A  class blog.

If I can manage it, I would start a class blog. Ever since I stopped working in a school operated by a parent cooperative, and started working in an public school, I have felt the lack of contact with the parents.  It is clearly written in the syllable, and often mentioned by the teachers that the cooperation and confidence building with parents is essential for children´s success in school. I would say that the most important parameter is the lack of a neutral meeting venue. Maybe you might see up on a class blog, as just that.

But would a blog be a good venue to practice and improve the English language? Well as for example “Skype” might be a god device for creating opportunities for talking, not only to the ones present, a blog could possibly be the same for writing skills. In my contact with quite young children I must say that the fear of writing and talking is the most difficult “hurdle to cross”. But sadly,  practice is the only way to perfect, so it is crucial to find funny, less strict tasks to do for children that feels afraid to use their second language more activly.  A class blog might just provide us with an arena where we (teachers, parents, pupils, … ) can use the language like in a playground. Talk about music, arts and other topics in the blog might feel less complicated and scary in the new language, compared to regular classrooms discussions.  Although, it also will be possible for me as the teacher to bring in subjects and items  preanalysed and specially designed by  for the class to work with, think and write  about.

If it works, it might be an opportunity for parents as well as students and teachers to meet and to gain knowledge of each other and the school system and perhaps its mission. While they practicing English writing, but at the same time, shares and enjoys each other´s experiences, trips, events, music..  

LearnEnglish Kids

LearnEnglish Kids is the British Council's website for children around the world who are learning English as a second or foreign language. This site has free resources for children to use at home, either independently or with family members or friends. You can recommend activities from this site to children to do for homework, or during school holidays. You can also recommend the Parents section of LearnEnglish Kids to parents and carers of children.

What you just read is the introduction of the Teachers page of the British Council's website for children who are learning the English. The website offers many different ways to help those children in their learning, both in school and at home. I'll present the different categories of activities that can be found.

Kids games

This section offers games where the children can practice certain language skills while having fun. The games are divided into five different groups; fun games, learn words, find words, play with words, and spell words. As the five categories suggest, many of the games can be used to learn new words and how they are spelled. They can also be used to practice the structure of sentences and the children's understanding of instructions in English. This can be done at different level of difficulty, for example by matching words with a corresponding pictures, playing Hangman, answering quiz questions or placing given words in the correct order. The games are not only made with different difficulties, but also with different themes or subjects of interest such as days and months, animals, and sports.

Listen & watch

This section contains the four categories songs, short stories, kids news and tongue twisters. All four categories offers animated videos for children to watch and listen to and thereby practice their listening skills. The videos covers many different themes and subjects of interest for children at different levels of knowledge in the English language. As it is written on the teacher's page, there are free worksheets to download and use in the classroom connected to many of the videos.

Read & write

In this section, you can find worksheets to practice the children's writing and reading skills. Those worksheets are free to download and use in the classroom.

There is a link to a sub-page called 'word of the week' where different words are being taught by written sentences where the words are used, and thereby explains the words. Every word comes with a video where children who speaks different accents says the word and the written sentence mentioned before. The section does also offer the children to write texts within different topics and send their writings as a contribution to the web-site.

Make

This section gives the children opportunities to create things, both online and with their hands. There are categories as 'story maker', 'style a hero', and 'comic strip maker' online. There are arts and crafts worksheets to download and use in the classroom. These worksheets have instructions of how the make different things such as 'a spring hat', 'Little Red Riding Hood finger puppets' and 'animal masks'. Every activity comes with a video of a child who are showing and telling how to make the different artworks.

Speak & spell

The super space spies Sam and Pam want to learn to speak and spell English, and they want children to learn with them. There are four sub-categories where Sam and Pam listen to sounds, learn to speak, learn spelling rules and learn to spell tricky words through worksheets and weekly spelling tests.

Grammar

The young learners of English are given help to learn grammar rules through games, quizzes, videos, worksheets, and tests.

Little kids

This section offers activities for pre-school teachers, parents of very young children and older siblings who wants to teach these children English. There are games, word games, songs, stories, crafts, and Let's go Pocoyo where the children can learn English with Pocoyo.

Others

Except from all the activities for children that can be used either in school or at home that I have written about above, there is a parent's page where parents are given ideas of how to help their children to learn English. All the activities their children have access to are easily found here, as well as a list of websites with more online resources.

To access everything on the website, children, teachers and parents need to have an account to log onto. You need to log on to access the worksheets.

Except from the LearnEnglish Kids, there is also LearnEnglish Teens and LearnEnglish adapted for adult learners. There's a TeachingEnglish section available as well.

LearnEnglish Kids:

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/

The LearnEnglish Teacher's website:

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/teachers 

/Therese

A blog

A blog is a type of website where you regularly can add short entries. It is a very quick and easy way of publishing text and pictures on the Internet for everyone to read. A blog is usually arranged in chronological order and the most recent post appears at the top of the main page. The word blog is an abbreviation for a web log.

There are a lot of free blog-publishing services on Internet, so it is very easy to set up your own. The free blog services are usually very user friendly. It is just to follow the instructions. Here are some examples

·      Blogger (www.blogger.com)

·      Wordpress (wordpress.org)

·      Typepad (www.typepad.com)

A teacher can set up his/her own blog and use it as a way to connect either with the students, their parents, or both. It can be about what the class is working on in the classroom right now or it can be information about upcoming events. You will also save the trees by not having to send out all information on paper. It is a good way to communicate, since everyone can comment on a blog.

Students can use a blog in a lot of different ways – as a diary, as communication with other students, as a way to share their thoughts etc.

If you want your students to use a blog specifically to learn English, it would be great to have a student blog written by the students about for example what they are working on in English right now. It could be a weekly blog written to update the parents about what they have learned. This kind of subject blog can start already with young learners. It might just be one sentence in the beginning “ We talked about colors today”. As time goes by it might be longer and longer postings with more information. You, as a teacher, have to think about how much you will correct in the students blog postings. A way to work with this problem is to have the students work in pairs and help each other with spelling and grammar.

A blog is a way to communicate. It is not meant to be a monologue, but a conversation. If you post a blog, everyone can comment on your blog and you can respond back to the comment.

/Anna

Smart Board!

Smart Board

 Smart Board is a very good pedagogic tool that you can use in the classroom. A Smart Board is a digital interactive whiteboard. You can use it to write on it. It is easy to underline the most important parts. The written can be made by a computer or by your hand or a pupil. For example, you can use it to put up a lyric, a short part of a story or a sentence on the smart board. The pupils can then take out the different clause elements, the head and the determiners or modifiers or take out the different word classes such as all the nouns, all the verbs and so on. For example if you are working with verbs in the clause then you can underline all the verbs that the pupils say is a verb. Furthermore the pupils can discuss about what is happening in the text or discuss a new word that they do not understand.

 

Moreover there are a lot of pre-made activities and lessons that you can use where the pupils can practice in different things. The activities and lessons can be found for all the different subjects such as, English, mathematics, Swedish, technology and so on. The activities and lessons are free resources that the Smart Technologies are providing with, which means that you can search for them. Furthermore other teachers put in activities, lessons and ideas that they have done with their pupils. Moreover it is easy to make different activities and lessons on the Smart Board by yourself.    

There are many ways that you can use the Smart Board for. For example, you can print something on it, you can change what is printed to text box, you can move items and objects on the screen and you can insert videos and pictures and so on. Also there is a record that you can use. It is also available to record in a video. For example, you can let the pupils’ record themselves while they are communicating with each other or when they are reading out loud or when they are giving easy instructions for how to do something such as how to put on a sweater. Afterward they can listen on how the pronunciation went and how their individual communicative skills are so they can practice in the parts that they need to. Of course they will listen at the recordings by themselves while the other pupils are doing something else. To quote to Brady Phillips “Ask not what your SMART Board can do; ask instead what you can do with your SMART Board.”

According to Brady Phillips ”Students learn by doing. Having teachers get out of the way and let the students use the SMART Board and Notebook software to demonstrate understanding of a concept or problem should be at the center of pedagogy.” Therefore it is important to let the pupils try by themselves and let them practice on the same things more than one time. Jeremy Harmer wrote about how important it is for the pupils to repeat the things that they learn, because the things that they have learn then goes from their short-term to their long-term memories.

 
The Smart Board is a very useful pedagogy tool especially if the classroom only has one computer, because you can use it with the whole class, in half class or with small groups. The classroom where I had my VFU had only one computer in the classroom, although they had a Smart Board that was frequently used. I really do recommend it, because it is a fun and easy way to use when you teach pupils in English.

// Maria-Pia Jansson  

learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org

I think this was a bit difficult because I do not teach English. I have earlier been teaching mathematical and NO in year 6-9. I did not use the computers and their possibilities very often, because it was too few and they did not always work as they should. I am now trying to find something that could fit pupils in year F-5 because my aim is to teach pupils in these years.

I have been surfing around a lot trying to find something. The website I have chosen is learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org. Here is a lot to look in to and try out. I think it could suit pupils of different ages because the level of difficulties varies.

The different subjects to choose between are “kids games”, listen & watch”, “read & write”, “make”, “speak & apell”, “grammar” and “little kids”. Under each subject there are more alternatives to choose between.

I have listened to many songs with text and different stories and played some games. I have not had the time to try it all because it is so much. I think one can use this site while working with different themes or as a complement to the textbook or just as a variation.

One thing that I think is good I that there is text to the songs and the stories which gives opportunities both to listen and to read, if the pupils have learned to read.

If you become a member on this website you have access to even more things, for example activities to the songs and stories.

/Pia

Stop motion film

What is stop motion?

Stop motion is a film created by hundreds or thousands of photos that are put together to a film. Like the way Disney films was done in the beginning but then the pictures was drawn.

You can see one example of a stop motion film by this link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOvEhWfneUM

On you tube there is a lot of stop motion films with lego and there are also films that describe how to do stop motion.

Resources and how to use it

The resources that it takes to do stop motion film are a simple digital camera and access to a computer with some kind of film editing program for example windows moviemaker.

Here is one you tube video that describes how to import the pictures in windows movie maker and how to work with the picture there. It also tells what stop motion is and what to think about to do it from the beginning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBlNksMkGSc

It is also a possibility to do stop motion with an I-pad because you can both take the pictures with the pad and do the editing.  

How stop motion can be used by teachers and students

This can be used in school to practice English in a different way and the same time work with technology and perhaps integrate with other subjects for example art.

The films can be a way to communicate. The teacher can do information films to the pupils to give them information of a new task etc. Maybe it is a fun way to communicate with the parents as well and tell them through a film what the pupils have been working with.     

The pupil can do films as a form of accounting for a task to show what they have learned about a subject through a stop motion animation. The students can also communicate with others by sending the stop motion film to other classes with messengers or questions to the receiver.

Other aspects (positive and negative)

One thing that can be negative by working with stop motion films is that it takes long time and both students and teacher have to be patient with that. Otherwise the films will not be any good and the time is lost without the positive benefits of the task or project. The benefit in doing films this way is that it does not demand new advanced technology. Most schools have at least one digital camera and a computer. Besides that I think that the pupils appropriate using technology in school.

This could be a smaller project if the school has limited resources. For example the pupils can work together two or three with only one camera and when they are finished with the camera another group takes over. Off course it would be easier if the whole class did the project at the same time, but I want to point out that with a little imagination as a teacher you can do a lot with little resources.   

Lina

Blogs in English teaching

Why a blog?
A blog is a brilliant way to communicate with the outer world. A blog is similar to a journal, a diary or a causerie as the writer posts written text on whatever subject the blog is about. The big difference from these other forms of writing lies in the publicity of the blog. This is also what makes the blog such a brilliant option for teaching - having a real audience provides meaning to school tasks. The students are more likely to care about how and what they write when someone else is about to read it, rather than if the only reader would be the teacher.

How does it work?
What one really needs to get started is simply a computer with a steady enough Internet connection. After connecting to the Internet the first thing to do is to find the most appropriate software. These days there are really easy blog software on the Internet, and some of them are free to. A few examples of a free and easy to use software are Blogger, Wordpress, Blog and Kidblog (click on the word to go directly to the website!).

When one see a blog, or a website for that matter, it´s easy to view it as something complicated, something one-self couldn´t do. But the secret is that we can all do it. To create your own blog you just need to fill in a few boxes, choose a few colours and designs, and of course – decide what the blog should be about. The difference from a blog and a website is that you yourself don´t have to build the page, i.e. the html code, rather you choose from a few options and get a ready made page. (As a matter of fact these days there is also the same kind of idea behind a few free website software, such as Bluevoda, where you similar to a blog choose templates rather than writing html code).

To post on the blog isn’t usually more difficult than sending an email; you write a text, press preview to see if it comes out the way you want, and instead of printing you publish your work on the internet. There is a lot of fun little applications and functions that easily can be used to make the blog become more alive, and to invite the reader to interact. For example one can put up photos and videos straight in to the blog, but also highlight words and make them become links to other blogs, websites, videos, or songs. I would say that the most relevant function is the comments. By being able to comment the reader can become an integrated part of the blog, and the resource by this means promotes interaction rather than monologue. The blog is considered social software because it´s outgoing perspective and the opportunity for readers to comment on the posts - without the readers the blog has lost it´s purpose.

YouTube

Most of you have already heard of YouTube, and used it. But most of you haven't used it to it fullest. It's a website where you can upload your own videos and watch others. Noteworthy is that you have no control over the contents of the website and there is some inappropriate material. With that in mind, I wouldn't let my students click around on their own.

To access the website you need a device with internet connectivity and a couple of speakers, and preferably a Smartboard of some sort so the entire class can watch it together.

When you browse the site you have a small search-window on top of the screen (the red circle) where you can search for specific videos etc. This is probably how most people use YouTube.

Although if you feel uncertain what you're looking for you can always use the "browse channels" tab instead (the blue circle above). 

Here you will find all sorts of topics, for example music, news and politics, science and education, tech and so on. 

On each topic you will find other users browsing similar clips. In the Science and education category you will for example find clips from NASA or Discovery Channel to use in your class. 

My favorite way to use YouTube is on the Smartboard watching short stories, music and educational clips. It's a great way to interact all the school subjects in a both fun and educational way.  

A last minute tip. Remember to watch the clip before you show it in class, to make sure it doesn't contain any improper language or photos.