Day 3- Making Use of Technology Tools Course in York Associates

Hello! Ciao! Hallo! Czesc! Moi! 

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: