Sunday, October 30, 2016

Keep on Teaching - Keep on Moving (Heraklion Project)

It was last March when I saw Christina again. Christina is a foreign language school owner in Crete, blogger, teacher and a wonderful friend.
We have met readng each other's blog.
Since then we have talked - joined projects together and commented on each other's blog millions of times! He have even met in the Athens conventions, had coffee and lots of fun!

It was Sunday afternoon, on our break in Athens - a roup of teachers including Christina and myself. "So why don't you guys come over to Crete and organize and at the school?" Christina asked. We all said yes of course, because, come on... Crete? friends? event? We guys are dying for stuff like that!
But the plan stayed a plan until one day I am calling Christina and say "You know what? I'm coming!"
So we planned activities, talked in Skype, exchanged messages on Facebook and the time came!
A lot of students participated from very young learners to A2 / B1 level.
All children participated with joy and helped each other.
Activities included:
1. ABC and chronoligical lines. Children lined up according to their names and then according to their age. We practised the ABC and numbers dates and months.

2. Pantomime
Students chose an adjective (small piece of paper with a word on it) from a small bucket and also a plastic animal miniature. For example "happy rhino" and they had to mime the animal and the mood.

3. Balloons with words
We hid small papers with letters in the balloons. Studenst had to run get the balloon , crush it, find the letters and form the word. This can also be done with expressions, idioms and phrases.

4. Running dictation
Kids ran to the texts, ran back and dictated as much as they could remember to the "writer" of the team.

5. Meditation


Our day ended with a bit of calming down. We practised meditation techniques and relaxed after an event full of movement.
All kids were given small chocolate treats and happily went home!!
A big thank you to Christina and her kids for inviting me and participating.
Until we meet again!

All pictures were taken by Christina Markoulaki and this is the original blogpost in Greek.



Friday, October 28, 2016

#30Goals: Make it about the relationships


I have been meaning to write a post on this for days now, but guess what?? Too much work as always!
It is very important for me to have students who help each other and are polite to each other and actually have a good relationship between them.
This means that they have to know things about each other. So how can they do that?
Shelly has suggested a lot of ways to work with technology.
Taking further one of Shelly's idea, I asked my students to create Snapchat storylines about their weekend.
Snapchat and Instagram gives them the opportunity to write, draw and add pictures from Bitmoji or emoticons on their pictures. So students can play and create really great animations and pictures.
These pictures can also be saved on their mobile phones, tablets on computers and can later be presented in front of the class or as a video. Showing you some examples.
They can also be downloaded as a slide show.





Have fun!

Sunday, October 9, 2016

IATEFL ESP SIG Athens 2016 - Impressions






A very interesting convention relating to teaching English for Specific Purposes. In the first plenary, Dr. Anna Mauranen pointed out that English is a Lingua Franca and how important it is to have a language to communicate internationally. She also showed survey results on how people from different countries "adapt" English combining it with their own language and expressions.

The next presentation I attended was Task-Based, topic- centered learning in ESP by Vesna Kovasevic from Serbia. I had already met her last year in Athens at the TESOL convention, she is an excellent ESP teacher with wonderful ideas. She presented her students' project and described the way she helps them to create their own presentations - commercials and essays/ reports in real life situations.

I then attended Teaching academic writing, critical thinking and autonomy through one draft by Sofia Valanis, lecturer at IST college. The presentation itself was lesson on how to write academic essays with examples, but the discussion that followed was very interesting, with people teaching in China, Abu Dabi and Europe having a say on cultural awareness and the conclusion was that different cultures do not always support autonomy and expression of personal opinions and one has to be careful on how to approach the students.


The next plenary was about preparing our students for their working lives in English - what is correct and incorrect language and again cultural awareness, stereotypes and multicultural communication skills. Ian Badger is an Author and instructor of business and medical English.

The workshop that followed was about helping students perform well in interviews, which was fun and very practical and useful. There were some wonderful insights on how to react and how to prepare. Joan Macphail and Angeliki Apostolidou are owners of The Tartan Epsilon http://www.easingintoenglish.com/

I have also met Elis Kakoulli Constantinou from Cyprus whose talk was about Technology and ESP . She is currently working on her master's degree in this field and talked about using technology in teaching (e-learning platforms). In fact she is planning to have an e-learning course about teaching ESP in the beginning of the new year and I will keep in touch. She has definitely a lot of ideas to share.

Day 2 begun with Profesor Almut Koster of Business Communication, University of Vienna, discussing teaching of ESP as training and education. She presented her surveys and a lot of examples and videos of lessons and analysed the challenges a teacher and a student has to face.

Right after, Will Nash from University of Sheffield presented the IAT(Inform / Analyse / Transfer) Model for ESAP and divided English teaching into two categories (Academic for Studies and Academic Professional)

I then attended the second workshop of Joan Macphial and Angeliki Apostolidou on CV's - we talked about different kind of CV's and I mentioned them the Europass type and had a discussion of the use of each type.

The next plenary was by Dr. Pascahlis Chiaras , lecturer at IST College and one of the Organisers of the convention who talked about technology and ESP classroom, flipped classrooms, e-learning advantages and disadvantages.

All in all it was an interesting convention, but with few participants (maybe due to the price?). The only problem in my opinion was lack of organization (the times of the talks were constantly changing).




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