No homework today!!!

It is not that difficult to play the role of a nice teacher. Everybody knows that the word “homework” does not go with “thank you very much.” Students, however, think that homework is directly related to workbooks and that anything apart from that can cause them no harm. Here follows something that happened to me last week. My students, who had been talking about rules for two weeks, asked for “no homework.” They were really surprised and happy when I gave them a positive answer. There was just a little condition: they had to go to http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teens6 and post one of the rules they had at home and make a comment about it. Take a look at the result. Isn’t it homework? They don’t think so! =D

Also see http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teens57

By Fábio Ferreira

M-Interviews

Students were studying Relative Clauses (who,that,which). They were divided in 5 groups. Each group had a cell phone to take a photo. I talked to some people in the branch (previously) (Cláudio Azevedo, Thelma Peres, Vera Cerejo, Louise (trainee) and Silvania (secretaria). I asked these people if my students could ask them some questions and take a photo with their cell phones. They gave me their permission. After the break, I explained students that they would talk to a person and ask these people some personal questions, take notes and take a photo of him or her. I gave them 10 minutes to do it. After that, they came back to the classroom and sent the photo of the person to my e-mail. I gave them 5 minutes to come up with sentences using relative clauses and pronouns to introduce the interviewed person to the class. I opened my e-mail and as I was showing the photos(using the data show) the group was talking to the class about the person they have interviewed. In this particular activity I needed the internet connection, which was working just fine that day. But they could have also shared their photos and information in groups. They get together with people from other groups and show the photo using the cell phone itself. It took 20 minutes to do everything and they had a lot of fun, talking to other people and especially using their cell phones!

Saying the Unsaid - Silent Movies and Reported Speech

Online Learning and Sharing - Posterous via kwout

Teaching reported speech is certainly not that difficult. When I teach it, I always explain to students that it is used to retell stories, translate conversations between a foreigner and someone who does not speak his or her language, or even engage in a conversation with three or more people in a noisy environment such as night club or a rock concert. I also try to recreate communicative situations that make it as authentic and genuine as possible. If I could take them to a rock concert or a night club, it would be great. Despite my efforts, my students cooperation, and the wonderful ideas teachers always have when planning classes , I am not always happy with the size of dialogues or the quality of language produced by students in follow up activities. You know, we teachers always think that there is room for improvement.
This semester while I was planning one more class to teach reported speech, I thought that silent movies would just be the perfect means to create a situation for having students reporting a third party utterances and actions to each other. How did I do it? I did it in two phases and two places.
In Class
I first showed them a short silent movie (I used a silent version of Star Wars available in You Tube- It lasts only a little more than a minute). Next I paired students and asked them to take turns reporting what was being said right after I paused the movie. So I played a bit of the movie and paused for reporting. It was quick and fun and they really enjoyed doing it.
In the Computer Lab
While we were still in class, I gave them instructions. I told them to go to Youtube and type the search term silent movies. I also told them to choose movies that lasted three minutes or less. Besides that, I instructed them to do as we had done in class: they should first play the entire movie and then play, pause, report. They did it in 25 minutes and posted their reported versions along with the movie straight to our posterous class blog. We later corrected and the posts.The first drafts, however, were amazingly quite accurate to my surprise.

Teacher, *MALL today?

Teacher, *MALL today?

How to overcome Internet connection problems and control fast paced students.

By Fábio Ferreira

Taking students to the Computer Lab is a good way to change your classroom environment and go over the content presented by textbooks. Besides breaking the classroom routine, the lab is a very useful tool to foster students’ independent learning behavior.

There are many options available for teachers to explore and practice the content being taught, as, for example, online exercises (from the e-folder), internet websites, videos from youtube, just to mention the most used ones. Let me talk a little bit about the exercises from the e-folder, since they seem to be the first option for many teachers. The strongest point about them is that they were designed exactly based on the content students have to master and is going to be assessed. However, as everything else in this world, there are pros and cons. In my view the negative point here is that we depend on the internet connection to use the exercises. If the internet is OK, teachers still have to be attentive because students’ paces are different and sooner or later you are going to hear “Teacher, I finish! Everything!” while some students are still struggling to open the page. You will find yourself in times of trouble and there will be no mother Mary to come to you**.

Based on that experience I came up with an alternative to use the Computer Lab, having all students do the activity proposed at the same time and what is better, being very careful about the accuracy of their production. The solution I found was to use Net Operator, installed on the teacher’s computer. Besides the possibility of monitoring all the computers in the room, there is also a chat option there. Here follows the strategy that I would like to share with you. Let’s use Helpful Helen (Teens 4 – Unit 5 L1) as an example. The context of that lesson is that somebody has a problem and the other person has to offer help. (I’m hungry. I’ll give you sth to eat.) With all the chat windows open, T gives Sts a problem. Sts have to offer help using the structure studied in class. The key here is that they are not supposed to press enter and send their lines until T says GO! After everybody finishes, T says Go and Sts press enter. The first (correct) line displayed gets one point***. As the lines will be sent only after T’s command, Sts will be together. All the computers are identified, so Sts are always careful about their mistakes, since they don’t want to be exposed. Considering that they have to be quick after they hear GO!, adrenaline has an important role making Sts forget they are “studying”. No one has ever complained about that activity and now, instead of hearing Teacher, MALL today?, I sometimes hear Teacher, let’s play that game on the computer!?

The purpose of this article was not to say that the other options are not good, but that there is always room for improvement when you let your creativity flow. Think outside the box!

Fábio Ferreira

Ed Tech Monitor - FAN

*M.A.L.L. stands for Multimedia Access to Language Learning (our Computer Lab)

**Let it Be – The Beatles

***The activity can be adapted!