Expanding sentences

I saw this activity in a twitter posting yesterday and liked this one a lot. It had many different ways of doing this activity posted on the web page. The one I liked the most was the one below posted by Ali asghar Mazinanian, Shahrood, from Iran:

Ask one of the students to choose a name/word in English. Write the word on the board. Once the student has chosen a word, as another student to give a word beginning with the last letter of the first chosen word. For example:

First word=David     Second word=door

Continue asking the students in sequence to think of words and writing them on the board until you have around ten. This way, you get a good mix of words for thew students to use in the second part.

Now, ask the students to create a sentence using all ten of the words. You can allow them some creative license, and encourage them to add any necessary vocabulary to make their sentences intelligible. You could give a prize for the best one.

I liked this idea a lot but thought I’d do this activity in a slightly different way. Getting some sheets of card and either cutting them into strips or asking the local paper store to cut them into strips for me with their guillotine. Then Instead of giving the students the ten words to create a sentence, I’ll give them a sentence to start with and write each word on a separate strip of paper, using them to recreate my sentence on the board. Then its just a matter of putting the students in groups/pairs and asking them to add words and punctuation to the sentence to change it, but still keeping it so that it can be understood. I got the idea for this after seeing the Telescopic Text site.

In our city there are many printing stores and paper stores that make printed flyers, etc. They always have offcuts and I am sure that they will give them away or sell them cheaply as they usually just throw them in the trash. Then instead of cutting up large sheets of card, I can just use these instead

Internet crazy

I’m a member of many sites, including, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Google Groups, etc. Most of my students old and at Wizard are members of these sites so it makes it easy for me to add them all, once I can find them, that is   Also I have this blog here, but I am struggling to find to post to it at the moment. Every time I try to sit in front of a pc to blog, something else comes up and I end up forgetting about it for days, or weeks hahaha!! Twitter I use the most as it takes very little time for me to update and Orkut when I get an email telling me somone has posted something there. Facebook is my main social networking site, Orkut is unheard of by my friends in the UK. I like Facebook the most as it links to every other site I use and I can access them all from the facebook site. Recently a lot of my students asked me if I had a Formspring account so they could add me and post things there. I had seen the links to some of my students Formspring accounts, but had never gone to look at them. Formspring is mainly a site where you go to post questions for your friends to answer, to learn more about you. I signed up for an account so I can try getting my students to post questions there in English for me to reply to, another way for them to practice their English I hope   In Facebook, you can simply add the site and it appears in your profile so that people can just click on the tab and post questions and read replies to other question already posted there. I’ll add the links to my other accounts so that my students can easily find the links and then sit back and see what happens. Hopefully, it will turn out to be something fun to do and I’ll get to discover a little more about my students, to go with the little things they told me about the 1st class in the ‘toilet paper game’ hahahahaha!!

Business English

I have some new students who work for Syngenta and they are in the beginning of learning Business English with me. The course we teach them is EPG (English for Professionals in General) and as a course its really nice. Full of video and multimedia stuff. I like this course a lot and the students that have studied this all seem to like it a lot too. One real problem with it is a lack of any dedicated online resources, the CCAA homepage is really only there to promote the schools to franchisers and has really very little to offer the students with regards to their courses. While i have a lot of sites online with stuff I’ve created myself for the TN and MEC courses, I have more or less nothing for EPG. I have been looking online to see what I can use with them while I work on getting something set up and running. I love the BBC Wordservice site because it has a Learning Business English section that has a lot of stuff on it but not really anything for total beginners. I was playing with Yacapaca too before the other school crashed out and I’m hoping to try to get some stuff into this for them too. They seem very enthusiastic and I’m sure that anything I create there with this they will defiinately try out. My main problem is really time at the moment, I need 30 hours in a 24 hour day hehehe!! I will try to get some free time online tomorrow in the afternoon and see what I can come up with. I was thinking abouyt maybe getting them to use something simple like Twitter with its very short message system as soon as we have a few lessons under their belts, just so they could try simple messages to each other. I’ll talk with them about this and see how they feel about experimenting with it later on in the semester. I have some sheets that I got from Eslprintables too, man that site is excellent for worksheets and stuff. Roberta loves posting stuff she has ran up on the pc there. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have some ideas for stuff for them. Also my web host has a lot of space left where I can upload some stuff for them too. Maybe it’s time to dust off Hot Potatoes again

Busy Busy!!

I haven’t really had a lot of time to post here, even though I’m only working in one school now I’ve got quite a few things to do. I’ve been showing my students some Web 2.0 sites they can use as part of their English courses and looking for some other stuff that looks fun and interesting for them to use too. Mainly the last week or so I’ve been trying to get my students interested in using Quizlet more. I really like this site a lot, it fits in just fine with my ESL classes. Some of the students have already started using it and like it a lot. Others I haven’t really had the time to sit in front of the pc with yet and demonstrate it but I’m slowly getting around to it. Roberta’s students also seemed interested in using it too so I added the vocabulary for her to try with them and next week we’ll see what they think of it and try to encourage them to use it more as part of their home learning. I also chatted with my students about things like blogging. I’d already tried to get some EPG student’s involved in this but although we got their WordPress accounts all set up, they moved to another part of Brasil and I have lost contact with them   Some of my advanced students liked the idea a lot but their time is limited as they are studying at uni at night and working in the day. I chatted with the about maybe using something like Twitter. I like this site a lot too and the idea of small text message like postings might be easier and more appealing to them. I have extra class with them over the weekend so I’ll demonstrate it to them in the break. It would be better if the other teachers were also more interested in using Web 2.0 more in their classes but generally they haven’t really shown much interest in it. I have quite a bit of stuff online for my students in wiki’s, blogs, etc. Most of it is for advanced or MEC groups but it could be easily added to for beginners if they tried it out. Sometimes I get the ‘If you do it for me I’ll use it’ impression from people but I don’t really have a lot of time for the things I have online for my own students and Roberta’s too. I’ll have to see about getting some of them to spend some time looking at what is already there so they can see how much it would help them out. I think for the beginner teachers they really need to look and see what else is out there because we seem to lose quite a few students after the 1st semester whereas I haven’t lost any of mine and I think this extra online stuff shows that the teacher is interested in help ing them to get as much of of their classes as they can. Hopefully as my students start to use the online sites more and more, the word will get around and the students might ask their teachers for more online resources for them to use too.

Twitterfeed

I have a Twitter account and had seen a few times in the people I follow that their blog postings appeared in their page but I couldn’t figure out how it was done, even though I had already stumbled accidentally on the site they use to do this. The site is called Twitterfeed and I just managed to get it all set up with the rss feed from WordPress. Now I just need to see if it works properly. Also I have Twitbin, an addon for Firefox that lets me post to Twitter without having to login to their homepage first. Both of these are well worth having if you use Twitter regularly

Web 2.0

I’ve been trying out a lot of Web 2.0 sites for a while now. I really like this idea of using the internet as a tool to teach my English students here in Brasil. My biggest problem here is that most schools in Brasil only really teach stuff that is geared to towards the vestibular (uni entrance exam) and most of the stuff they actually teach will never get used for anything or by anyone if they manage to get into either a public or private uni here. Also a lot of teachers here have this fear or laziness of anything new. Sadly a lot of them are just in it for the salary, nothing else. I have a lot of websites online that I created for my students, seven or eight wikis as well as a site that hosts exercises and stuff for my students to use. Some of my favorite Web 2.0 sites that I use a lot are:

1. Wikispaces - I really like this site a lot. 90% or more of my sites online are created using this website. Its fast and easy to use, you need just some basic word processing skills and the registration and setup is easy. They have a good help section and forum too. An email sent out gives a lot of information about new features in the site. I use the free version of it and have no complaints, a few more themes would be nice though but other than that Wikispaces is great.

2. Classroom20 – I like this site a lot, its run by teacher for teachers. It has a lot of postings about Web 2.0 stuff on it. I heard about sites there I’d never heard of before. If you’re a teacher its well worth joining. It has it’s own wikis related to different parts of the site as well as members posting some of their wiki addresses.

3. Twitter - This site is pretty new to me but it is very addictive. You can use it as a messaging service, sort of sms for the web. You post messages about what you are doing at that particular moment and get to read what everyone else is doing at the same time. There are some nice firefox addons for this site so you can read and post without having to go to the site and log in. I use Twitbin a lot.

4. Orkut - A popular social-networking site here in Brasil owned by Google. Its full of links to viruses and stuff but almost all of my students use it. I mainly use this just to send messages to remind them of things or wish them Happy Birthday. I have Myspace and Facebook too but I don’t use them very often, I don’t have the time hahaha!!

There are others I use and I’ll list them here when I get a little more free time

First post…

Today I finally found time to get into WordPress and post my first post I was using Blogger but decided to have a change and also I want to use wordpress with some of my students as part of trying out some Web 2.0 stuff. I’ve been interested in using Web 2.0 sites in class for quite some time, mainly my students tend to use Orkut a lot here in Brasil, but it’s not really a good social networking site – lots of viruses and stuff. In the blogroll I listed a few that I’m really into at the moment. Twitter is one of my favorites, it’s very addictive.

 This afternoon all of the groups of students at CCAA had a lanche (a snack break?). It was a lot of fun – lots of Coca Cola – and I took my camera to take a couple of photos… and forget to use it hahahaha!! Never mind, they have these things quite often. All the classes on Friday afternoons are three hour classes so its nice to have a break and eat something half way through. My class on Friday afternoon is MEC (Master English Course) and mainly teenagers, they are a lot of fun. They’ve been my students for quite some time and we are comfortable with one another. I teach mainly advanced groups, as well as business English and conversation classes. When we have one of these Roberta and I usually bake a cake to take along, this time was chocolate and lemon cream, there was none left at the end so I guess everyone liked it I haven’t eaten anything this evening after all the food from earlier on, I think it’ll just be liquid food like coffee or tea for the rest of the day