Wednesday, January 22, 2014

HOW TO USE NEWS PAPER AND MAGAZINES IN ENGLISH CLASSROOM

jigsaw reading

(in a group, assign each student a small extract, then ask them to report on their part and put all the parts into the right order/ for one-to-one putting the parts into the right order would also work greatly)

reading-and–retelling-and-discussing

(very close to real life – when you read a newspaper in your language, you would often discuss what you’ve read with your friends or colleagues)

scanning, finding the most interesting bits and extending on them

(to be honest, that’s what I usually do with newspapers in English and in my native language- I scan the headlines and read only what catches my eye. So once again this is a highly real-life activity, which is precious for me as a teacher)

working with pictures

(before reading articles, you can get the students to predict what the articles are about, or to match the pics to the right headlines. Some pictures can be used without any article at all: you can just show a picture and ask your students to speculate about it)

inventing headlines

(ask students to read article(s), think of a good headline(s), then reveal the real one(s). I am sure some of the invented ones would be much better)

inventing articles

(asking the students to look at the headlines and to predict what the article is about. Then proceeding to reading and comparing)

playing word race

(get the students to find as many good words/collocations/ phrases about something at a newspaper page. e.g. find as many adjectives about cities on this page as you can. It’s fun, engaging, unusual and really promotes new vocab and using dictionaries)

category sorting

(cut out several articles from different newspaper sections (business, lifestyle, news, etc) and ask students to decide which articles refer to what section.

translating and interpreting

(take a newspaper in a native language of your students and ask them to tell/ write what this or that section/article is about, or arrange a discussion of a news story (written in their native language) in English)

searching&hunting

(choose one or several newspaper pages, prepare a list of questions based on the articles or advertisements from them, and get the students to compete in finding more answers faster than the others.)

reading and taking Classifieds seriously

(prepare students’ cards with tasks like “buy an unusual piece of furniture”, “find a new housekeeper”…. and ask them to find the most appropriate advertisement on a page/ on several pages. Some strange and funny ads will make your day!)

gap-fill

(ask one student in each pair to black out/white out some of the keywords they think are worth knowing, and get the other student to recreate them)

reading and understanding advertisements

(ask the students to think of the best way to translate an advertising text, it can be a really challenging, but very engaging, task. or ask them to choose the best advertisement in a magazine. or to study advertisements and to make their own).

starting a discussion

(start a lesson with discussing an article, a headline or a photo from a paper. then proceed to all the other work you’ve planned for the same topic. For example, start with an a report of a tsunami in Indonesia, then continue by introducing the topic of natural disasters. or the topic of unlucky travelling experiences. or something else…)

completing articles

(cut out the ending paragraphs of an article, give the beginning to the students and ask them to finish it in the way they like. They can then compare their version to the cut out one)

styling and restyling

(after students have read and discussed an article, ask them to rewrite it in different styles: as if it was a letter/ as if it was an ad, as if it was radio program, etc)

source : svetlana Urisman article

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

WIKI'S IN PLAIN ENGLISH

Wiki is a very nice way to organize information amongst a group of people. With the use of wiki, information can be saved in a clear manner & wouldn't take as much time as emailing would. Wiki is a very interesting program and seems essential for sharing data within a business or just a group of individuals wanting to share information.

It informed me about this thing called WIKI that I had no idea about. It seems like a good method for people to get together online and put things together. Email is bad, and Wiki is good.

Its so easy to communicate to groups of people when having a special function or event. With email people will probably choose the same things at the same time, so this is a much better way with updates.

WEB 2.0 by GRAHAM STANLEY

Web 2.0
The clear example of a secondary language teacher embracing
the affordances of recent developments online. The term Web 2.0 is often used as a
label for these developments, and although it is a term that means different things
to different people, for our purposes, we can think of it as ‘a shift from what were
primarily informational tools to what we might call relational tools – so that if Web
1.0 was the informational web, Web 2.0 is the social web.’.
Web 2.0 tools have proliferated in recent years, and as most allow for some degree
of content creation and communication, they are often ideal for language learning.
At the heart of Web 2.0 is the blog, short for web log. At its most basic, a blog is an
online journal that can be used by teachers to publish information about a course,
links to resources and other information directed to learners or other teachers.
Ease of use was identified as one of the most important factors behind ‘the significant
proliferation in the number of teaching blogs’ used by secondary school teachers
in a recent, and there is no doubt that the push button
publishing first promoted by Blogger (www.blogger.com) has encouraged many
teachers to embrace online publishing who otherwise would not have done so. Many
teachers also now encourage their learners to blog, publishing their written work and
projects online in ways that go beyond sharing their work with an audience beyond
the teacher, and which help prepare learners ‘for the digitally-driven post-industrial
world into which they’ll graduate – a world where our understanding of knowledge,
culture, truth and authority are in the process of being rewritten.’.
The other popular online publishing platform that has become well-used by
secondary school teachers and learners is the wiki. The term comes from the
Hawaiian for ‘quick’ and a wiki is a collaborative web space allowing for pages that
can be created and edited by multiple users easily without any knowledge of web
design. The wiki is similar to the blog in that it allows for quick and easy publishing,
but the more flexible structure of the wiki means that it is good for project work,
whilst the blog is better as an ongoing record of classwork as the latest work is
always displayed at the top of the page.
Another development of Web 2.0 is the podcast, which comes from the combination
of the words iPod and broadcast. Podcasts are audio or video files that are broadcast
via the internet and can be downloaded and listened to on a computer or mobile
device. Apart from software allowing the creation and sharing of podcasts, there
are many other Web 2.0 tools that make use of audio, and to many users podcasting
now refers to any creation and sharing of audio online.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching

this person is TED 2013 winner

Mobile Learning in ELT: Survey 2013 by Nik

In 2010, after buying my first iPad I decided to do some research into how teachers were using mobile devices in their classrooms and their teaching. At this stage ‘smart’ phones were already starting to make an impact and tablet devices were just coming onto the market. The research results from this first survey were published in the Guardian Online under the title ‘English language teachers connect to mobile learning’http://nikpeachey.blogspot.in/2012/12/mobile-learning-in-elt-survey-2013.html

Tuesday, March 12, 2013