Mobile and social media for language learning and teaching - INSETT

Last Friday (October 23) we had an INSETT on this. There weren't that many people there but that didn't matter because the discussion was good. We talked about:

• how we learn and how gaining insights from this can help us understand better what works with our students
• how far we can expect students to take the lead in their own learning
• practical ideas for motivating students and encouraging them to be more autonomous

If you missed the INSETT you can see the prezi presentation we used to guide the discussion and a google doc that has loads of links that go with the topics we tried (not always successfully) to cover. Hope you find them useful!

Are you ready to Dogme?

Dogme certainly seems to be one of the current buzz words in English language teaching – we've even had a dogme session here at our centre (thanks Peter!) So what is it? As I understand, it's all about making as much out of students' input into your class as you can. But don't take my word for it. There are a lot of experts out there ready to give their definitions and specific takes about its implications for what we do in our classes.

Check out:
Scott Thornbury's blog An A-Z of ELT  – and particularly the comments on his posts – for an unwinding debate about what dogme is all about. Scott wrote the classic on the subject - Teaching Unplugged (do we have a copy at our centre? We should!)

He co-wrote the book with Luke Meddings, who is currently the guest writer on the TeachingEnglish website. Lukes's already written there an article, 2 activities: Family snapshot and My wikipedia plus a blog post. And if these inspire you, why not take the opportunity to ask Luke a question while he's around on the  site? All you need to do is to add one to his blog post.

Another dogme blogger to look out for is David Coulter. David's blog – which is endearingly called Language Moments – is based around him providing lesson skeletons – not lesson plans – because if you've got a plan you've probably not got the right dogme mind set to go with the flow of how students are responding to your class. (So forget most of what you learnt on your CELTA/DELTA course!) I personally like his skeletons a lot – they're full of practical ideas for activities to do in class and are obviously the product of a teacher who reflects a lot about what works (and doesn't) in his class.

There are many more dogme ELT bloggers than the 3 I've mentioned here. Perhaps you can add them yourselves in a comment or write another blog post? Or if you've found this useful, let me know and I'll add a follow up.

Spellbinding resources for Young Learners

Draw a stick man is an online resource where - you've guessed it! – you draw a stick man. But then the remarkable thing is that your stick man comes "alive" and starts asking you questions and giving you instructions! I've used it with my Silver 2 class (Primary 9 & 10 year olds) and they were spellbound. We then followed this up up with me giving them a drawing-a-story dictation – which practised the vocabulary we'd learnt, following instructions, prepositions of place (next to, behind etc), some basic adjectives etc. I left the ending of the story up to them – what the monster did when the 2 stick men that they'd drawn escaped (hanging onto a balloon and a kite). So, we ended up by having a round the class interchange about what each monster was doing. Great stuff!

I reckon that Juniors would also buy into drawing a stick man. I've even used it with a Young Adult class for a quick mood change activity – and it seemed to go down well.

Another drawing resource that fits the seasonal theme – Halloween – is Grabba Beast I haven't used it yet but for a fun class activity to revise body parts, colours, adjectives and the obligatory draw a Halloween monster, I'm sure it'd work well.

Fun drawing!

storify: creating stories using social media

Storify, a tool that has been used by news agencies, PR companies, bloggers and others inc the White House, has now been released to the public. Check out As it happened on the BBC and this example to get an idea. As well as the news it can be used to make narratives from vids, tweets, images as well as websites.
Read more or just watch the intro video:

Similarly you could have a look at Storyful

pictory

Pictory is a(nother) online photo journal providing some thoughtful photos with accompanying texts to encourage students to produce some meaningful work, check it out: pictory blog here pictory site here

You could perhaps introduce the theme of personal experience and/or the task of students interviewing their family or friends with Susan Dirgham's 3 minute photo story.

(if you're feeling ambitious don't forget we have moviemaker)

Good & reliable suggestions for lesson plans and class activities using visual stimuli

If you're looking for innovative and well-prepared lesson plans that use visual/video stimuli, try:

• Kieran Donaghy's Film English website 
• Jamie Keddie's LessonStream - which you can search by subject & level

David Mainwood's EFL Smartblog also uses lots of short videos and has lesson plans/activities that focus on grammar concepts. For example, I just used 2 of these for practising the present continuous in a Junior class and the students loved them - particularly the clip about Mr Bean making a sandwich.

Also, don't forget the LearnEnglish website - particularly video-based listenings such as the Word on the street series, I wanna talk about. They come with online activities that work really well on the IWB. Just used this one on Learning languages as an assessed task for an Advanced A class. They wrote the answers to the task first in their notebooks and then we checked them by completing them on the IWB.

Also you can find quirky videos like this one on YouTube about David after the dentist (specially if you've got quirky friends who constantly post links to them on facebook) and, for example, get students to write their comment about the video, randomly distribute them in the class and ask the students to try and identify who wrote the comment.

Another one for vocabulary building: Memrise

This could be an alternative to your class vocabulary bag with the advantage that students can access it from home.

Once you've registered with Memrise you can create your own vocabulary list which you do by adding descriptions/definitions and images. Once you've built up a list, you can play games (and invite your friends to join in with you) that are designed to help you fix the new vocabulary in your brain.