This blog has been specially created for two weeks in July/August 2013. It is the place to find creative ideas and resources!
Friday 9 August 2013
Welcome to the Creative Teaching in the Secondary Classroom blog! It was specially created for the 2 weeks of the course at the Lake School of English.
Below you can see the class enjoying a beer or two together at the local...... Cheers, everyone for being such a fab group :-))
Mustafa sent me some fab images, including the one below of the same pub evening. I have added a border to it.
Another lovely photo sent in by Anush, showing the group enjoying yummy chocolate muffins and coffee on our last day at SAID.
This is what the class brainstormed as the KEY skills necessary to be a SURVIVOR TEACHER.
'If music be the food of love, play on'. This quote demonstrates the power of music in our lives. It would be a dull world without the joy that music brings. It is a great unifier, it has no boundaries, it is timeless, it is evocative and inspiring!
The English language is in a state of constant flux. Nothing stays still for a moment We need to keep up with the rapid flow. Below you can read through a presentation I did for Connecting Online e-conference a few years ago. It is called 'Language in Motion: Teaching with the Flow'.
There is a list of sites to help you keep up with your English at the end of the presentation.
Please click on the Youblisher booklet below to view the presentation in a bigger format.
STEFAN also found and shared this fun image below:
MAGDA created this lovely Tagxedo word cloud review of Idiomatic Intensifiers we learned last week. Can you connect which words go with each other?
MUSTAFA had another go at creating a GoAnimate movie and this one is great fun! Click on the 'idioms' link above the image below to access the animation.
How much technology do you use in class?
What technology do you use in your lessons?
How much technology integration do you plan for the new school term?
'I don't want no Edtech!'
View this video. Do you sympathize with this teacher who has been forced by her school to teach with 'edtech'?
Sue Lyons Jones (the singer in the video) outlines a very useful list in her blog of ready made online lesson plans. You will know 3 of them already :-)
View the video below called 'A Vision of K-12 Students Today'. Whilst viewing, make notes and be prepared to give your opinion of what you have seen. Think of the following points:
Do you think your students expect you to be technologically prepared for their future?
Are the young pupils in the video expecting too much from their teachers?
Trip Advisor Slideshow
This is a slideshow of Oxford Highlights that I created a while back for my students. I used TripAdvisor Tripwow! You can create your own very quickly and easily by clicking on the link given in the slideshow at the end. This tool is very useful for getting your students to create projects using their own digital images. You will need to register for this site, but it is a great tool for fun slideshows.
Can you guess what Stefan got up to? What are these images about??? Ask him questions to find out more. Thanks, Stefan!
Images by Stefan Lapniewski
Can you guess what Janet did over the weekend?
As seen in the examples above, you can get your students to talk about an image from their weekend.
They can also create a Word cloud of their weekend activities and then send you a link, or a jpeg image for you to add to your blog or wiki. Open class you can quickly make guesses of what the students got up to.
Alternatively, you can get your students to say one thing about their weekend and you add the words to a word cloud tool in class. Click create and then in groups get students to remember why the words were added to the group cloud. Please see the example from this morning's lesson.
Can you remember who said what about their weekend??
Instead of the whole class doing their own word cloud in the first example above (which could be time-consuming), maybe do a rota system, so that every Monday morning you can focus on a few students at a time, over the period of the term? That way, everybody gets a chance to have their image up on the screen and be the focus of attention.....
Comic created by Janet
Fodey Newspaper Snippet
You can ask your students to create a newspaper article about their weekend by using fodey.com as in the example above we created in class.
Are the following phrases TRUE or FALSE for the class?
Janet watched the BOX over the weekend.
Aga PICKED UP some slang expressions such as 'bloke', 'bits & bobs' and 'broke'.
Alicja didn't GET THROUGH a shedload of DOSH.
Anush SPENT A BOMB at the weekend. She got through a GRAND!!
Edu GOT LEGLESS last night at the LOCAL.
Betty RAN INTOsome friends in town yesterday.
Emel put off DROPING her MATES A LINE.
Juliana POPPED IN to see a class MATE last night.
Kasia BURNED THE MIDNIGHT OIL last night. She studied phrasal verbs & idioms all night long!!
Stefan was AT A LOOSE END last night. He was really bored.
Magda had a nice LIE-IN on Sunday morning.
Mustafa PICKED UP quite a few new expressions.
Midori bought some BITS & BOBS in London.
Pilar HIT THE TOWN on Saturday. She went pubbing & clubbing with her MATES.
Khalil CHILLED OUT on Saturday.
ToonDoo Questions:
You can make your own cartoon weekend questions to ask your students at ToonDoo. If you want to keep them all in one place, you can easily register for free.
Vocaroo I recently reviewed some weekend expressions using my
Smartphone to record questions to ask my students. I then uploaded the audio file from my phone to Vocaroo, and then embedded the Vocaroo embed code to my blog. Students had to reply open class / in pairs as
soon as they heard the question. Please note, your Vocaroo audios get deleted from the system after a period of time, so use the audio while you can!
Here is a GoAnimate animation of one of the 10 chapters of the ebook. The hero Frederick, abandoned his girfriend Isabella, and then turned up again a year later.... An Idiomatic Story Part 4 by Janet Bianchini on GoAnimate Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate. The idioms in the story can be pre-taught by handing out a set of flashcards printed from Quizlet.
Writing a mini saga is a challenging activity and it is also a lot of fun! The objective is to write a short story in only 50 words. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The original idea came from the Daily Telegraph paper which ran a very popular Mini Saga competition for the first time in 1999. You can read someof the mini sagas.
I asked the class to predict the content of a topical news item from today's issue of The Guardian Online.
I copy pasted the words from the article into a word-cloud making site called Word It Out.
Then we played bingo with the words in the word cloud. I read out parts of the text and everyone crossed out the word if it was the same as what they had written in one of the 9 boxes as seen in the example below.
We played the first round for a straight line, and the second time was for a 'full house'.
Baby Prince George Alexander Louis
An online reading text from BBC News on the names of new-born baby Prince George Alexander Louis could be preceded by a Tagxedo word cloud such as the following:
The English Blog has some great news items concerning Prince George and we looked at a few cartoons from the British press.
Some useful sites mentioned by the group included the following:
I took this photo in Oxford of an idiom on the back of a bus - 'Saving is as easy as pie'
MUSTAFA sent in an image of a poster for the coach to London. It has a
great grammar structure - 'let someone do something', as seen below.
Thank you!
EDU sent in a picture of an interesting idiom he spotted on the side of a bus. Cheers!
STEFAN spotted the interesting notice on a lamp post below, and then took a photo of it to include in this post. Many thanks!!
Another traditional sight is the local pub. There are many pubs here and this one is in Broad Street opposite the Sheldonian theatre.
Real ale is a traditional type of beer that you can drink in this pub.
If you go to the local tonight, then hopefully you won't end up getting :
A typical dialogue in the local might go like this:
A It's my round. What can I get you? B Cheers, mate! Half a lager would be great. A Do you fancy some crisps? B Yeah, why not.. A Any particular flavour? B I'll go with salt 'n' vinegar, if that's ok? A No probs. Back in a mo'.
Below I have embedded an ebooklet on places around Oxford. I simply took images then added them to a presentation and then uploaded the pdf version to Issuu. You too can take photos of signs and places in Oxford, and then use them in class to exploit areas of interest such as vocabulary, grammar and cultural aspects of your visit. This is a form of digital literacy. You can read this publication called The Skills Transformation: Digital Literacy Explored, written by Gavin Dudeney.
You could enocurage your students to take snaps of interesting signs and places and then show to the class to discuss.
Some useful sites
The English blog is a useful source of news about life in the UK. It updates frequently and I like it because it always has the latest news and daily cartoons from the papers. Woodlands Junior School is a rich source of information on British life and culture.
