Keep on Teaching
Thoughts, Feelings and Ideas
Friday, May 13, 2022
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Let's learn about the weather!
Recently I have presented emotion vocabulary with my students. You can find some ideas in my previous post.
One more thing that we did, was actually stick the emotion cards on ice cream sticks and played them as puppets.
So, I decided to play a little. I downloaded weather flashcards to introduce weather words to my students.
I showed them the words, we played pantomime and then we combined them with the emotion - words and made sentences. "It's rainy - I'm sad"
We also acted out the sentences.
It was a lot of fun!
Friday, March 25, 2022
Some lesson ideas
Friday, March 4, 2022
Teacher Diary: Week collection
Here I am with some more activities from this week.
Working on the coursebooks was our main activity, but I always try to include some more games / ideas to make it more interesting.
- A very favourite activity when I teach body parts is picture dictation backwards. This means that the students write the word on a blank piece of paper where the body part would be if they drew it. So for example the word toe goes at the bottom edges of the paper. When we have mentioned all the words we make an outline and we create a monster. Students LOVE it.
- Another activity that my students loved this week is find (hidden) objects game. We used the app from Super course (the publisher of the books we use), but you can find numerous free games (prented and online), I am posting a link from islcollective where you can find a lot of activities and exercises.
- Grammar of the week was gerunds and infinnitives. So I decided to work with songs. Here is a compilation with songs you can use to teach this structure.
- Another idea is to use Lyrics Training to practise both grammar, vocabulary and listening comprehension
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Teacher diary : Weekend edition
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Be different - iTDi webinar
Thursday, July 29, 2021
#8weeksofsummer: Share new knowledge
What have I learned this year?
Working and collaborating remotely. Not, that is not true. I already knew this. It's the other people who learned how to work with me remotely.
People who were hesitant to collaborate online in the past were obliged to do so and guess what? Some of them liked it!!!
Seriously now, staying home has given me the opportunity to study and learn new skills and write about them!
So I am sharing some of my posts hoping to give you some ideas on how to acquire new skills:
Saturday, July 24, 2021
#8weeksofsummer: What specific personal development do you need for next school year?
This post is week 7 of 8 in the #8WeeksofSummer Blog Challenge for educators.
So you have to ask yourself.
What were the difficulties that I have faced during the past school year?
Have I taken advantage of all the technology that is offered to me?
What activities could not be performed with online learning and what should I do to replace them with equal online ones?
If I look back on my lessons, following things could change or get improved and this is what courses (or other kinds of professional development I should take:
- How should I give my own material a more professional look (a self publishing course)
- How I can build my own professional website in order to make my work and business know and accessible to students and parents a.k.a potential clients (tutorial on how to build a website)
- How to use social media to ahow my work (social media advertising course)
- How to build / use a platform to create and asynchronous learning data bank for my students (tutorial on moodle or other similar platofrm)
Monday, July 12, 2021
#8weeksofsummer Week 6: What will you keep/lose/try this coming school year?
This post is week 6 of 8 in the #8WeeksofSummer Blog Challenge for educators.
That's a difficult one.
A lot of decisions to be made. But not entirely up to us.
How will the next school year begin? Will there be a new lockdown? Will it still be dangerous to go outside?
Will face to face classes begin without a problem?
I don't believe that life will be normal this year, though. Still not a cure to the disease, still not sure of the vaccine works.
So everything depends on the situation actually.
What I personally want to do is defininetly keep online lessons. People (and potential clients) have come to realise that distance is not a problem anymore and you don't have to be in the same city or country to work with eachother.
I have always had clients / studentsaway from my hometown, but this year there were definitely no borders.
What i plan to do is get to know more on social media marketing and maybe create an online page for my teaching.
Who knows, maybe all this can have a great outcome!
More to come
#8weeksofsummer Week 5: What improved or challenged communication this year?
As I mentioned in my previous posts, this year has been totally different that we were used to. New way of teaching and new way of interacting, which was not necessarily bad. Before Covid, things were a bit simpler, since (in my case), I visited students at home to tutor, so I also interacted with their parents as well. Now, since a lot of parents didn't know how to use platforms and were not exactly as computer literate as their children, the effort from the tutor (or teacher has to be double. One way to go is by email, but you are never sure if they have actually read it. Best way is by telephone. I was able to contact everybody, most of the times, so communication was pretty successful.As far as the students are concerned, online video calls were as alike as being in the classroom. Comparing all this with the definition above, I don't believe that communication was lost this year.
To be continued...
Monday, June 28, 2021
#8weeksofsummer Week 4: New tools I discovered this year
This year had to do with technology. Since we couldn't be in our face to face classrooms, we had to find ways to communicate, work, teach, interact.
What I found particularly useful this year was Google documents and Edmodo.
Before covid, I only used dropbox or Google drive only to upload my students' homework or a PDF document for reading or Grammar rules my students had to study. Nobody had told me until then that I could use it as a board for my lesson!
I know that in platforms like Zoom or Webex, you can write or draw on your presentation bord, but it sometimes complicated to give the control to other participants. Sometime the participants don't have e good internet connection and cannont write or anwer on the platform.
A word document on Google documents can be the solution. Every person invited could write on it, solve exercises, write comments, do corrections.
It can also be uses as a chat room in a much simpler version.
The other thing I used and learned some features was Edmodo.
I found out that Edmodo is something like facebook for learners. Easy to use, the teacher can upload his/her exercises, create quizzes online and offline, give grades and feedback to the learners and all this in a closed and protected enviroment.
I am sure that as time goes by, I keep learning more things I can use as far technology is concerned.
As teachers we have to keep up yp keep going!
Until next time.
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