hi everyone! I would like to share the last part of our very fruitful training course. It was informative, inspiring and motivating. My colleagues in the course from different countries made it fun and impeccable! If you want to learn about this course and plan to take it here is the link: http://york-associates.co.uk/course/empowerment-in-ict-skills/ (The course is not only for English teachers but teachers teaching all different subjects.) At the end of our course, we received our certificates :)
here is the last group photo of ours:
thanks for everything guys! I learned a lot and will definitely share what I learned from my colleagues and with you my dear followers :) follow me :)
Such a fruitful day with full of nice discussions
and great exchanges of ideas!
The day started with what we covered the previous
day. We made a list of all the websites, applications and ideas we covered to
make sure that we were ok with them. It is always nice to start the day with
remembering the previous day’s subjects.
We talked about the fact that ‘Silence is good.’ in
classrooms from time to time especially on teachers’ part. We should always
give our students enough time at least to finish their sentences.
Then, our trainer, Chia, shared an interesting
metaphor for teachers: ‘Energetic antenna’. I liked it and I also believe that
teachers are sending energy to the classroom and it generally sets the mood. If
we as teachers have high energy and are positive, our students also reflect
this. This was also mentioned by our teacher trainer Jade in my institution.
She says that our classrooms are our mirror images.
Later, Chia talked about literal videos on YouTube and showed us some
examples. It was a pity that I hadn’t known about them before. They are
hilarious! At the same time, they can be quite interesting to apply in our
classrooms to teach description language. We can each give a group of students
a short music video and ask them to describe at least one minute of it just like
it is done in literal videos. Here are some examples you may want to have a
look at to understand these videos:
Then, we did a very nice activity related to descriptive language again. You can use this activity in your classes. It is very easy and almost no preparation is needed before the lesson.
Pair up the students. They should sit in a way that one of them should face the screen and the other partner the opposite direction just like this:
The student facing the screen describes what s/he sees on the video. The other student is trying to visualise the video. In the second half of the video, teacher pauses the video and pairs swap the chairs and the other student starts describing.
At the end students watch the full video and compare what they have in their minds about the video and how the real video actually look.
It is a great activity to practise the present continuous tense.You can practise certain vocabulary items too. Our trainer used a Misery Bear video with us today. If you want to have a look at it:
Hello! We are back together in the second day of our intensive course! We started the day by evaluating yesterday's session with the website that we were introduced yesterday: answergarden.ch
Later, it was time for homework checking! :) We shared the photos we have taken in York about the things we have found interesting/ strange things about this city. Here are the ones taken by me:
These full two plates were served for one person for lunch! I was so shocked when I saw it that I could actually eat almost nothing.
This is the sugar served at the famous tea room, Betty's Cafe which looked different than the ones we have in Turkey (cube shaped).
I consider myself really lucky because every minute of the course we learn something new both from our trainer and from our colleagues. Here are some of the other websites that have been recommended by our trainer or my colleagues:
https://www.geocaching.com/play: If you travel a lot and want to discover parts of your destination that are really worth visiting, would you like to do that like a treasure hunt? In many different parts of the world, people are hiding little secret things and you need to discover where they are! It is really exciting. You can even try this in your own town. Maybe there are still some places you haven't been yet...
http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html : This is a very nice easy to use moviemaker program with which you can prepare simple animation videos in a minute. It seems it is better for younger learners but I am sure students at all ages would all like to see a very short dvolver video in their lesson. At least we enjoyed it. :)
https://www.spreaker.com: We were introduced this podcast program by our trainer Chia. It is a free program where you can record podcasts with clicking one button only, literally! It is worth trying it with your students because it is really practical, but bear in mind that you cannot edit your podcasts in speaker. If you are going for something more professional, you need to use additional editing websites.
In our course, we also enjoy ourselves a lot! For example, I am the youngest member of the group and my dear colleague Andrea pointed out this fact in a funny way in his blog:
World famous Shambles Street. It is really interesting to see all these different kinds of stores including jewellery stores and thinking that they were all butchers in the past.
York Minster
Train to the National Railway Museum (the biggest in the world)
This TED talk by Sugata Mitra talks about a very interesting experiment he conducted with children from different parts of the world. He introduces some very controversial ideas related to the role of the teachers and the great capacity that all children have.
A really nice TED talk by Susan Cain about introverts (who likes spending time by themselvess rather thanks spending time with a group of people). What makes this TED talk very interesting is the fact that the speaker is an introvert herself and she shares her own experiences from her own life.
As we, 9 enthusiastic teachers from 5 different countries, got together in York Associates today, we knew that we were about to learn a great amount of information about using technology in classroom.
We first met our instructor, a great expert on this issue: Chia Suan Chong.
(You can learn more about her and what she has been doing about ELT and using technology effectively at this website: https://chiasuanchong.com)
Since the first moment we met, we have been learning a lot of new things! It is just great!
Here are some things that my colleagues in education may find interesting and useful:
For example, let's imagine that your students are going to write an essay about a topic, say: advantages of traveling abroad for university students.
As the first step of writing an essay, you want your students to brainstorm about this for a couple minutes.
What you can do is to create a question onanswergarden.chand the website will give you the link to your question. After your students are done with their brainstorming, they can visit this link and share their ideas with limited characters (so they don't write for too long)
In a second, without writing down anything on the board by yourself, you have all the ideas from your students on the screen!
