April Fool's Day

The excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site has a lesson plan for April Fool's Day (April 1st, regrettably, from a teacher's point of view, this year on a Sunday!), plus links, etc.

TeachingEnglish.org.uk is a site you definitely want to bookmark (make one of your "Favourites"): it's got lots of great advice on the basics of English language teaching.

Once you've got a lot more teaching experience, you might want to move on to another excellent British Council, SearchEnglish.

More lesson plans for special days of the year here.

Word collages

Life: a collage...

In the Spanish Department here at IH Barcelona we have a blog project "Las palabras más bellas", in which students each write a post on what they consider the "loveliest" word.

A colleague, Susana Ortiz, got her learners to produce collages to accompany their words. She took a pile of magazines, scissors and glue into class, and had a fun 15-minute activity which also produced a surprising amount of language ("Can you lend me the scissors?", "Has anyone got a picture of a flower?" etc).

For the blog, the students used a digital camera to photograph their collages (with more language practice discussing how best to take the pictures...)

It was fun, it produced a lot of language practice, it had a neat end product and made only minimal, non-intrusive use of technology...

I'd suggest that is how we should use technology in our classrooms.

How to murder your teacher

How to murder your teacher... nearly 1.6 million results!

It was a "Good Week" for the prosecution [says The Week]. An expert testified that somebody Googled "how to commit murder" on the PC of a New Jersey woman charged with murdering her husband.

I did a quick "Google" myself, as you can see. Teaching is a lot more dangerous than previously thought, it seems ,-)!

Wikipedia, not the worst place to look

Wikipedia... Not the first, or the only place to look, but no worse than anywhere else

An article on Tim Stahmer's excellent Assorted Stuff blog caught my eye among in my RSS feeds this morning.

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia gets knocked because "anyone" can contribute to it, but as Tim suggests in his Finding Value in Wikipedia post, "anyone" can also deceive Google.

Wikipedia isn't the first place I'd go to find out about -- say -- TEFL, but then again neither is Google.

What you do get with Wikipedia is as good a starting point as anywhere else on the cyber dungheap (aka the Internet). If Wikipedia doesn't give you the answer, often the links it provides you with will...

10 seconds: the makings of half a class

As one of my default start pages, yahoo.co.uk, has failed to turn up any interesting stories for class lately, I've made ananova.com's "Quirkies" section one of my "starts". (I'm using Firefox, not Internet Explorer, and open six pages by default, every time I log on).

What am I looking for when I spend 10 seconds a day scanning pages like that? A headline that makes me curious, that makes me want to read. I figure that if that's the case, then I can write the headline up on the board, and my students will then want to read the story in class.

Among the items this morning: Teen turns down £8.5m, about how a "Cheltenham teenager has reportedly turned down £8.5million to sell his website".

It gives the name of the kids (news) website, Sharpenews, and I guessed that must be sharpenews.com. 89m "hits" in 18 months...? It must be a brilliant site!

Whether or not I actually occupy class time visiting the site, I think I've got the makings of my kids' class for this afternoon...

I hate Second Life

Second Life: 4.6m+ "residents", supposed to be exciting... But frankly, it's not

Second Life (or SL), a 3D Virtual Reality platform, is being touted as the next big thing for learning, and just about anything else you care to think about, for that matter.

Here's the Future Technologies Advisory Group (who describe themselves as "a consulting and media group") raving about it:

In other words, 3D is a much better user interface. This is not surprising: while we have been working with documents for only a few hundreds of years, we have evolved fast responses to the real 3D universe, like running from predators and hunting prey, for hundreds of thousands of years. Now that technology permits doing so, 3D VR will become the preferred online interface for users with powerful PCs and enough bandwidth. Nothing exceptional though: your home PC and DSL are probably more than good enough to run Second Life.

First of all, it would be interesting to have some stats on what percentage of the population are currently "users with powerful PCs and enough bandwidth" and what percentage could fix things if their home PC doesn't prove to be "good enough to run Second Life"... Like, you've got the wrong kind of videocard. Duh! What do I do now...?

Beware of, be skeptical of any and all claims that are made for any and all technology, I say. To say that "3D [and hence Second Life] is a much better user interface" strikes me as being utter nonsense. To suggest that we've been "running from predators and hunting prey, for hundreds of thousands of years" and will thus take to SL like ducks to water is, frankly, utter crap.

What percentage of the population... :

• have ever run from predators or hunted prey in the real world?
• actually like First Person Shooter (FPS) video games?
  
• actually like any video games?
• actively hate video games?
  

I mention FPS video games [definition] because that's essentially what SL is. You "see" yourself in a virtual world, and wander round doing things (er, what things, if we're supposed to be teaching/learning languages...?).

But there is one important exception: SL is not exciting (unless you happen to be into cybersex, that is) -- you don't run away from anyone, shoot anything, get excited or feel scared (etc).

According to Wikipedia: "[Although] Second Life is sometimes referred to as a game, it does not have [my emphasis] points, scores, winners or losers, levels, an end-strategy." Er, the point of "playing" it...?

What percentage of FPS video games players like SL...?

More about Second Life
Second Life | Wikipedia entry | Second Life Education Research

A room with a view

About 40, tie, expensive coat, shoulder bag, reading freebee newspaper...

I liked this idea, which came from DevelopingTeachers.com's March newsletter, in which Hall Houston describes some of the ideas in his new book The Creative Classroom (Lynx Publishing).

Take your students to the window of your classroom. Tell the class to choose a person outside and describe him or her briefly (you probably don't want them to stare). Now, everyone sits down and writes a paragraph about the topic from the person's perspective.

You might suggest a few ideas to them to get them going -- what is the person's name, age, etc; where are they going, what are they thinking etc.

Possibly you might use a digital camera to take pictures and use these and the paragraphs to decorate the classroom walls.

And of course if you had a blog you could publish them there (see also "comments"...)

The newsletter is well worth subscribing to.