Watching myself teach – the encore

I have just submitted my Reflection and Action (RA) Stage 4 for my Delta, and it feels like a weight off my shoulders! The four stages are, briefly:

1. Teach an experimental practice lesson, where you try something you have never done before.
2. State your teaching beliefs, highlight your main weaknesses, create an action plan to deal with them and describe how you will collect data connected to your plan.
3. Show how you have progressed with your action plan and what data collection methods have helped you. Create another action plan, highlighting different weaknesses if necessary.
4. Describe your teaching beliefs now, and whether they have changed. Show what was most useful from the RA process and create a plan for the future (watch this space to find out how my blog will be incorporated into this).

I’ve already shared a video from a class I taught in January, and I learnt so much from it, I decided to do it again. The quality is a bit better this time, helped in large part to being in a bigger classroom! I have put up two excerpts here, which I would be interested to hear what you think of.

The group were B1 intermediate, mostly from Brazil, with one German and one Saudi. We were working on the money vocabulary from unit 2a of New English File Intermediate (pages 20 and 147), including listening to the song Ka-Ching. The lesson was 1h45.

The first video shows all of the times I gave instructions during the lesson, including a couple of remedial instructions when students didn’t understand. One student got very stressed because they really didn’t understand the first two exercises – I haven’t included this in the video, obviously, but I think it’s important to know that before you watch. Instructions are one of the areas I highlighted in my Stage 3 action plan, and I still need a lot of work on this. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I’ve tried writing instructions down, and have also audio recorded myself, but neither of these seem to have helped particularly. The only thing that seems to have changed is that I now use a few more instruction-checking questions, but clearly not enough! The same video also shows examples of me feeding back from exercises and drilling pronunciation.

The second video shows a focus on ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’, which were causing students some problems. There is a black-screen transition in the first video to show you the point at which this was covered in the lesson. (I divided them so you don’t have to watch 25 minutes if you don’t want to!)

Apart from looking for instructions suggestions, I’m not going to ask specific questions as I don’t want you to miss the gorilla

Thanks in advance!

Photo by me, shared on eltpics

An improvised monologue

I spent Saturday reading all about listening in preparation for my second LSA (Language Skills Assignment). While working through Penny Ur’s Teaching Listening Comprehension, I came across a few ideas which I’d like to try out. From both that and Listening (Anderson/Lynch), I’ve realised how little ‘natural’ English our learners generally hear. They often hear scripted things from the CD/mp3/films, or ‘teacher’ English from us, but not a lot of false starts, stuttering, repetition, and all of the other features of a normal English conversation. This was my variation on a grid activity suggested by Ur which I did with pre-intermediate students.

• I introduced a few adventure sports using pictures.
• Students drew a grid in their books (sorry for it’s a bit of a mess!):
  like                             |                  would like
  ________________________|____________________________
  √
  ________________________|____________________________
  x
• I had a similar grid on my paper, where I had listed a few of the adventure sports:
  like              /                  would like
  __________________/____________________________
  √                       skydiving    /climbing
  __________________/waterskiing_________________
  x                        skiing         /snowboarding
  .                   rollerskating   /
• I monologued about the sports above, telling the students what I like/don’t like doing and what I would (not) like to try. I made it into a kind of story, mixing up the sports: “When I lived in the Czech Republic, I went skiing, and I really didn’t like it because…” The first time they listened, all the students had to do was count how many sports were in each box.
• After students had compared in pairs (in true CELTA fashion!), I then monologued again, in a different order, but with roughly similar elements to my story. This time, students had to write down which sports were in each box. We then checked it on the board.
• Finally, students created their own tables, and did the same two-step process – listening and counting, then listening and writing.

The only place I was happy for my skis to be

Did it work?

Mostly, yes. One of the students even said it was much more useful doing listening like this. I ended up doing the monologue four times, as the first time students thought they were counting sports for themselves – they didn’t realise it was about me! Once they got the hang of it though, they seemed to be motivated, and were concentrating hard to try and get the right answers. They also enjoyed the chance to do it themselves afterwards.

It also served as a useful basis for looking at ‘like + ing’ and ‘would like to + infinitive’ which was the main focus of the lesson.

Doing it again

I’d pull out a few more phrases from my own monologue to help students build their own stories. I also needed to make it clearer that it was a listening exercise when I started! Apart from that, I’d follow a very similar procedure again.

(This is one of a series of shared mini reflections on some of the activities I’m trying out during my Delta. The first was here, the second here.)

Picture role plays

I’ve been investigating role plays as part of my Delta reflection. I rarely use them because I never enjoyed them as a language student, but I think some students would respond to them very well.

Today I adapted an activity from Role Play by Gillian Porter Ladousse, called ‘Picture role plays’, with pre-intermediate (A2+) students.

• I put a few pictures from eltpics around the room. Each picture showed a minimum of two people, and it was relatively easy to imagine that they were having a conversation. First, students walked around in pairs discussing what they could see. To prompt them, I had the question words Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? written on the board.

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @acliltoclimb, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

• Each pair chose their favourite picture and took it back to their desk.
• They chose one person in their picture to write a mini biography of.
• These were quite short, so I then asked students to read all the biographies and add one question under each.
• The students then had to ‘inhabit’ the person they wrote a biography of and have a conversation with the other person in their photo.
• Finally, they wrote out the conversation.

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @inglishteacher, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Shaun Wilden brought picture role plays to my attention during his seminar at the recent IH Online Conference. You can watch his session here and read the original description of the activity here.

Did it work?

Yes and no. The quieter students were very creative in the biography, and added lots of extra details. My favourite was ‘My grandmother loves playing chess and is the world champion.’ However, when it came to the roleplay, the conversation was quite stilted. They did ‘inhabit’ the role a little, but for the quieter students this was very difficult. The more confident students really seemed to enjoy it, and were arguing quite a lot about the correct language to use.

We had been practising indirect questions during the week, and one or two of the quieter students got them into their conversations. However, I didn’t have a particularly clear aim for the activity. It was very much a ‘Friday afternoon’ activity.

Doing it again

With role plays, you definitely need some kind of clear aim. Why do the students need to imagine the conversations between the people in the photos?

Most of the language work I did with the students was in their pairs. It would be useful to work more with the language and build on it further.

We didn’t have time to repeat the role play, and this is definitely something the students would benefit from.

Do you have any other advice?

(This is one of a series of shared mini reflections on some of the activities I’m trying out during my Delta. The first was here.)

English UK North

The English UK North conference took place at my school, IH Newcastle, on 6th October 2012. I presented on ‘Twitter for Professional Development’.

Here are all of the links I shared during my presentation:

• Twitter
• Russell Stannard’s introduction to Twitter
• Me on Twitter
• Barbara Sakamoto’s starter PLN: recommendations of tweeters for you to follow
• My list of International House schools on Twitter (please tell me if I have missed any)
• ELTchat
• ELTpics and the ‘Take a photo and…‘ blog
• Tweetdeck - a way to organise Twitter
• Diigo – a social bookmarking site
• Google Reader – a way to keep track of blogs you are following

You can see the slides from the presentation here:

(for some strange reason, slideshare has changed some of the formatting so a couple of slides look a little odd – apologies)

For a more detailed explanation of how to make the most of Twitter, look here.

And if you join, please let me know by tweeting me @sandymillin

IH TOC 50

International House is celebrating 50 years of teacher training courses. The first course took place in 1962, and was the forerunner to what is now the CELTA. As part of the celebrations, a one-day online conference has been organised for Friday 25th May 2012, and I am one of the presenters.

As it is my first webinar, I thought I would present on a topic I am familiar with, so I chose ‘Twitter for Professional Development’.

Here are all of the links I shared during my presentation:

• Twitter
• Russell Stannard’s introduction to Twitter
• Me on Twitter
• Barbara Sakamoto’s starter PLN: recommendations of tweeters for you to follow
• My list of International House schools on Twitter (please tell me if I have missed any)
• IHTOC50 on Tweetchat (IH Teachers Online Conference)
• ELTchat
• ELTpics and the ‘Take a photo and…‘ blog
• Tweetdeck – a way to organise Twitter
• Diigo – a social bookmarking site
• Google Reader – a way to keep track of blogs you are following

For a more detailed explanation of how to make the most of Twitter, look here.

Thank you to International House for providing me with the opportunity to present this webinar, and to Oxford University Press for providing the platform to host the workshop.

Ideas for an IWB…

…or a projector!

I shared these ideas and links with colleagues at my school during a 45-minute workshop. They are meant to help us all get more use out of our electronic whiteboards, which are sometimes only used as an oversize television, or at best a way to access Google. I presented four tools, and demonstrated a couple of ways to use each of them. Since I’m not too confident with the pen functions of our IWBs, and the calibration needs to be redone quite regularly, all of these tools could equally well be used with projector too.

PowerPoint

Not just a presentation tool! PowerPoint is actually very versatile, and is great for vocabulary revision games. There are many templates on the web which are (relatively) easy to download and adapt. I have also written a post showing you how to make two games: one for hidden pictures and the other flashing pictures up quickly for students to remember vocabulary.

Triptico

Triptico is my favourite IWB tool because it is versatile, easy to use, constantly updated, and best of all, free! David has created a video showing how to use a lot of the tools within Triptico. I shared my ideas for using Triptico here and recorded a video showing you how to download it and use word magnets, although it’s a little out-of-date. This is what Triptico looks like now, and there are about twice as many functions as there were a year ago when I made the video:

#eltpics

To declare an interest, I am one of the curators of the Flickr #eltpics site and it is something I am very proud to be a part of. Teachers, writers and other interested parties from all over the world share photos on Twitter, including the #eltpics hashtag in their tweets. A group of us then upload them to Flickr, where they are then available for anybody to use in classroom materials or on blogs, with no need to worry about copyright restrictions. There are only two conditions: that you attribute the photos to the photographer (their name is under each picture) and that you do not make any money from anything featuring the images. At the time of writing, we have just topped 8000 images divided into 66 sets, and we also take requests for topics or types of image which people would like us to add. You can see the 10 most recently uploaded #eltpics at the bottom of the right-hand column on this blog.

How to join in

How to download the photos

Ideas for using the photos – blog

I also shared Big Huge Labs excellent mosaic maker and captioner, which are a great to use with #eltpics. You could use the captioner as a way to revise or introduce a particular piece of language. Here’s a picture I added captions too. It was taken by Ian James (@ij64):

Quizlet

Quizlet is an online flashcards site, where you can search for content which has already been created, or make your own flashcards. The scatter and space race functions are both great for an IWB/projector. I have written a complete guide to Quizlet over on my blog for students.

Further reading

Here are a few other posts I have written with ideas or tips which might also be useful:

• Easy Technology for the EFL Classroom
• Teaching 2.0 in the One-Computer Classroom
• Tools for the 21st-century teacher
• Go online: getting your students to use Internet resources
• Twitter for Professional Development (almost all of the ideas shared here are ones which I found out about through Twitter)

Chiew Pang has a series of games on his blog, which are very good for specific purposes:

• Places in a town
• Pronunciation of regular past simple
• Irregular past simple
• Jigsaw puzzles, including one for adjectives of feeling

Phil Bird has written a post about SmartNotebook tools and activities.

Gareth Davies has a whole blog dedicated to IWBs called ‘Interactive Whiteboards made simple’.

If you have any other ideas, please leave them in the comments.

Enjoy!

Twitter and Blogs for Professional Development (post-IATEFL)

During IATEFL I had quite a few conversations about joining Twitter and starting blogs. I know that both of these processes can be quite daunting when you’re new – it’s only 18 months since I started, and the learning curve at the beginning was pretty steep!

To that end, I’ve collated a few blog posts which might help:

• Twitter for Professional Development - my complete introduction to using Twitter and a couple of other tools to help you with CPD
• A Whole New World of ELT – my first ever post about Twitter and blogs, based around a prezi presentation which includes links to various interesting blogs to follow
• Online Professional Development Survey - the results of a very informal survey I did in January 2011 to see how people use online tools for PD
• Which blog platform should your students use? - by Chris Wilson. The guide is very useful for teachers who are interested in blogging too.
• 11 things you should know about blogging – from ‘Free Technology for Teachers’. A good set of tips to start you off, although I disagree with #2 a little – ‘EFL’ has been working pretty well as a niche for me
• 7 things you really shouldn’t forget to do (Edublogging) – by Karenne Sylvester. Some great advice about things to remember to include on a teaching blog page.

When I have a bit more time, I’ll hopefully write a beginner’s guide to blogging along the lines of the Twitter one above or my Independent English blog (shameless plug there!)

I hope these links help, and if there’s anything you need advice on that isn’t covered here, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do!

My new blog: Independent English

As if two blogs weren’t enough

I set up ‘Independent English‘ for students, with the aim of giving them ideas to help them practise English at home. I plan to post roughly once a week, with each post being a step-by-step guide which they can work through alone or with a teacher. If I have time, I will also record myself reading the post so that students can listen to it if they are not confident readers. It is probably best for B1/Intermediate and higher at the moment, although some posts may be suitable for lower levels later.

The first entry is about podcasts, including a list of links to (in my opinion) good podcasts for learners and native speakers to listen to.

There is also a facebook page for you to ‘like’.

Please feel free to pass the link on to your students, and/or to give me feedback on how to improve the site. Hope you find it useful!

Twitter seminar for CELTA students, January 2012

Here is are the most important things from the seminar which I did this morning for the IH Newcastle CELTA students.

Link to the longer post on Twitter for Professional Development

Sandy Millin on Twitter

The tweets which were sent to us from other Twitter users (from newest to oldest):

Thanks to everyone who sent tweets!

duncan_lydburyDuncan Baker

@

@sandymillin Twitter is a really good way to have almost instant communication with all friends and colleagues round the world – friendly!

elizzabetttamartha ador

@

@sandymillin Hi! I love it because you can interact with people any time and get inmediate response! Greetings from Mexico ! Good luck !

1 hour ago

»

WinnersSchoolsWinners Education

@sandymillin #ELTchat Twitter’s great once you find the right connections.Groups you share interests with or “following” belong to are great

1 hour ago

»

leoselivanLexical Leo

@

@phil3wade @sandymillin I was in Paris for best friend’s bday so didn’t hang out much in the eves with conf crowd – so missed all the action

1 hour ago

»

daveclearyczDave Cleary

@

@sandymillin#eltchat New to twitter but finding it great because of the people, it is a social network not a technological one

1 hour ago

»

phil3wadephil wade

@

@leoselivan @sandymillin I wasn’t there but it seemed like a real benchmark in the EFL/Twitter world.

1 hour ago

»

leoselivanLexical Leo

@sandymillin as someone commented yday – attending confs is a whole diff ball game when you get to meet your Twitter followeres f2f

1 hour ago

»

leoselivanLexical Leo

@sandymillin seems half of my twitter buddies were at #TESOLFrance in Nov – I wish I’d been on Twitter then – could’ve met many inspiring Ts

1 hour ago

»

PhilPethybridgePhilip Pethybridge

Twitter brings things to your attention; provides help/ideas; links to blogs/sites; online staffroom; fun diversions! #eltchat @sandymillin

1 hour ago

»

cgoodeyCarol Goodey

@

@sandymillin Hope I’m in time! Twitter’s a gr8 way to keep up w/ what’s going on in ELT world, learn new ways of doing things, & get support

1 hour ago

»

aClilToClimbChiew Pang

@

@sandymillin hi y’all. It’s grt PD bc the world’s open to us. We shr probs, thoughts, reflectns, resources, life, stories,… #eltchat

1 hour ago

»

cerirhiannonCeri Jones

RT @DaveDodgson: @sandymillin  it takes time to build connections & reap the benefits. Definitely worth it though #ELTchat > agree

1 hour ago

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DaveDodgsonDavid Dodgson

@

@sandymillin Twitter IS great for PD BUT it takes time to build connections & reap the benefits. Definitely worth it though #ELTchat

1 hour ago

»

michaelegriffinMichael Griffin

@

@sandymillin Been using Twitter for about 2 months N have been really impressed with the active engagement in ELT from all around the world

cerirhiannonCeri Jones

@

@sandymillin  Hi!  twitter offers the most amazing variety of voices & experiences of committed, questioning Ts from all over the world

1 hour ago

»

cioccasLesley

@

@sandymillin Twitter has led me to the fabulous community teachers that is #ELTchat & increased my PD 100-fold!

worldteacherAndrea Wade

@

@sandymillin Hi from Vietnam! I get all my best links and info from Twitter and I meet some great people who can answer all my questions!

5 hours ago

»

marekandrewsmark andrews

@

@sandymillin twitter gr8 to share ideas,resources+ 4 you,entering the world of EFL,it’s gd 2 be in touch w/ people whose books u will read!

Out with the old, in with the new

Happy New Year! (By @eltpics)

This will be short and sweet I hope, with the aim that writing down my aims for 2012 is more likely to make them happen!

2011 has been a busy year for me. I spent the first six months living in Brno in the Czech Republic, and the second six in Newcastle, UK. I’ve been to Krakow and Paris. I’ve become part of a huge community of teachers on Twitter, kept two blogs, become a curator for ELTpics on Flickr and completed the IH Certificate in Advanced Methodology and Certificate in Online Tutoring. I have presented training seminars for the first time and won a scholarship to go to IATEFL Glasgow 2012. I have also spent far too long in front of computers and not done anywhere near enough exercise! (I do walk to work every day though)

So, in 2012 I would like to:

• go swimming at least once a week.
• do 10 minutes of non-walking exercise at least three times a week, in addition to swimming.
• present an online seminar for the first time.
• start and maintain a blog aimed at English learners (watch this space).
• start my DELTA.

There are only five aims here, as I feel that should make them more achievable.

Happy New Year to all of you!