Week 4

This week has brought me new ideas for teaching reading and writing. As always, we on the course have got so many useful links to good ESL sites and so  much new information and ideas both from our teacher Donna and from each other. It is just impossible to wholly grasp the width of all the knowledge we are gaining on this course.

As the essay constitutes about 30% of the maximum total score in the final school leaving exam in English and the reading comprehension part amounts to approximately 25%, these skills are extremely important to teach in our high school. Naturally, they are also essential in the students' further studies at university and polytechnic as well as in their future global working life. Our text books are mostly fairly up-to-date, but they can never contain current news articles. One can of course find news articles online, but creating exercises to go with the texts requires so much time that few teachers actually have that much time. That's why finding a site such as Breaking News English http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ was like finding at least a small treasure chest at the end of the rainbow! Now using current news texts is so much easier : )

Creating a lesson plan for a lesson using technology was interesting and challenging at first as it is a long time since I've last planned a lesson on paper. I do plan my lessons but only in my head. The last time I did it on paper was probably during my teacher training year a long time ago ; ) Anyway, it was useful to have to actually put the planning process in writing this time as it made me think about all the factors involved more thoroughly. It was also very nice and educational for me to read my peers' lesson plans on Nicenet because teaching is sometimes a bit lonely profession as we don't much get to see what our colleagues are doing with their students when dealing with the same topics as we are. So thank you, all my fellow learners on this course, for wonderful ideas I can apply to my courses next year!

And a short weather update from the far north: still a bit of snow on the ground, it was raining and even sleeting yesterday but there are also a few early spring flowers visible here and there!

 

The choice of picture has to do with my lesson plan of studying houses for sale ads online.

Just playing with web tools today. I first searched the word education on Just the Word http://www.just-the-word.com/ to find collocations with that word. I collected a couple of pages' list of the collocations and made a word cloud/squirrel with the list of vocabulary with Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html.

Week 3, Part 2

Project Task #2

I read two project reports and scanned through a third one. They all appeared very professionally made and interesting. The groups of students, the teaching circumstances, and the goals of the projects differed a great deal. It was intriguing to read the teachers' anticipations on the results of the projects and then what the actual results were.

What was the most useful and interesting thing about reading the reports was, of course, getting a clearer picture of the project and the report we are also going to do on this course. Now I have a better idea of what I have got myself into. ; )

Week 3, part one

This week has been an eye-opener and a useful reminder when it comes to teaching listening and speaking skills. We do practise especially listening fairly much as it is and we do a lot of speaking exercises on all courses and even have a separate oral skills course, which is voluntary, but I should really look at new ways of teaching these skills. Making the students speak and listen is of course the main objective, but I will have to explore the webtools that could be useful and see whether they will make the practising of these skills more efficient or more tempting for the students.

One advantage that the web tools could bring to practising aural and oral skills is that students could be doing that practise as homework and that would save us some of the valuable time in class for other things.

Another thing I've done so far this week was creating my Delicious page. The process was easy and adding links is pretty simple as well. I had already started collecting useful links on my blog, now I'll have to make a decision which I'm going to use as my link "achive" from now on; doing double work seems a bit unnecessary. I'll probably use Delicious in the long run. Anyway, creating the link storage was a great improvement for me as a person who hates filing papers and "filing" electronic information such as useful web sites.

Week 2 continued...

I attended an interesting seminar in Helsinki today. It was organised by the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities and the topic of the seminar was the future of Finnish high school (or upper secondary) education. The speakers of the seminar represented e.g. the organising association, the Ministry of Education and Culture, Aalto University and the national Board of Matriculation Examination.

Several aspects of the high school system are currently undergoing big changes. There will be new curricula, the planning of which has recently started and which should bein use in 2016. Besides that, the matriculation examination, which students have to pass in order to graduate from high school, will be made computer-based gradually, the first exams being "computerized" in 2016. All of this change has raised a lot of questions some of which were answered or at least discussed in today's seminar.

The greatest benefit that I personally gained from the seminar today was that whatever direction the new curriculum and the new forms of the matriculation exam will take one thing is sure: teaching and applying different webskills and tools will be more and more important in all the subjects. Being once again reminded of that increased both my motivation to learn more myself and also my despair at the enormity of the area we are entering when talking about webskills. Striking the right balance will be essential.

About starting the project:

Our school years in high school are divided into 5 (or in some schools 6) 6 - 8-week periods. The students can choose fairly freely which courses they take in which period as long as they complete all the obligatory courses as well a the required number of optional courses in order to graduate.
This system means that the groups we teach change approximately every  7 weeks and in our school with about 540 students, there are always several new faces in every new course.

We just started a new period yesterday and I have two new groups in which most of the students seem to be previously unfamiliar to me, so I have no clear idea of their skills in English at the moment. As I am writing this, I'm still undecided which group I will get involved in the project for this course or whether I'll have them both do something. The problem is that they do have the study books they have bought, so whatever project I will have them do, can't take too much time from studying at least the main topics of the text book; otherwise there will be complaints about "wasting the students' money on books they didn't need"... So I'll have to find a balance between the project and the "normal" stuff we do.

By the way, it IS so nice to finally get organised concerning useful links that I need or may need. I have added a few here again. The Worldmapper and BBC's How Big Really are truly nice visual representations of geographical, ecological, historical etc things in the world.Good prompts for discussions or writing for example. TED Talks is also one I have used; the students watch a video of their choice and write a comment.

Week 2

Websearching

The Internet is soooo full of materials I could use if only there was time to search, test, evaluate...
I've looked through more than ten of the links given in this week's material and I still have at least another ten that I've marked on the list as sites I'll have to have a closer look at.
Here are just a couple of ideas I got when checking out some of the links:

- USAgov - that will be useful together with http://cencus.org/ when writing essay instructions as we sometimes make the third years students analyse statistics in their essays

- I will use Hot Topics and IDEA Portal for discussion courses

- American Memory will be a gold mine if we ever have time to do projects on topics related to American history and I will definitely ask my colleague (a history teacher) whether he knows that site

- National Science Digital Library will be very helpful on two of my courses, those covering science and technology and environmental issues

- I also found the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation site interesting as well the couple of sites recommended for searches concerning arts; I'll have to look at them more closely in the autumn when I teach courses with global and cultural topics.

- 10x10 looked like a lot of fun! That I will definitely show my students!

When doing all this websearching last night, I also came across a couple of sites that I found useful and/or fun.

- On snopes.com you can search for urban legends and see whether they are true...

- I also found several falsh fiction pages one of which is Flash Fiction Online. I will surely use texts from those sites on my writing course as well as on the course on culture next term.

All in all, searching the web for new sites and materials made me both ecstatic and despaired. So many sites, so little time!!!

I combined country info about Finalnd from the CIA web page with trying out a web tool called Tagxedo. Looks nice, doesn't it!

At last I have a place (and enough motitvation) ...

... to collect all the links of potentially useful web tools and sites in one place. I hear and read about sites and tools that might be useful or at least entertaining to use in class, but there is so little time to look into them and see whether they would actually bring something beneficial in my courses. So I write the names on post it-notes and have those little pieces of paper everywhere and seldom have the energy to sit down and actually go through those sites. And after a while I usually have to clean my desk and throw the notes away...

But now I have a sensible place where to store that information and maybe I will even get to looking at those tools and sites more closely as I visit the sites bríefly in order to get the URL for this blog.

Khadija, thank you once more for mentioning Testmoz - that's one of the sites I will have to study more carefully!

As a final note: it's snowing in southern Finland..

Week 1

So now the much awaited and slightly dreaded course on web skills has started! Much awaited because it was an honour to be accepted on the course and I'm looking forward to getting a lot of new ideas from the course, both from the instructors and course materials but also from my colleagues attending the course. Sligthly dreaded because the next two months are usually very busy at work and I'm still wondering where I'm going to find the time to do everything on this course, but I will take it one day at a time and not stress about the whole of the ten weeks quite yet.

This first week has been interesting as I've read the presentations of the other teachers on the course and realised - once again that we, English teachers, are a huge group of professional people all over the world sharing the same passion for the language, all the cultures that it is spoken in and the idea of teaching and spreading this modern lingua franca to our students to ease their communication with people from all over the globe. Our contexts differ as our students represent different age groups, skill levels and cultures, but still, a lot of our challenges and rewards with teaching English are nonetheless similar.

The Ground Rules for communication on the course as well as the rubrics for evaluation sounded very thorough and well-motivated so I didn't really have anything to add. Just have to keep them in mind, which shouldn't be too difficult as they seem fair and professional.

About blogs:

I have never used blogs in my teaching. Some students of mine have occassionally handed in a written project as a blog, eg. a travel journal, which has been a nice change to all the hand-written texts on paper I usually grade. Now that I saw how easy it is to create a blog (it took about 5 minutes or less), I will seriously consider requiring certain written projects to be done in a blig form.

What I still have to ponder on conceerning student blogs, is how to correct the language as it is not a similar process as on a text on paper. Of course a simple solution is to print the text on paper and make the necessary corrections, and that's probably what I'll do, but on the other hand, that sounds unnecessarily unecological to print a text that is on the web. That's something I have to think about.