Teach English speaking

Project Based Learning

The Technology Integration Matrix

The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells as illustrated on the original site http://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/2006tim.html

50 ways to use wiki in the classroom

50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom

Wikis are an exceptionally useful tool for getting students more involved in curriculum. They’re often appealing and fun for students to use, while at the same time ideal for encouraging participation, collaboration, and interaction. Read on to see how you can put wikis to work in your classroom.
Resource Creation
Using these ideas, your students can collaboratively create classroom valuables.

1. Virtual field trips: Have your students research far away places they would like to go on a field trip, and get them to share images and information about the location.
2. Create presentations: Instead of using traditional presentation software, put presentations on a wiki.
3. Write a Wikibook: Make it a class project to collaboratively write a reference book that others can use.
4. Study guides: Ask students to create study guides for a specific part of the unit you’re studying.
5. Readers’ guides: Have your students create readers’ guides to share their favorite and most important parts of works you’ve read in class.
6. Solving wiki: Post difficult math problems, such as calculus, so that the class can collaboratively solve them.
7. Glossary: Get your class to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units, adding definitions and images.
8. Class encyclopedia: Ask your class to create an "encyclopedia" on a topic, adding useful information that can be built upon through the years.
9. Create exploratory projects: If you’re teaching a new subject, ask your students to collect and share information in the wiki so that you can learn together.

Student Participation
These projects are sure to get your students involved.

10. Exam review: Encourage students to share review notes and other helpful pieces of information on your classroom’s wiki.
11. Peer review: Allow students to draft their papers in a wiki, then ask other students to comment it.
12. Student portfolios: Assign portfolio pages to each of your students, and allow them to display and discuss their work.
13. Correction competition: You can post a document riddled with mistakes, then have students compete to see who can fix the most errors fastest.
14. Peer editing: Ask students to edit each others’ work for spelling, grammar, and facts based on a style guide or rules you’ve defined.
15. Vocabulary lists: Encourage students to submit words that they had trouble with, along with a dictionary entry.
16. Get feedback: Ask students to post comments on wiki pages.
17. Share notes: Let your students share their collective information so that everyone gets a better understanding of the subject.

Group Projects
Allow wikis to facilitate group work by using these ideas.

18. Group authoring: By asking groups to use central documents in a wiki, you can ensure that everyone’s documentation will be uniform.
19. Grandma timeline: Have your students create a history timeline using Grandmas as units of time.
20. Organize ideas: Allow group members to post their ideas in a wiki, and you’ll cut down on duplicate ideas, while at the same time allowing them to build upon the ideas.
21. Fan clubs: Start fan clubs for your students’ favorite figures from history and ask them to contribute their favorite quotes, photos, and other tidbits together.
22. Track projects: With wikis, it’s easy for students to see which tasks have been completed and which ones still need to be fulfilled.
23. Track participation: Assign a wiki page to a group project, and then individual pages for each student to show their participation.

Student Interaction
Get your students to work together on these projects.

24. Collect data: Use central documents to make sure that data collection is uniform and easy to manage.
25. Mock-debate: Pit two class candidates against each other and perform a debate on your wiki.
26. Study buddy matching: Let students match themselves up into study buddy pairs.
27. Multi-author story: Start a creative writing unit, and get your students to write a short story together, each writing a small amount of the story.
28. Choose your own adventure story: A twist on the multi-author story could be a choose your own adventure story, where each student branches out into a different path.
29. Share reviews: Post articles for different movies, books, and TV shows, encouraging students to share what they though about them.
30. Literature circles: Host a book club on your wiki where students are required to read the same book, then discuss it on the wiki.

For the Classroom
Use your wiki to create spaces that are special to your class.

31. Classroom FAQ: Make it a class project to create an FAQ for your classroom that will help new students and those that will come in years later.
32. Classroom scrapbook: Share news, photos, and current achievements in your classroom on a wiki page.
33. Calendar: Create a calendar on the wiki and encourage students to add their own personally important dates.
34. Classroom newspaper: Create your own news outlet on a wiki.
35. Hall of fame: Highlight students’ exceptional achievements on the wiki.
36. Classroom policies: Encourage students to draft rules and policies for the classroom.

Community
Reach out to the community with these resources that everyone can appreciate.

37. School tour: Get your class to take photos of your school and write about their favorite spots on the wiki, then share it with the rest of your school and your local community.
38. Recipe book: Ask students to bring in their favorite recipes from home, then share them with parents and the rest of the community.
39. International sharing: Collaborate with a class from another country and share information about your culture, or even a day in the life of a typical student.
40. Local history: Document historical buildings, events, and more from our community. You can ask students to perform interviews, and encourage parents and other adults to contribute their knowledge in the wiki.
41. Community FAQ: Ask students to create an FAQ for their community, then pass it on to your next group of students.
42. Community nature guide: Have your students collect highlights of plants and animals in your community.
43. Share achievements: Let parents log in to the wiki to see what their children have accomplished.

Other
Here are even more fun and useful ways to improve your classroom with a wiki.

44. Let your students leave their books at school: With a strong classroom wiki, you should have a wealth of information available, so much so that students can leave their books at school and access information online.
45. Use wikis as a hub: Any time a student creates anything online, ask them to link to it or upload it to the wiki so that everyone can use it.
46. Make website creation easier for students: Using a wiki platform, students don’t have to worry about web design, so they can focus on content instead.
47. Organization: Save links, documents, and quotes related to units or your classroom as a whole.
48. Track assignments: If you ask students to put their research on wikis, you can check in on their progress to make sure they’re on the right path.
49. Teacher collaboration: Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.
50. Create and pass a legislative bill: Let students see the back and forth that exists in legislation by creating their own and attempting to pass it.

Calendar for teachers community

Here is the calendar of our English teachers' community for 2012 
http://narod.ru/disk/start/20.dl6sg-narod.yandex.ru/34917875001/h0a1e08e6e76bf511412357bf7f913f8e/calendar1.pdf

Call for Participation in TESOL's

Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012

A Project of TESOL's  CALL Interest Section

2012  Sessions

January 9, 2012 - February 12, 2012

--> Registration is Jan 2-8, 2012 - You will not be able to register before January 2nd!

 

 

The Electronic Village Online Sessions

For five weeks in January-February, participants and ESOL experts can engage in collaborative, online discussion or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. These sessions will bring together participants for a longer period of time than is permitted by the land-based convention and will allow a fuller development of ideas than is otherwise possible.

Sessions are free and open to anyone around the globe. Bring your colleagues!

Surviving as a teachers

Liam Brown reflects on how you might 'survive' as an English language teacher and work on your own professional development, in this seminar filmed in London.

 

Podcast in teaching English

 

Twitter in the classroom

Many educators are looking at ways to use micro-blogging in the classroom. Nik Peachey has written about Plurk in language teaching. This tool describes itself as a 'social journal', so posts are arranged on a timeline and grouped into threads. There are some useful tips he writes about microblogging:

As a teacher you could use microblogging to:

• Share resources and links to useful websites or videos (they open in the interface so students don't have to search around YouTube for them.
• Send out prompts and reminders to students about assignments and due dates.
• You could just use the social aspect to share a bit of what you do each day with them
• Send students images to comment on / describe
• Send out words and ask students to respond with a definition.
• Create single sentence assignments that students respond to wit single sentences.
• Create sentences for the students to correct.
• Create a collaborative story. You start the story with one line and each student has to add another using the response feature.

Your students could use microblogging to:

• Create a learner diary, recording briefly their language learning activities and insights through the day.
• Ask questions to the groups and get support with new words they find or things they don't understand.
• Post a short sentence each day using a different one of the verbs in the Plurk line
• Share good websites etc.
• Share a little of their world and what they do when they aren't in class.

And there is a presentation "35 ideas on Twitter to be used in the classroom" at the bottom of this page

IT and teachers

Key skills and attitudes for IT literate teachers

This part is an attempt to define the key skills that teachers using technology for ELT should posses.

The aim of this is for teachers to be able to see what skills they want to develop and work toward and so set themselves developmental goals. Please feel free to add any skills that you think are 'key' ones. I've also added a 'desirable' section for ones that aren't essential but are very useful.

Key Skills

• The ability to evaluate technological resources and recognise their potential and limitations for language development
• The ability to understand and learn how to use new IT resources
• The ability to explain students why and how to use certain technology

Key attitudes

• The willing ness to learn new things and the commitment to keep learning
• The readiness to prepare plan B in case technology fails

Desirable Skills

• The ability to create interactive learning objects

What is a BLOG

What is a blog?

A blog (short for weblog) is a frequently updated website that often resembles an online journal. It's so easy to create and update a blog - it requires only basic access to the Internet, and a minimum of technical know-how. Because of this, it is one of the easiest ways to publish student writing on the WWW. It's almost as easy as sending an email.

Nowadays, blogs can also display photos and some people are using them with audio and even video, but this article will concentrate on the basics, showing how a simple text-based blog can be used to great effect with your English language learners.

Types of blogs used in language teaching
Aaron Campbell (2003) has outlined three types of blogs for use with language classes:

* The Tutor Blog is run by the teacher of a class. The content of this type of blog can be limited to syllabus, course information, homework, assignments, etc. Or the teacher may choose to write about his or her life, sharing reflections about the local culture, target culture and language to stimulate online and in-class discussion. In this type of blog, students are normally restricted to being able to write comments to the teacher's posts. A great example of this is Aaron Campbell's own 'The New Tanuki' http://thenewtanuki.blogspot.com/

* The Class Blog is a shared space, with teacher and students being able to write to the main area. It is best used as a collaborative discussion space, an extra-curricular extension of the classroom. Students can be encouraged to reflect in more depth, in writing, on themes touched upon in class. Students are given a greater sense of freedom and involvement than with the tutor blog. A very good example of what has been done with this type of blog is Barbara Dieu's 'Bee Online' http://beeonline.blogspot.com/) and 'Bee Online 2' http://beeonline2.blogspot.com/

* The Learner Blog is the third type of blog and it requires more time and effort from the teacher to both set up and moderate, but is probably the most rewarding. It involves giving each student an individual blog. The benefit of this is that this becomes the student's own personal online space. Students can be encouraged to write frequently about what interests them, and can post comments on other students' blogs. For examples, see the links to learner blogs from the class blog and tutor blog examples above.


Of course, teachers who decide to use blogs often use a combination of Tutor or Class blog and Learner blogs, with hyperlinks connecting them.

By Graham Stanley, British Council, Barcelona
Read more on  http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/blogging-elt