For a couple of days autumn has come. Leaves are getting yellow and are falling, mornings and evenings are colder and colder. I regret summer, I regret those long lazy summer days...
In August I traveled around Europe, and my voyage included many countries, among which Italy, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Germany... I came back home with my heart and mind full of images and wonderful memories, to last during the cold winter days.
I am getting ready for a new school year. I'd like to change my school, my town, my country... but nothing seems possible for the time being. Now I am in the middle of a voting process. During the latest school year we were involved in the European competition E.S.C.O.T. Hard work, I must admit, but it's worth. I hope we'll be rewarded. If you want to help my school and my students, do it. Just one click here and we are grateful. You can see our work, our ideas, our videos...
I am back. I will continue keeping this blog up to date. It's gonna be a long school year but I am sure things will be all right in the end.
My first international school project started in 2001 – so long ago. Everything was at the beginning then: finding partners, setting up international projects. But, I was lucky to find a school from Milan, Italy and to start work together. We designed a bilingual school magazine, in English and French, called Youth Magazine / Le Journal Europeen de la Jeunesse, on different themes, such as music, sports, fashion, and cuisine. It was a real success.
Then, every single school year I involved my students in a school project. I can count about 50 so far. And I love doing this job as the advantages for students and teachers couldn’t be found anywhere else. Of course there are disadvantages too. You can’t set up a project without having some money, as you need it for the final products (for instance paper, cartridges, internet connection, etc). And they need time – if you are not willing to spend some time on working on the project, give up. And they can create conflicts, as not all the students or teachers can be involved, and you, as coordinator, must be aware of this. But the advantages are so many…
First of all you can discover: your partners, another country with its background, culture, language. And you discover yourself, as you can’t introduce yourself to your partner without knowing who you are and what you want, where you come from, what makes you unique. One of my favorite school projects involved a school from Tehran, Iran. We worked together in the Mondialogo School Contest – we created a magazine on our holidays and we were simply amazed to see so many similarities, even if we come from two different cultures, two different religions…
If you are lucky enough and you have a grant, you can visit your partner, together with your students and colleagues. In this way you get to know your partner even better.
Another important aspect is the language. You can practice the language of the project (mainly English or French) and your students become aware of the fact that this language is alive , not only in their textbooks or notebooks.
After a project everything improves – your students’ knowledge, yourself, your teaching methods. You can get and share experience, you know new people and you discover the people around you, as you work in a less formal way.
How difficult summer may be for me, the busy teacher…
In my country the summer holiday lasts 3 months – that’s very much, that’s too much for me. I like being involved, teaching, learning new things, sharing and caring.
Now it’s summer, I have no place to go to… It's so hot here. The sky is so blue, there is no hope of rain.
I spend day after day hoping that the weather will help me. That it will become colder.
I feel as if I were in a desert: loneliness and heat. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. I miss those hectic days when I could do new great things, when I could share everything with my mates.
For almost a week I have been spending my time with this:
For a very long time, I considered power-point presentations have nothing interesting. Actually, every single day, I receive lots of power point presentations on different things, mainly entertainment. At the beginning, I was quite excited about them, I used to watch them with great pleasure, but later they became boring: same backgrounds, same music, same poor quality of the pictures or sounds…
I have tried to make some power point presentations to integrate them in my lessons. But, I failed. They were boring. I made some typical mistakes. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that, I considered myself an expert in PPTs, both Windows PowerPoint and more recently Apple Keynote . Two years ago, a teacher from Scotland taught me how to make them and mainly, how to avoid them becoming boring. What he didn’t tell me then was that simply watching the screen is not interactive. And we get the same boring final product which we expect to work wonders. What can we do to change that?
First of all, we should avoid the mistakes most power-point creators make.
I am writing now about some of them. The first one is to create a PPT presentation as lecture notes. It's boring, and students feel totally trapped when on the screen they can read the number of our slides, e.g. 10 / 98. Boring, uninteresting... What can we do? This program offers us a great chance to include pictures, or play music, or even show video-clips. We can do this in a very easy way: we just insert our video / music, etc and make sure it is saved in the same folder as our presentation. Students are given the chance to listen to a text for instance, then actually work on it. And everything can be part of our presentation. For instance, I show them a medieval castle, and I try to elicit: country, age, builder, etc. Then, they listen to a text about the castle and do something, e.g. re-order the paragraphs. And all this is possible by the help of the PPT presentation.
However, we should be careful not to make a visual assault out of our presentation. I don't say we can't use pictures, flashes, funny faces, but not too much. Less is better. Instead of using another picture, we can use a blank slide to arise our students’ interest.
Sometimes, the new pictures on the screen come together with a sound (and there are so many and so loud...). Once again, we should pay attention not to make it an aural assault. Our students will be stressed. I use listening texts in my presentations, especially for the auditory students. Actually, a PPT presentation is a good way of addressing our students' learning-styles. Once again, the listening can become interactive. They start from the text and they can create a whole interactive story or they can play (jeopardy is helpful). We can make all very easily, as we use the "hyperlink" function the program features.
One thing I don't like about presentations is the bullet points. I find them boring, common and uninteresting. Instead of them, our ideas can come animated. For instance, my text appears on the screen and then fades away. It can become interactive, as in the meantime, while the text is gone, students have to do something (e.g. remember from the text as much as they can and tell their partner ). When they finish, the initial text can reappear again and stay on the screen as much as I want / need it.
In the end, I would like to remind you about the background and the font. It's true, the program offers lots of backgrounds, more or less inspired. Personally, for an interactive and serious presentation, I prefer a monochrome or a blank background. Remember that the walls in the art galleries are white, too. As for the font, we should use the right size, so that the students in the last rows may read. Then, once again, less is better: no more than 5 lines, no more than 8 words in a line.
Last, but not least, we should think about a plan B or C in case we face a technology failure. We should take it into account, as without technology, we (re)become simply teachers: we, the teacher, in front of our students who are waiting for us to tell them something interesting and new.
Just to illustrate what I said here, have a look at the famous Gettysburg Address - what it would have looked like if Lincoln had had powerpoint: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg
This time I would like to write a little bit about listening. Many teachers consider that listening is not very important, as long as students have to listen to their teacher during the whole class. Things are different. It's true, they have to listen to us, but as long as we (the non-native speakers) speak mainly Englishes, not English, we should do something and expose our students to authentic listening materials. I am against the CDs and the tapes accompanying our textbooks. They are artificial: the texts are read by British actors / actresses, who sometimes speak with American / Canadian / Australian accent. They are not authentic. I had better find some authentic materials online. My idea is that listening is important.
We should integrate listening in our lessons. It's nothing more boring than telling students: "And now, you will listen to a fragment... ". That moment we lose our students' attention and interest. They consider it just another chore... But, we can avoid it! I will give you an example. One day, one of my lessons had as objectives enabling students to speak about personal details. After reading a short text, after speaking, they had to solve an exercise based on a text. I made the transition in the most natural way possible. I asked students if they thought the person presented in the text is real or not. Some of them said she was real, some others said she wasn't. I congratulated those who said she was real and I gave them the proof: they could listen to her voice.
When students listen to a text, they must do something: find a figure, answer a question, solve an exercise. Otherwise, they don't pay attention to the listening activity, and they get bored and uninterested. And, don't forget about the golden rule: listen - check with a partner - listen again.
A listening text should be played up to 4 times - at the maximum. If the students' level is poor, it's better to stop after every single sequence having the information they need. In this way they will get used to listening and their English will improve.
It's the 21st June and it's the longest day in the year. It's the summer solstice. Does it have any significance? For me it surely has. You may ask me why, you may wonder what's so special about this day. Well, let me tell you something: besides teaching English, I also teach literature and civilization to my students. The civilization lessons include the Celts and Stonehenge. And the main connection between these and the longest day in the year is ... the summer solstice.
How can we exploit this? First of all, we can use this common information to introduce Stonehenge. Have a look at the beautiful summer solstice sunrise over Stonehenge and ideas will come up.
Or, the summer solstice may become the starting point to introduce different celebrations to our students. If you browse an encyclopedia, you will find out many different things. For instance, I would introduce the idea of solstices which in some languages are considered to start or separate the seasons, while in others they are considered to be center points. For instance, in English, in the Northern hemisphere, the period around the June solstice is known as midsummer, and Midsummer's Day is 24 June, about three days after the solstice itself. It is on the same day when an important Romanian holiday takes place. Similarly 25th December is the start of the Christmas celebration, and is the day the Sun begins to return to the northern hemisphere. It can become a starting point for comparing different celebrations all around the world.
The Romanian holiday which takes place every year 3 days after the summer solstice, on 24th June, is called "Sanziene". The name of the celebration is given by these flowers:
The name of the celebration could be translated as "holy" ("san" in Romanian, an abbreviation of sfant = saint) and " fairy" ("zana" in my language). It's actually the celebration of the fairies who play an important role in the local folklore. There are many beliefs related to this celebration, but my favorite states that on the Sanziene night, the heavens open up, making it an adequate time for making wishes and for praying, as God is more likely to listen.
It's quite a mysterious celebration. My favorite writer, Mircea Eliade wrote a novel, "Noaptea de Sanziene", translated as "The Forbidden Forest", which includes references to the folk belief about skies opening at night.
A new week has just started. Normally I would have named this post "Week 11: Something". But the course is over. And something is missing. I am used to accessing Nicenet not every day - several times a day. Now, it's empty - no new messages... I am used to accessing your blogs: nothing new, at least so far.
But, this new week has started. Today I had my last English class with the 9th graders - the last one this school year, of course. I had to reward them: I offered them a Certificate I designed by the help of 123Certificates. I discovered something. If you want to print a certificate directly from the brwoser, you simply can't get rid of the website addrress, the date and the time it was printed. And it's quite unpleasant to have them on a nice certificate, isn't it? I managed to get rid of them. I selected the certificate from the browser, then I pressed ctrl+c (copy), then I opened a new document and pressed ctrl+v (paste). I had the template in my document. Only picture, not text. I added the text in a very simple way: insert - add text box, and there I edited everything as I wanted. The result is great - no more header and footer from the browser.
Today I feel a little bit confused. After 10 weeks' time when I learned so many great new things, now I find myself having nothing to do. I should relax, but I can't. Not now. Something is missing. I miss something. I miss the competition with myself, I miss the challenge, I miss the discussions, the new ideas... From today on I will miss my students too.
Here, in Romania, a hot summer has started and I have nothing to do. But, tomorrow is another day. Till then, have a look at my 9th graders today, holding their certificates with pride and joy.
