Graffiti creator: would I want to use it?

Editing the letters individually, with greater contrast between them, would have made the word ("create") more legible

Here's one I'm not so sure about: graffiticreator.net...

It's fun, though I'd have liked an un-do button, but maybe that's just me: I've never actually had a go with an aerosol can and reckon true graffiti artists don't, ever, "un-do"... ,-)! But would I actually want to use this with students?

Criteria for using technology
When I'm lesson planning and look at a website or an activity of some sort involving the use of any technology, I ask myself the same questions I suggest in the technology session on our CELTA course:

• Is it a suitable level of difficulty, language and maturity for my learners...?
• Will my learners enjoy doing it...? Will it engage them...?
• How can / must I adapt it...?
• What are the aims...?
• What are the stages...?
• What language is being used, practised and learnt...?
• What are we going to do with what we've found / created...?
• What is the return-on-investment (time spent setting up, in class...)?
  

With graffiticreator.net, my doubt is really over the language that is going to be produced and used: is it merely going to engage my learners at the visual level and absorb them in understanding how the site works, or am I going to be able to create a task that will really produce a lot of meaningful (linguistic) interaction?

Decision time...
On balance, that looks to me like one that will go into my "For the kids" file in my favourites -- for my own kids, that is, they'll like it, but I don't think I'll be using it in the classroom with learners.

Now, on the other hand, if we had a class blog, and I wanted to decorate it, and we had -- say -- a new "graffiti word a week", and the kids wanted to do it in their own time, at home, or when I'd got someone finished all their other work, then I might consider it -- but my aim would not then be a linguistic one.

The power of story telling

Once upon a time...

Another one I didn't have to search for, as it came to me via my RSS feed: an article on storytelling by Mario Rinvolucri on my favourite ELT site, teachingenglish.org.uk.

Story telling, Mario says, is "a uniquely powerful linguistic and psychological technique in the hands of a language teacher" and suggests various story-telling techniques that a teacher can use.

One of the most frequently asked questions on our post-course support group must surely be "Can anyone suggest games for younger learners?". Yes, here, here and here, but is it games or stories that will really engage your young learners?

For slightly older learners, ones that can already write in English (though it doesn't have to be at a particularly high level), don't just stick to story-telling, I'd say, but get your learners to enjoy story-writing...

To learn more about story-telling, there is also the excellent Storytelling with Children, by Andrew Wright.

Working with images

I've only just flicked through it quickly but Ben Goldstein's Working with Images (Cambridge 2008) looks interesting, with "75 practical teaching ideas for the language classroom".

Apart from the general information about the book, the information on the Cambridge website includes a page of useful links for working with images.

Working with Images, which comes with a CD-Rom image bank, is in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series.

Wanting to understand your young learners

The "Think" section of the TeachingEnglish.org.uk site is one with lots of articles which are well worth reading for anyone just starting out in English teaching. There are things that will be familiar to you from your Celta course, but other things that might be new to you.

One that caught my eye this morning (among my RSS feeds) was one on Making a difficult young learner group better, with the problems of teaching young learners being one that your Celta course won't have dealt with in any great depth.

The article suggests three "possible strategies":

• Introducing a competitive element
• Clarity of class rules
• Rewarding co-operation

My own experience of teaching young learners, and what my colleagues have shared with me, suggests however that there's something else, something more fundamental: that is not your learners' attitude to English (or to you) but your attitude to them that really makes all the difference to how they behave in class.

Take a genuine interest in them (what are they interested in, what makes them tick, what makes them misbehave...), start to understand them -- start to want to understand them -- and you'll have started to make yourself a better teacher of a difficult age group.

Related post >> RSS feeds for ELT

The most annoying invention ever

Karaoke: if it's such fun, can it really be the most annoying invention ever?

Because its quirky news stories make great texts for use in class, Ananova.com is one of my default home pages: I spend 20 seconds a day there when I log on scanning the headlines in case there's something I could use in class.

One that caught my eye today: The most annoying invention ever: the Karaoke.

As well as the language and reading comprehension work that might come out of the text, my 20 seconds are about long enough to image my students, pre-reading, brainstorming their own lists of the world's worst inventions; and, post-reading, writing up their suggestions on a class blog and then taking a vote on it, possibly involving students in another class -- and possibly using the poll option that you can easily include on your blog if you are using Blogger to publish it (the steps being Layout >> Add a gadget >> Poll).

20 seconds a day scanning the stuff that comes to me: that, rather than wasting the day trawling Google-is-Evil...

Technology lesson planning 101

On the excellent Doug Johnson Blue Skunk Blog, there are two recent articles well worth reading: one is Seven brilliant things teachers do with technology, in which I particularly like the idea that we should "use technology's engagement (not entertainment) power" [>> more].

The second is Seven stupid mistakes teachers make with technology, "stupid" being a word he uses with some reservation.

I've got the same reservations myself about "stupid". "Can I ask a stupid question?" people sometimes ask me in technology seminars, meaning a question that might seem stupid to experts, an idea that embarrasses the questioner. But the question never turns out to be stupid: "basic" is perhaps the word being sought.

As regards using technology, let's call it "silly", shall we? To my mind, the silliest mistake you can make as a teacher is not having a Plan B in case the technology goes wrong, as at some point it inevitably will.

"Silly" is a word I hear teachers use: they say, for example, "you just look silly in front of all your students when there's no Internet connection".

But that's the great thing about having a "Plan B": if you do, you won't look silly, on the contrary, you'll look slickly professional, which as a learner is how I like my teacher to look...