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Posts tagged tefl
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 3 – Get Your Blog Moving!
01 year ago
In this final part of my short series on how to blog with EFL students. If you missed the first two you can find them here:
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 1 – Setting Up a Blog
and here:
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 2 – Blogs Grow With Comments
In this final set of slides I’ll discuss a couple of the essential things every blogger should be able to do to whether they be a teacher or a student. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of everything a blogger should do, but it should help you get the final basics in place.
Uploading a photo to your blog post makes it far easier on the eye and therefore more likely to be read. Adding a link to other related posts or interesting information helps give your reader a bit of background and adds context to your post and finally sorting out your profile lets your reader find out a bit more about you which, hopefully, will make them more likely to want to connect with you.
So, on to the slides: Once again, please do ask if there is anything you’re unclear about or if you want a bit of help with something. If you think I’ve missed out another vital skill for bloggers, do tell me. I’d love to know and will happily update the slides in the future. Down there at the bottom in the comments section, let it rip! 
Take care and all the best,
Seth.
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 2 – Blogs Grow With Comments
21 year ago
As I mentioned in the first post in this series blogging offers a lot of scope for authentic communication from EFL students. From “guest speakers” to reflective jornals, to simple discussions, to stronger “opinion pieces” there are all sorts of ways EFL teachers can use blogs with their learners.
For example this year at the high-school I work at, we’ve been discussing social issues that we feel strongly about in our personal blogs. We’ve also used a class blog to share hints and advice for classmates about how they can improve their own blogs.
Although the slides in this series are all quite specific to my own students (and trainee teachers,) I hope they can be helpful to other teachers and teacher-trainers, too. I’ve learnt a lot from what other people have generously shared over the internet and I hope now to be able to “put a bit back” for others.
In this second set of slides we discuss how important comments are to a blog (and a blogger) and how to enable them. The slides use screenshots from Blogger itself. On occasion things have changed in Blogger slightly from when I originally wrote this guide, but the basics have remained more or less the same.
If you want any more information about edublogging, or if you’d like to share a lesson idea that you’ve tried out with your students, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.
All the very best!
Seth.
Death By PowerPoint (and how to avoid it!)
21 year ago
I’m sure at some point in your career you have been bored to tears by a PowerPoint presentation. Let’s face it, who hasn’t! The same, I’m sure, is true for our students.
This is the presentation I gave at the IATEFL BESIG Rome mini-summer-conference in June 2010 to help teachers improve their PowerPoint presentations.
I was really pleased with the feedback I got from the presentation. It seemed to strike a chord with many of the teachers, school owners, writers and others who were present. (The poor folk had probably suffered too many terrible presentations in their careers!)
I hope these slides can help both people wishing to improve their own powerPoint presentations, teachers looking for a few ideas of ways to use PowerPoint with their classes and teachers who would like to do a lesson for their students about the basics of good slide design.
As always with “good” presentation slides, they only really work properly if they have a presenter there to explain what on earth they are talking about! I hope anyhow that you will find this useful. The presentation is split into two basic parts, an introduction which includes a lesson plan, and the second section (around slide number 50) which actually discusses the “Dos and Don’ts” when creating a PowerPoint presentation.
Have you got any extra hints and tips to share about how to create high-quality PowerPoint slides? Have you ever seen a truly awful presentation that you want to purge from your memory? Please leave us a comment to tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!
All the best,
Seth.
High School Digme Courses Inspire
03 years ago
Minneapolis Roosevelt High School students have been using blogs, Twitter, wikis, video, podcasts and other digital media in their English lessons.
At the University of Minnesota they have been looking at how the Roosevelt High School “Digme” programme has given students an opportunity to engage with English lessons in a way they never did previously. Judging by some of the feedback in the video, the use of Web 2.0 tools has inspired the students so much that they now really look forward to their English lessons.
Apart from mygeneral interest in the use of ICT in education, this program has really grabbed my attention as the school seems to be doing almost exactly the same kind of activity that I’ve been doing with my students this year at Martino Martini in Italy. I too have been using Twitter to facilitate e-twinning, podcasts and voice recordings to encourage oral fluency videos of science experiments and a social studies video to enthuse the students and encourage them to use the target language.I have also been using a wiki to co-ordinate the whole programme and give teachers, students and parents one central place to check up on the latest classroom activities.
In short, they’re doing just what I’m doing. It’s nice to know that you’re heading in the right direction! 
Have a look at this video of the U.S. students to see how positive they seem about the whole project.
Improve your PowerPoints in 45 minutes
03 years ago
I saw a fantastic video by Alvin Trusty recently where he talks about how to create high-quality PowerPoint presentations. There are many great ideas in his video, among the ones that I really liked were the use of Flickr Creative Commons photos, the excellent Flickr photo search tool Compfight (which also finds creative Commons photos for you) and Alvin’s move and grow Powerpoint animation (watch the video to find out how this works!) I used the advice in this video to write the Philosophically Speaking PowerPoint lesson I recently posted here. It’s good advice!
Although this video is 45 minutes long, I think you’ll agree that it’s 45 minutes that are VERY well spent! Enjoy!
How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.
WARNING! This video will seriously damage your contentedness with previous PowerPoints you’ve made! I am now re-doing several of my favourite PowerPoint lessons!
Best,
Seth.
Speaking Philosophically – CLIL Lesson
03 years ago
This year I’m working as a CLIL/ICT teacher at Martino Martini, a high school in Mezzolombardo, Italy. It’s a really interesting project where I co-teach different subjects together with the “regular” class teacher. The difference with this CLIL project is however that I don’t just help teach the subject in English, but I have to use technology to teach the subject too. This means that so far this year I have taught subjects as diverse as History, Biology and Social Sciences using all sorts of different Web 2.0 technology such as wikis, web-based video, online surveys and so on. I tell you what, it’s been great fun! Take a look at our wiki if you’d like to see some of my students’ great work.
For one of my philosophy classes recently I decided to do a speaking activity based on one of the arguments from the BBC World Philosophy Day article from last year. As philosophy is often taught as a fairly dry subject here in Italy, I decided to “spruce it up a bit” by using some of the great creative commons photographs from Flickr to illustrate the arguments. I put them together as a Powerpoint presentation and I hope you’ll agree that the results are pretty good!
Although the PowerPoint presentation deals with philosophical ideas that Kant had, I’m sure that many speaking classes would really enjoy the subject. The references to Kant are infact only in the last slide. I used this lesson with a class of 17-18 yr olds. It does deal with some pretty “full on” issues, so have a good look through the slides before taking it into your class.
Click on the image to download the PowerPoint file. It’s 14 MB so it might take a minute or two!
!!STOP PRESS!!!
Thanks to some great ideas from The Webheads, I’m now also going to do this lesson as a VoiceThread. So, if you (or more likely your English class) fancy joining in the debate, click on the comments button in this VoiceThread version below:
Best,
Seth.
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