Week 4

This week I am going to talk about the use of pictures in the EFL classroom. Like Scott Thornsbury mentions, our students all have different ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge. Students who have a strong spacial intelligence can really benifit from the use of pictures. I know that I am like this. When recalling a conversatin that I've had for example, I can easily picture in my head where I had that conversation which helps me remember other details about that specific conversation. So I'm all for including pictures in the classroom. 

In the past I have introduced new vocabulary with pictures by showing a picture on the screen together with the word in English. I would ask students to write in their notebooks what they think the word means in Hebrew and NOT call out the answer. With each slide I would repeat this request because as you can imagine they seemed to have been so excited with the lesson that they forgot not to call out. After we saw all the pictures we reviewed all the words and I confirmed the correct meanings. I found these images usually on Google but Pixabay has much better results. It might be fun to surprise the students by inserting a picture of the principle, the gaurd, or even one of the students with the help of this cool site called LunaPic.

The difficulty in teaching EFL (English as a foreign language) as opposed to ESL (English as a secnong language) is that the environment that the students are in all day long is not one that speaks the new language they are learning. When a student exits the classroom they probably won't hear English again till the next lesson (assuming they didn't do their homework :) ).

Scott Thornsbury talks about a Linguistic Landscape.This view changed my perspectiveon EFL. He points out that there is English everywhere! On street signs, shop signs, logos and more. We just have to train our students to look for them! I think that a good idea for younger students, when introducing the alphabet would be to ask them to take a picture (if they have a phone)or write down, a word that starts with the letter being learned that they find on the street. I think that this can keep the learning going even outside of the classroom!

Week 3

Week 3

I read an article that actually wasn't from the blog I've been following but it was a link on the blog I was following and I think I am going to follow this new one now.

The writer makes a case for allowing cellphones into the classroom. I will summarize some of her points here or you can read the full post here.

Today most adults (welll at least those who are tech-savvy) use their phones to organize their daily schedules and meetings. Why should kids not be allowed to do the same? We can teach them from a young age how to organize themselves and their time and as a result be more efficient. We should teach them how to do so with the tools they will eventually be using as adults! Students can plan their after school activities, set reminders about tests and keep lists of homework all from their cellphone!

Have a student use his/her cellphoe for small tasks instead of taking up time on the school's computers

Having cellphones within arms reach but not using the, teaches the students a valuable lesson: self discipline. 

Soon parents are going to demand cellphones in class for safety reasons. Let's learn to utilize them before that happens.  Better to get ahead of the problem that will undoubedly arise in the near future.

On Edudemic, I read a post about how to better use YouTube in the classroom. This right away caught my eye because I sometimes use clips from youtube in my lessons but it's nearly impossible to find the perfect clip to fit your needs.

One suggestion is to crop the video and add your own audio over it. Edpuzzle looks like an awesome and user friendly website that cn help you accomplish that. I haven't tried it myself but the tour makes it look easy.

On TeacherTube, you can find tons of videos with educational content. I also liked Explore. This is a website dedicated to nature videos. Often I find there are units involving animals.  I think a short clip on that animal could be a great hook for the unit. Similar to that is National Geographic.