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Milan IATEFL / British Council Conference ’09 (Part 1)
52 years ago
This year’s British Council / IATEFL Conference in Milan was on the theme of CLIL and Learning Technologies. I was really pleased and privileged to give a workshop there, especially seeing as so many of my fellow presenters gave great presentations full of great ideas and useful hints and tips.
By far the biggest highlight of the conference for me was the opportunity to work with such an enthusiastic and participatory group of teachers in my workshop. It was a real privilege to be able to help such an experienced and knowledgeable group of teachers integrate technology into their CLIL teaching. We had great fun during the session, and there was a lot of great positive feedback about the work me and my colleagues at Martino Martini have been doing. There was some great debate too about the practical time constraints of integrating technology into CLIL. I think, all told, we agreed the results are worth the effort.
As I promised the teachers at the conference (cross my heart!) here is the PowerPoint presentation with details of all the ideas and tools we looked at during the workshop. If you are one of those great teachers who came along, I hope this helps you! If you would like try something out with your students and want to talk about it, or if you just fancy a bit of help or advice on something we looked at during the workshop, I’d love to hear from you! Leave me a comment (by clicking on that little box with a number on up there at the top left of this blog post – that will take you to the comments section.)
View more presentations from Seth Dickens.
Finally, be sure to check back again in a day or two and I’ll get the History, Science and Geography resources we looked at posted here as well as our fabulous videos!
All the best,
Seth.
UPDATE: For some crazy reason I think anyone who uses Internet Explorer will not have been able to read this post until now. 
If that includes you, I’m really sorry! I hope you’ll now be able to read this okay. As always, I look forward to reading any comments and would love to continue discussing the work we looked at in my IATEFL workshop with you all.
Seth.
Interactive Scoreboard for Smart Notebook 10
02 years ago
Inspired by the fantastic activities James Hollis talks about on the Teachers Love Smart Boards blog I decided to try out a “Error correction game” with my 4th year class recently.
I wanted to have some sort of scoreboard to keep track of how much each team had “won” by guessing which sentences were correct or not. I thought I’d use something like the excellent Powerpoint scorecards that Dave Foord has on his A6 training site (they’re great – check them out if you haven’t yet). Unfortunately it seems that there isn’t any equivalent for the Smart Notebook 10 software. Undeterred, I thought I’d try my hand at making one myself. I must say I’m quite pleased with the result.
Basically I used the “Flip Along Axis” animation to produce a scoreboard which students or teachers can use with any Smart interactive white board. If you have a look at James’ blog there is a good tutorial on how to do this.
This interactive scoreboard also contains “hyperlinks” so that you can insert a series of questions (up to 10 at the moment, but you can always add more) then you can jump straight to the question you want and jump back to the scoreboard again when your students have answered it.
I hope you enjoy using my lesson. Do let me know with a comment if you find this useful. If you have any questions about how to edit the lesson, again – get in touch with a comment.
Best,
Seth.
Social Media in Plain English
02 years ago
Social Media – Blogs, Podcasts, Photo sharing, Video Blogs (Vlogs) etc – as we know these can be really versatile tools to use with our students.
This video by Lee LeFever from the fantastic Common Craft explains why the “Social” part of social media is bringing new life to publishing while allowing small, content publishers (our students?) to have meaningful interaction with other students and their readers/listeners/viewers via the comments system. If you’re looking for a simple explanation of all this, you can’t go wrong with this golden oldie (from 2008!)
If you have lower-level students you can also find a subtitled version of the video on the Dot Sub website.
Web Search Skills for Language Learners
22 years ago
Many of the lessons I choose to do with my students involve internet search skills. Webquests, research for web-based projects, searching for definitions, there are all sorts of reasons why we ask our students to search the internet. However, we often take it for granted that our students know how to use Google and other search engines effectively. However (as I know to my frustration in Italian) it is actually very difficult to do web searches in another language. For this reason I decided to give my students a helping hand the other day and showed them a few of the useful “search operators” Google has.
After getting the students to brainstorm a few of the words they’d expect to find on Key websites we looked through the worksheet below. This basically talks them through the reasons you need to put quotes around certain search terms, how to search for Word documents, PDFs and other file types and other useful hints and tips.
Feel free to use it with your students, I hope it comes in handy!
All the best,
Seth.
Being a Teacher Inspires
23 years ago
I got the TeacherTube 2008 list of their Top-Voted Videos of 2008 last week. The No. 1 video (based on TeacherTube viewer votes) is this one below. It made me realise what a privilege it is to have an education and therefore what an important and role and huge responsibility we have as educators.
The video is made by 4th grade students an it’s called “My Hero“
The description of the video is: “This movie was made by a group of Grade 4 students in Bradford, Ontario, Canada. It is about a former child soldier, Sidibay, from Sierra Leone. “
It’s truly inspiring.
How could you use this in class?
I think this is such an inspiring video, just like 6 Billion Others which I wrote some lessons ideas for here, it would be a real shame not to use it with students.
- Get your students to write to someone who is their hero. Choose a real person and get them to send the letter too.
- Ask the students to discuss the video together in pairs, then to post a summary of their thoughts about Sidibay as a comment on the original TeacherTube video.
- Record a podcast (or any audio) of your students discussing who their hero is and why. Play it back to the class. Share it with other classes. Ask other classes to record something about their own hero.
- Hold a vote in-class and choose a class hero. Shoot a short video similar to this about the person. Post it to Teacher tube. If your class can’t think of a hero, you could get them to look through http://www.mylifeisastory.org/ They’ll definitely find some amazing, inspiring kids there who could be a good candidate for hero status.
I’d love to know what you think of this video, or if you have any other ideas of how you coould use it in class. Please leave me a comment if you have any ideas you’d like to share.
Warm Regards, Seth
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