questions conspicuously bring out our failure to give them understanding and knowledge of the issues that are part of our daily life and the society we live in. The questions where many students lack the scarcest knowledge all center round technologies, social networks, online activities.

We teach what we know ourselves. We cannot teach what we do not know.

Can teachers discuss social networking with their students if they have not made the acquaintance of the virtual world and learned about the trends in online environment? Our students are there, they just do not know everything has a name and everything has a purpose.
Technologies can be explained, taught and used. If you tell your students that what they do online every day for hours is social networking, they will no doubt understand it and probably remember because they learn easily what they like.


There is a great website Social Networking dealing with the topics a teacher should know about social networks, addiction to online sites, cyber-bullying etc. It gives a down-to-earth explanation about what is social networking. Teachers can turn the text into a reading or discussion task and they won't need more than a couple of lessons before their students have learned the basics of the subject.
More sites have been given in the handout.

I have made a table with a few exam questions and typical student answers which fall short of understanding of the topic. There are some suggestions for the teachers about how to give their students some knowledge about social networking and online activities. 

Download the document here.

Help your students with pronunciation

Very often students who are learning English as a foreign language need help with pronunciation. Those who have a perfect memory and natural language acquisition gift, may remember the sounding of a word from the teacher or a recording.
However, those who have to hear the pronunciation many times before they remember it, need additional help.





The best assistant in helping students with pronunciation of the words is the website howjsay which is an indispensable resource for checking the sounding of English. There are currently 145,328 entries in the dictionary. It also offers apps for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Another useful site is Forvo which contains 969,698 words and 1,017,619 pronunciations in 268 languages. At present it has 77,234 recorded English words. Many words are recorded by more than one speaker.

A fantastic help for checking the pronunciation of names is the website HearNames which has a long list of  names of different nationalities and regions. I tested it with the Irish name Siobhan which I find incredibly tricky, and of course the site had it! I had to hear it six times to make sure I wouldn't forget it.


Teachers can make use of the marvellous phonemic chart published on the Teaching English website. The students can hear sounds by clicking on the symbols. Perfect at the beginners stage!

If you need to transcribe a short passage, here is the site which will do it for you PhoTransEdit. You only have to type or paste the text in the box and click Transcribe. You can even choose between the British or American variant of the pronunciation.
I am quoting the website: "Text2Phonetics is a PhoTransEdit Online application that transcribes small English texts into broad phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)."


Finally, I'd like to mention two great sites which offer IPA phonetic symbols for writing the pronunciation online - Type IPA phonetic symbols and Script Typewriter 1.3. Use them when you need to show the pronunciation of a word on the screen or teach IPA symbols.

Less known blogging and website platforms

Even if you have your own blog or website, you may want to try out something new and swap WordPress, Blogger, TypePad or Live Journal for some newer platform.
Less known (used in the title of this post) is relative of course.

Here are some sites which offer services for bloggers or website creators. 
I have chosen only those sites which are free or offer a choice of a free basic account. They are listed in no particular order.

I'd like to recommend Weebly in the first place because it has a special version for education which lets you create a class website or blog with your student accounts. They can publish their projects, e-portfolios, homework on the site.
Editing of the page is very easy - you just drag and drop everything you need including photos, maps, videos, texts etc. I love the promise that there are no advertisements on your site.

Lifeyo is another blog building platform with an intuitive interface which can be used with students. I quote Richard Byrne from  Free Technology for Teachers: "LIFEYO's ease of use makes it easy to get students creating websites."
What is truly great is the absence of advertisements on your blog. It is also suitable for creating and publishing your portfolio.

Jimdo is a site which offers a private account for free with the storage of 500 MB.
I quote ReadWriteWeb: "One of the easiest tools we've seen for creating truly multimedia sites!"
There is a video tutorial of how to make a website in minutes. One of the best features of Jimdo is the wide choice of languages to choose from. This makes it possible to use a Jimdo-hosted website for the speakers of other languages, not only English.


The site which looks really cool is Jux which combines Open Source and Creative Commons principles. It requires no knowledge of HTML or other coding but it lets you play with themes, templates, widgets etc.
I quote the website: "Everything on the site is a widget than can be dragged, dropped, moved and reshaped willy-nilly. The basic site widgets include a text box, an image, a page title, a site title, etc."

SnapPages is somewhat similar to the Jux website. You build your site by dragging and dropping page elements and widgets. The basic account is free and offers a storage of 1 GB which is more than enough for a personal website.

A fast and free website building is promised by Webnode. It says "Even your grandma can do it!" which may encourage beginners to try this platform out.
There are hundreds of really beautiful templates to choose from. You can create photo galleries, polls, forums and add plenty of gadgets and widgets.

Sub Hub Lite is another web platform for creating your personal blog or website. It promises an easy and fast way of setting up a fully customizable website.

hPage is a totally free website building platform. It has a long list of features and many extras. You can choose between English or German to use on your site.

Creating personalized seals (and having fun)

The current school year is approaching its end and in many schools teachers are struggling to keep students' minds on classroom work. Why not have some fun instead of cramming their heads with grammar rules?

I have been using the seal generator for some time and it has always brought joy because it is a creative and rewarding activity.



The seal maker is a web tool on the http://www.says-it.com website which offers different tools for making funny images, signs, graphics and badges.


My favourite is the seal maker which lets you generate a personal seal which you can use on your documents, projects, homework, letters, webpages etc. Students love creating their own seals and proudly present them to their classmates.

Look at the seals made by three 15-year-old students. If you can get into the computer lab, you can have a whole lesson of fun letting your students make their personalized seals and voting for the best one at the end of the lesson.  You can also ask them to make a seal at home and send it to you or put it on their homework.

When you begin, you will need to explain some basic things about formatting options but usually students cope with such tasks very easily. Let them experiment, let them find the best design and colours and when they have finished, ask them to save their seal (it will be saved as a gif image). After that use it as you wish.

A lot of fun for everyone!

For more fun activities visit another of my favourite websites - the RedKid.net website and make tons of humorous and entertaining signs and images, e.g.:

Teaching food vocabulary with artist drawn recipes: They Draw And Cook

Since I first came across the website They draw and cook, I have often visited it and always found new and awesome picture recipes drawn by different artists from all parts of the world - India, USA, Brazil, Russia, Spain, France, Mexico and many more.

Not only are the recipes beautifully presented and easy to follow (in case you are ready to cook some new dish) but they can also be effectively used in teaching food vocabulary serving as attractive flashcards.

Take, for instance, the recipe Vegetable Stock by Nate Padavick.

One of the comments reads as follows:
Great color palette, nice 'hand-stamped' texture, appealing shapes, and a reminder to compost (nice touch).

The recipe contains the names of vegetables - onion, mushroom, carrot, turnip, tomato, squash, celery, asparagus, leek, parsley etc.
There are a few cooking verbs - chop, boil, simmer, strain etc.

Students learn the vocabulary in a fun way and they can also try out the recipe at home which is a great added value to the lesson. In addition, they can get inspired to draw their own recipe and share it with their classmates!

The site hosts a fantastic variety of recipes and you can search for a specific food or dish name. I can only imagine what a treasure this site must be to the teachers of cooking classes!

More brilliant recipes (click to zoom)

If you love great design and marvellous illustration, you will love the site and use it to your advantage as a teacher.

Homework sent in as an audio file

I have a group of very bright students who love trying out new things. This time it was homework recorded online and sent in for me to evaluate.

For recording the speech, I chose the simplest tool on the web - Vocaroo. It is seldom mentioned when different audio recording programs are discussed but it is absolutely perfect for beginners or young students. There are no buttons, no frills, no nothing, just a box which you click to record. And yes, the only thing you need is a mike. The tool does everything itself and at the end you just send the file to an e-mail address. (In this case, students sent their files to me.) The file can also be downloaded and it can be embedded which I am going to do here. Awesome!

For this homework my 16-year-old students had to write and record the story My first date because we are studying the theme Relationships. They were allowed to tell the truth or invent the story, and here is one of the stories told by a boy who is an avid gamer.


Updated on December 1, 2011. Just learned that Vocaroo does not keep the recorded files for long (my guess is half a year), this and many other files recorded by my students have been removed. I was not smart enough to download them or save in some other way. Disappointed.........