Powerpointing Me -EFL Tech Tip #13

The other day when I was reading Nick Jaworski's blog postings on using the Teacher as the Narrative in EFL classes, I left a comment behind regarding one of my used-a-gazillion-times-first-lessons...


The Getting to Know You, Getting to Know Me game

I've no idea where I originally picked up the bones of this before techitizing it for my own purposes, so 'xcuse me if I don't reference the source - however, if you know, let us all know below.


Objective

• Create an atmosphere of sharing right from the get-go.

• Find out your students' communicative abilities and weaknesses: particularly when making small talk /asking and answering questions.

Prep

• Approx 2 - 4 hours, depending which option you choose below. However you'll be able to use it an infinite number of times in an infinite number of (first day) lessons for an infinite number of years.
  

Brainstorm

Who are you?
Jot down quick notes on words that describe you and your life.

• country of birth
• countries lived in
• marital status
• family & siblings
• current job
• previous jobs
• a job you dreamed of having
  
• degree(s)/ other studies
  
• hobbies and interests
• group/ associations you belong to
  
• places you've been on holiday
• your age (number)
  
• how long you've been teaching (number)
• your house number
  
• fave food /drink
• fave music /musicians
  
• fave book(s)
  
• something unusual about you
• anything else you feel like sharing
  

Procedure Option 1 (no tech, photocopier optional)

• Dig out photos that match the above list, clip pics out of a magazine
• Type the numbers using a large font and print
  
• Photocopy the pics to A4 if you'd like them to be uniformed in appearance
  
• Stick on to colored card and laminate

Procedure Option 2 (low tech)

• Open up a PowerPoint document
• Insert personal pictures from your computer
• Search www.flickr.com or google images (cc-licensed*) for the images/maps you don't have yourself - import these into your ppt.
• Type the numbers in a large font.

Procedure Option 3 (medium tech - quickest)

• Go to Wordle.net
• Enter the words you brainstormed
• Print several copies of your wordle & laminate (or capture as a jpeg / insert into a ppt slide)

Procedure Option 4 (will take >4hrs)

• PhotoPeach your life. Use with intermediate learners+ re fast imagery.
• Same as option 2
• Save all slides as jpegs
• Upload into Photopeach
• Select music: something related to your own culture or fave band works best.
  

PhotoPeachingMe on PhotoPeach



NB. It doesn't matter what order you present your images in.



In class

After briefly introducing yourself to your new students and getting their names, ask if they know anything about you and if they'd like to.
Optional: depending on your students' levels you may like to review question structures (wh-q/auxiliary and modals/conditionals/present-perfect) prior to doing this exercise, but not necessary.

Tell your students you're going to show some pictures and you'd like them to guess what the images have to do with your life by asking you questions.

Show the first picture / beam the first slide / show the first 30secs of movie.

Once you've elicited the correct answer, elicit the best question form which would produce that answer.

A rough example:
Picture: A boy and girl which look like me
Teacher: What does this have to do with me?
Students: "Brothers and sister?"
Teacher: How can you make that into a good question?
Students: "Do you have brother and sister?"
Teacher: Brothers and sisters are called siblings, you can also ask "Are they your brother and sister?"
Students: "Do you have (any) siblings?"
Teacher: Yes, I do. I have 2 brothers and a sister. My little brother wasn't born yet - in this picture - he's only 19. Do you have any questions about them?
Students: "Where they live?"
Teacher: Where do they live
etc...

Show the rest of the pictures or slides and continue getting students to ask about your life.

If you chose the movie option, show the whole film and then get students to ask questions about your life based on the images they've seen.

If you chose the Wordle option, get students to work in groups to figure out what the words might have to do with your life before getting them to ask the questions.


Their turn

Get students to jot down 5- 10 questions they'd like to ask each other. Circulate and correct their structures and vocabulary.

Form pairs or small groups and encourage them to ask each other about each others lives.

After around 15 minutes, switch members of groups and now ask them to tell their new partners about the lives of those they were talking to, as well as themselves. Depending on the size of your class, you can repeat this step as often as you like.


Post task

Students can create their own powerpoint presentations, wordles or movies based on what they're able to learn from the internet and/or other sources regarding one or more of the following:

• politicians /local or international
• sports figures
• entertainers: singers, movie stars, tv personalities
• their googlegänger
• anyone else

Ask students to bring what they learned to the next class in order to present it - share and discuss what they learned - again encouraging them to ask each other to ask questions & prompting for extended answers.





Useful links related to this posting:

Getting to know you, video with lyrics (can be used pre-task)
Getting to know you introduction games
Getting to know you - conversation prompt cards (available free to registered members of my website).


Do you have any questions or a creative tip for first lessons that you'd like to share with us?

Best,
Karenne

Note: you can print these lesson tips as a pdf by clicking on the title of the post, scrolling down and then clicking on the green "print as pdf" button.

Hi English Fans! (Motivation in Adult EFL)

alternative title: UP, DOWN, TOP/BOTTOM, CHANGES & NO CHANGES


There have been some rather hot and heavy discussions recently about whether or not it's a good idea to use technology in teaching.

And if you're a regular visitor to my blog then you pretty much already know what I think.

For those who're new: I drum it in hard and heavy. It's the world we live in, it's the world we better be teaching in.



This time, though, I won't be socking you with my opinions. I'll just show you the result.

For those who don't know any back story, I'm very proudly a dogmeist which is a kind of radical movement in teaching, started up by Scott Thornbury back in 2000 (see his website and articles here).

Dogme has the goal of student-centered learning, conversation-driven lessons and a clear focus on emergent language.

Trouble is, I'm also a technologist and most dogmeists aren't.


Now, although Scott Thornbury is my thought leader (there really isn't anyone else like him or his work in our field) we've had a few, somewhat public, arguments about the tech side of things.

I enjoy these discussions - he makes valid points which force me to up my anty each time: just because I think I'm right, doesn't mean that I am.

Being wrong is a point of growth and opportunity to develop - it's specifically because of these arguments, every time they flare up, that I keep copious notes on what's happening in the classroom, how my students are responding, how much they're retaining, where they're improving and constantly question my teaching practice and its effectiveness.

Today's post is about student motivation in my hybrid dogme meets technology teaching.

This blog mostly contains lessons I've done again and again, things that I have experimented with way before you get to see them ;-) however today... I'm going to go out on a wing and admit I don't know what my students will produce next week.

Today, I'll simply ask you to look at the level of motivation my students are displaying due to the fact that we focus on things that they are interested in learning, work on language they need to learn and reuse this in ways applicable to their lives.

We use technology when it fits to do so, not because it's fancy.

Part 1

Language objective:

Mastery over phrases used in statistical reporting /Financial English.

In class procedure:

• Get each student to draw trend expressions as given onto large sheets of paper then present to the rest of the class. If we had had computers in class with us that day, these could have been done in excel.
  

• Discussion and agreement /disagreement. Building contextual examples.

• Cross checking via BlackBerry for expressions when validity of use uncertain.

The expressions in drawings:





Setting up the pretask activity:
(I dislike the word homework)

Brainstorm potential sources for reports.



Pre Task

Find pre-existing graphs, pie-charts, annual reports and download from the internet, preferably in English but not necessarily.

The task is not to create a graph (they know how to do that) but instead to choose any figures and trends personally interesting and think about how to best describe change.

Next week we'll discuss their findings in English.

Student involvement

See emails from Eva, the self appointed moderator, who decided to make sure that all students (including those missing) are on the same page for next week. I did not request for this email to be written, although I wasn't surprised to see it - she often follows up on the lessons.

We live in a world with email. We live in a world where digital photographs can be taken and shared, where .pdfs can be downloaded and distributed.

We live in a world where our phones are micro-sized computers.

We live in a world where the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented but can instead be analyzed - where the focus in language learning can actually be on the language.

Next week I will show you what happens next In Task - what they produce, if they reused the language, how they present these and anything else.


Best,
Karenne
p.s. Can I just say this cracks me up: Hi English Fans! My German/Polish students in this class are aged 40+ and work in the Financial sector.

Water Words (on using images in ESP: Financial English)

One of the absolute best supplementary books to use when teaching banking or financial types is Financial English by Ian MacKenzie.


However, despite the absolute wealth of vocabulary it contains, the exercises can be a bit difficult for students to do, especially if they've never seen the words before and also the book is, quite frankly, a wee dry.

If you've been reading my blog for a while then you've probably already gleaned by now that I like to have a bit of fun in my lessons... and I've noticed you do too... while still sticking to the core learning objectives.

So in this posting I'm going to hone in on two different approaches to working with lists of words, when presenting a visual lexis.

For this example, we'll look at the language in unit 2.10 of Financial English, Liquid Metaphors.

Step one:
Divide up the following words by the number of students you have:

2.10 includes:
channel, dry up, flood, flow, pour, run out of, swim, trickle down, drain, ebb and flow, pool, source, awash, crest, depth, under(water), fluid, sank, plug.

*To mix things up, I also brainstorm a list of related lexis with my students and provide extras before evenly distributing these amongst the students e.g. (water)fall, drop, river, cross that bridge, laundry, ocean, wave & drown.

Step two (the dogme version)

Hand out the vocabulary and ask your students to draw pictures matching each word.






As great masterpieces aren't expected, you'd be surprised how much 50+ year old bankers enjoy doing this type of activity, LOL!





For the words they have difficulty drawing (because they don't know them) either encourage them to help each other out, mime the words or allow them to use a dictionary.

OR

Step two (the techno-teacher version)

Give your students their share of the words and set image searching as their pre-task activity.

They can use Google images (use safe search), any photo based web 2.0 platform and/or my personal favorite, flickr. Remind them to look for images that are creative commons licensed.

Ask them to copy the pictures into Powerpoint, create slides & label if wished.

n.b. if you don't have a computer in the classroom this pre-task can be set as a home based activity.



Step three

Spread the pictures across the table or if you have one, pin them up on a corkboard.

Encourage your students to present their drawings or slides and to share their understanding of the words they've learned with each other.





Step four

Do the exercise provided by the book* - if feasible, get them working in pairs of groups discussing the different solutions applying the words to a financial context, referencing the pictures on the table.

*obviously although I'm using Financial English as the example here, you can do this activity with any vocabulary book.



Step five

Build awareness by highlighting and discussing the common expresssions i.e. trickle down, run out of, riding on the crest of a wave, pulling the plug on something, a huge pool of resources etc - encourage them to come up with alternative sentences using these.

Step six

Now ask your students to write up a short essay reusing the metaphors. For example, in this case, they could describe:

• their company's financial situation
• a project they're currently working on
• their country's economy
• the financial crisis and the global economy
• a current financial news item (e.g. a company heading toward bankruptcy or being listed on the stock exchange)
  

Step seven

Correct their pieces and get them to share what they wrote with each other - encourage further conversation on the opinions stated - reusing the collocative phrases as often as possible.

Best,
Karenne

Side note: I've done both of these methods with my learners and they all reported 1) increased awareness of the vocabulary and 2) a noticing of the lexis in later financial news articles.

For me, these approaches of working with images, while similar probably have different effects on memory.

I've been thinking about it and reckon that they probably trigger different learning processes (one involves some physical learning and discovery of the lexis, the image searching would result in immediate association between the word and image) however, honestly, as I'm not a scientist nor do I have a masters in second language acquisition, I'd really love to know your professional take on this issue.

Do you know of supportive texts that back these ideas up?

Have you/would you also do this type of activity with kids or teens? Why, why not?


Useful links related to this posting:

• Jeremy Day's excellent tips on using Imagery in Financial English
  
• Murder of a Superhero (using drama in the classroom)
• Other teaching tips with a dogme angle added
  
• Other vocabulary teaching tips

• Scott Thornbury on Repetition, great YouTube video!

• The Weboword Ning - for vocabulary enthusiasts, lovers and learners! This is the world's first community dedicated to Visual Vocabulary.

• Jamie Keddie's post: Reasons for buying flowers (grammar + images)
  
• Vicky Saumell on Using Phasr