Tools for the 21st century teacher

Here's a fantastic presentation I came across courtesy of a tweet from @MZimmer557 via @mike08

It's a great summary of some internet tools that could be really useful for teachers.

Open publication - Free publishing - More 21st century

Find the original here

Dictation #2

Well, it's taken me a while, but here's the second part of my mini-series on dictation activities. Here are a few activities for sentence length texts:

How many words

I first saw this demonstrated at an IH workshop day in Poland, by a teacher who was a native to Nigeria. He read us sentences pronounced with a thick accent and we could really feel like the students would during the same activity, it was really hard to understand him!

It's very simple, all you do is dictate sentences at a natural pace and for the first task the students write only the number of words they think they hear. For example: 'I'd love to go to the cinema' is eight words. It's great for focussing on contractions and difficulties with connected speech.

After reading all the sentences, you ask the students to compare and then tell them the correct answers. Then you read the sentences again and the students attempt to write out the complete sentences, using the number of words as a guide. They can compare again before a final feedback to check the correct sentences.

Pass the Pen

This is an activity the kids love as much as I do! Again it's very simple. The kids sit in circles of three or four and they have a pen and one sheet of paper. You play music and they pass the pen around the circle (it works well with board pens and the plastic sheets I mentioned in Dictation#1). When you stop the music the student with the pen will be the writer for this sentence.

Then you dictate a sentence two or three times and the student who finished up with the pen (helped by the others) writes the sentence on their paper. They must all raise their hands and shout 'finished' when they feel that they have completed it correctly. When they've all finished, check their work and write the correct sentence on the board for them to check.

The scoring can be done in any way, but I like to award a bonus for being first (if correct) and also start with 5 points so that minus points can be awarded for dropping the pen (it stops them throwing it), noisiness or arguing!

Running dictation for one to one

Ok, it might sound strange, but it works! I have a couple of young learners (nine years old) who come for private tuition and something they love is writing on our IWB. To practise writing, I sit at one end of the classroom, away from the board, and write a sentence on paper. They have to read the sentence, say it to me and run over to the board to write the phrase. They can run back as many times as they want, to re-read the sentence. We usually do three or four sentences like this and it takes about ten minutes.

I've also done it by just saying the sentence when they come back to me, but they seem to benefit a lot from comparing one sentence with the other and are becoming better at checking there own work for mistakes.

Well, there you go. Please share any other sentence length dictation acivities you have and I'll get on with the next post, which will focus on activities using longer texts.

Thanks for reading!

How do you manage your time online?

I received last Friday, multiple times, an invitation to do some blog reading homework at the weekend, an idea suggested by livesofteachers. Now I like reading blogs and I like Darren's blog but one thing I won't do (I realise I have a free choice and this was only a suggestion) is do 'homework' at the weekend.

I have been thinking about writing a work-life balance blog for a while now, as it seems very easy to be sucked into always being online. When I first started using twitter I found it very addictive and I wanted to log in all the time, in case I missed something. Gradually, I realised that a lot of twitter usage is socialising that's irrelevant to me and I'm not really interested in stroking some tefl big-shot's ego. As a result, I have made a conscious effort to be online less and use online time well, not browse around aimlessly wasting my time. Blogs, of course, aren't as immediate as twitter and it's easier to keep up without being there all the time.

At times in the past I have been 'addicted' to a computer game. There are various around that have this capacity, but my drug of choice was Football Manager, sometimes nicknamed 'The Divorcer', due to it's effect on relationships. When my girlfriend mentioned that maybe I'd like to spend some time talking to her, rather than on twitter and perhaps do some cleaning occasionally, I thought about it and was reminded of the aforementioned game.

There is a time for being online and a time to enjoy other things. As teachers, we teach, therefore we have to prepare for classes, mark work, do administrative tasks and attend meetings and workshops; so the online stuff is in our free-time. Where's the time for friends, family, exercise, relaxation and travelling? Well, for me, that's the weekend (as well as a few other times during the week, to be honest). At the weekend I don't want to read blogs, or tweet or even be on the computer (unless I'm checking football results or watching a game online), I want to enjoy my free-time, away from the computer. We all need a break; if I don't do this, I'll go nuts and to me time management is very important, because I can be fairly disorganised.

My advice is this, use Delicious to bookmark good sites you come across; use instapaper to save an article you'd like to read when you have more time; develop a list of blogs you really want to read and set up rss feeds. Also, be efficient with your time online, decide when you have the time, stick to that time and don't do homework at the weekend.

The sun is shining in Spain, I want to be outside.

Classroom Routines

One of the most important things I have learnt about teaching young learners is the need for routines. There are many things that can be used in the classroom for many reasons, but today I'm interested in discipline routines.

When I started teaching, until not long ago, if I'm honest, I would send a child outside the room for a minute, though I did't like it and don't use this method at all now. Other teachers have a 'naughty' chair, ask a child to sit out of an activity to calm down or perhaps make a student sit next to them at the front. The important thing is that the teacher is consistent.

There are teachers who are consistently wrong. I have heard that a teacher before me put students in the classroom store room for 10 minutes, I was told all about it by my students this year. No further comments required, I think, but there are teachers out there doing similarly crazy things, I'm sure.

One of my current classroom routines is one that I really don't like. I find it works to an extent, but is difficult to manage and is a pain in the arse, to be frank. I have the students names on cards that they designed and move them between areas of bad, good and excellent, depending on their behaviour during the lesson. At the end of the week, the students in the 'excellent' area get a sticker. I employed this method for three main reasons: 1) The whole class was loud, easily distracted and talked in Spanish too much; not just one student, 2) I had to do something and 3) I couldn't think of anything else.

Hopefully, a few of you out there will recognise this scenario, I'm sure I'm not the only one. I don't think it's very good, I probably don't 'police' it well enough for one class in particular (I use it with two) and I hate seeing the faces of the kids who don't get stickers, regardless of how annoying they've been.

Another teacher at my school is very strict and has a system tied to the end of term tests, but I'd prefer not to have anything attached to results. There are methods using traffic lights, football style yellow and red cards, teams with points and more. All in an attempt to ensure these things - that the class is quieter, they don't talk over each other or the teacher, the use English, they don't annoy other kids and that they don't break any other classroom rules. There's a lot to think about.

How do you manage your young learner classrooms? It's a great cause of stress for many teachers, yet I haven't come across too many methods that really work for me. What about you?

Compendium Page

I started a page that was designed to be a collection of interesting web tools and teaching resources that can be fund online. I have discovered that this is a big job even to update little by little and also that a blogger page is not necessarily an easy place to do it. So, I've removed the page at the moment, while I think about what I'm going to do!


As I spend a lot of time bookmarking interesting pages, I'd like to divert your attention to my Delicious page. There's a gadget showing the latest bookmarks in my sidebar. 


If you're not signed up to Delicious, I recommend it highly. 


Check out my bookmarks on there, get Delicious for yourself and we can follow each other!

A wonderful video for all teachers

This video was posted by @ddeubel on his blog EFL Classroom 2.0 which is a blog that I really love. He's chosen this as the #1 video for English language teachers. 


It's a tremendously moving video about a Japanese teacher and his class. Their objective for the year is to "understand how to live a happy life (and) how to care for other people". What a wonderful syllabus objective?!



Find more videos like this on Seoul Education Training Institute

The great thing for me about the video is the fantastic relationship between the teacher and the students: the great empathy, the friendliness and the physical contact. Above all, the physical contact. Here is a teacher with his primary students, doing high-fives, hugging and consoling, joking around and even playfully wrestling with one. 


As a male British teacher, working in Europe, I was struck by the fact that I have been forced into a mind-set that says - don't touch kids. 


When I started teaching in 2003, I worked in Portugal and there had recently been a high profile paedophile case involving a British teacher in a language school. As a result, we were told by the directors to try not to touch the kids at any time and never to be in a room alone with them, particularly male teachers with female students. This has also been a procedure at other school's I've taught at, summer schools in the UK particularly. Some advice has been that if a student wants to talk after class you should move towards the door, leave it open and talk in the doorway, meaning that others can see you, just to protect the teacher from any potential difficulties.


In Spain, where the culture is far more touchy-feely than the UK, I've been made to feel uncomfortable by little kids wanting to hold my hand, sit on my knee during a story or cling to my leg, just to be playful. These are perfectly normal things that are now seen as dangerous or wrong by many. I don't think that there's any need for the kids to sit on my knee, that's taking it a bit far, but kids being tactile is perfectly natural and maybe some of the discipline problems I've had are because they see me as cold. Who knows? I'm not a cold person and I do laugh and joke with the kids, but maybe I appear distant by never allowing physical contact.


I love the idea of high-fives. My friend who teaches in the same town always does this and it's great when I've seen the kids run up to him and slap hands in the street. I'm thinking of using this as a hello or goodbye routine, or both! Maybe I could use a handshake for some good work? Neither of these things should be considered strange and are totally acceptable forms of contact. I still don't think I'd be happy giving hugs though, I would be genuinely worried about it being misinterpreted - though maybe I'm paranoid.


What do you think? 


Other thoughts on physical contact with YLs here at Ranting Manor. 

Dictation #1

While we are all in thrall to the wonderful technological advances of web 2.0 – the social media, the tools for this, that and the other, the IWBs etc, it's important to remember the stuff that doesn't necessarily need technology. In fact, most of the oldest ideas require no materials at all, just willing participants. They are also incredibly useful as a back up when the technology fails! So, it is here that I will declare that...

...I LOVE dictation!

There is a huge variety of ways dictation can be employed in the classroom. I suppose what qualifies as 'dictation' depends on your personal opinion, but why restrict yourself?

Rinvolucri and Davis, in the introduction to their book 'Dictation' (CUP, 1988) refer to old-fashioned experiences of dictation at school:

“In many cases the teacher probably read you the text, dictated it, and then read it a third time so you could check through. To many people this, and nothing else, IS dictation. The picture begins to change if you ask yourself a series of questions:

Who controls the dictation, and who to?

Who controls the pace of the dictation?

Who chooses or creates the text?

Who corrects it?”

When you challenge the old-fashioned ideas of what dictation is, it's possible to come up with a great number of variations on the theme, for learners of all levels and ages.

I wanted to write a short series on dictation activities partly to share some knowledge that I have acquired, but also to encourage others reading this blog to share dictation activities they like using, or suggest variations on the ones I write about.

Single Word Dictation

There are various activities that I use regularly and have done for a few years because they always work well; from single word dictations, through sentences, to longer texts. I use a lot of single word dictation activities with young learners and it's these single word activities that I going to write about here.

Anagrams

Really simple. Just dictate the letters of a word that have been rearranged to make an anagram. The students copy the letters down and raise their hand when they've changed it into the correct word. For example, dictate 'rolicoced'. The first student to raise their hand and show you the correctly written word 'crocodile' wins a point!

A variation on the above, is that there is no writing involved. The teachers spells the anagram to the students and they put up their hand and say the answer. This can be done as individuals or in pairs/ teams. Kids love puzzles, so this one presents them with an enjoyable challenge and recycles vocabulary you want to focus on.

Secret Code

Instead of dictating a word, dictate a number that is a letter in code (A – 1, B – 2, etc). The students can then attempt to solve the puzzle first, again individually or in teams. For me it works well in pairs, with the students taking turns writing. This is a great way of revising numbers and vocabulary. It's best to have the alphabet with numbers on display for them to refer to; it's very difficult otherwise.

Air drawing

One of my current classes, some 10 year olds with a few years of English, absolutely love this one. It's very simple. I draw the letters of a word in the air (it's backwards from their perspective, but they can still do it) and they write the answers down or put up their hands to say the answer. I don't do points for them with this, they're way too competitive and argumentative as it is! A great tool for this is a laminated A4 piece of coloured paper and board pens, the students write, clean and write again!

Mouthing

This is great for helping very young learners to recognise the shapes made by the mouth when pronouncing words. Usually after a drilling activity when we've done some loud and quiet and slow and fast pronunciation practice, I quieten things down a bit by simply mouthing a word silently and they point to the corresponding flashcard, saying the word out loud themselves. To increase the challenge and make it a more normal dictation, the students could write the word instead, or make the word with scrabble letters - which is one of my favourite writing tasks with YLs.

Maths Dictation

(Obviously not a single word, but it's only a short dictation!)

Another way of practising number recognition while introducing a cross-curricular aspect is to dictate a few numbers and have the students add them up. The first student to reach the correct answer wins. To make things more complicated, a whole sum could be dictated as long as the students are familiar with the vocabulary – such as 4 plus 7, multiplied by 2, minus 5 equals...(answer below!) Some of my students love maths (I always hated it) and they enjoy doing these calculations.

To sum up

The great thing about all these activities is that the students can do it themselves in pairs, groups or in open class, making it more learner-centred. Once they get into it they often don't even need me as a referee, which is great for taking a back seat to listen carefully to their pronunciation and check for gaps in their knowledge.

Just an idea: A variation on simple points scoring systems is to draw lines to create an object, for example a house. The first student or team to 'build' their house, wins! I think this idea is from 'Young Learners' by Sarah Philips, which is a book worth having if you teach kids.

For more ideas, visit these pages as well:

Marta's blog reminded me to get on with my previously brain-confined dictation post and the first 12 pages of the wonderful 'Dictation', by Davis and Rinvolucri, can be found here on google books.

Disclaimer: The ideas I present here are things that I have acquired from who knows where during my time as a teacher. I honestly don't know if any have previously been presented in copyrighted material. I am not aware that any of these ideas appear in the aforementioned book 'Dictation'. If anyone knows of printed material from which one of these has come, please let me know and I can then give credit where it is due.