A little help from pins

Many of us are back to work now.  Schools here locally are with teachers, without students at the moment.  Timetables are being finalised, maintenance work being carried out and preparations to welcome the students back to class being made.

I've mentioned Pinterest before on this Blog.  I'm using it more and more both for work and hobbies.  The number of boards I have is growing all the time and I must admit, that the weekly email I get with 'Your weekly inspiration' from Pinterest is one of the emails I look forward to receiving.

So, when I received a second email from Pinterest a couple of weeks ago with the Title 'Teach with a little help from pins', I checked out the suggested pins and boards in it.  I was impressed and made a mental note to share some of them with you via this Blog.

I checked out (and have clicked to follow) the following boards:

Reading ideas.  There are some great ideas here for activities and displays.

Bulletin Boards and Charts

Where I found this:

So, I hope you enjoy my 'important thoughts' for today.  I'm going to press on and get myself geared up for this academic year.  May it be a great experience for everyone!

Reading and writing and being creative with Storybird

Recently, while I was preparing a seminar on using pictures, I came across a great site for using pictures to create stories.

Storybird

http://storybird.com/

What is Storybird?
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print. It is a fun, collaborative, storytelling website.
Storybird was designed to allow children to work with parents and friends in creating art-inspired stories to share and save. It is also now a very popular tool to for use by teachers with their students around the globe. Users choose from art hosted on the site and build a story around those images that can then be shared with family and friends. Storybird encourages creativity and is a web tool that supports working collaboratively.
The final product can be printed, watched on screen, or shared in an online library with the world. You also have the option to keep it private on the network. 

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/storybird-new-teacher-boot-camp-lisa-dabbs

There is a great slideshow explaining how to use Storybird:
http://www.slideshare.net/WakeCountyPublicLibraries/whats-your-storybird-how-to-use-storybird

I would suggest that you can use Storybird as a source of reading material.  I just keyed in the word 'tall' into the search bar on Storybird and it came up with 3,441 stories by 659 people and using pictures by 18 artists.

I read one about negative and positive feelings called 'Standing tall' that I liked (I 'hearted' it actually - a 'like' for a Storybird story).

And then of course, you could use it with students to write stories.  Storybird provides the pictures (you could use the same set of pictures as a writing challenge first and maybe they could move onto choosing their own set of pictures).

I definitely

http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Love/wallpaper-28182.htm

Storybird!

Interesting Cambridge English webinar

I have just signed up to 'attend' another Cambridge English Language Assessment webinar.

On Monday, 15th or Wednesday 17th April, Jill Buggey will lead a webinar

Practice makes perfect: creating your own exam materials for the classroom

The webinar will begin by identifying the specific skills tested in different exam tasks, such as multiple choice, gap fill and sentence completion. The presenter will show how different types of task are constructed in order to test these skills effectively, using examples from Reading, Listening and Use of English papers.

The presenter will explain how distraction is used in reading and listening tasks, and there will also be examples from Use of English tasks. The strategies students are expected to use in exam tasks are real-life skills, and at this point the presenter will give some practical hints on the most effective strategies for students to use when approaching different types of exam task.

I'm sure the webinar will be enlightening and useful.  I've used materials prepared by Jill Buggey in seminars and they are always very practical.

To find out more, click here:

Inspiration from TED and Jarrett

I was clearing up the mailbox for one of my email accounts, and decided that I had time to watch a video recommended in the This week on TED.com email.

I clicked on the first link and liked the start of the talk When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? 
But then I decided that right now, the likelihood of me having 10 minutes to do absolutely nothing is very zero, so I then clicked on the fourth link.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka: How a boy became an artist

http://on.ted.com/Krosoczka

I watched Jarrett for the full 18 minutes of his talk and found myself laughing and nodding at several of the anecdotes and things he said.

After it had finished, I clicked on a button: Rate  

From the adjectives I could choose from, I selected Inspiring and Funny.  

I thought I'd write a post about it.  If you have 20 minutes this weekend, maybe, you might laugh and be inspired too.

Jarrett stresses the important role that teachers played in his education and career.  I agree totally!

Here are some of the covers from Jarrett's books.  I will definitely look out for them on my next visit to a bookshop.

New YLE Handbook

Great news!

As well as the new handbooks for other exams like Cambridge English: First or Cambridge English: Advanced, Cambridge ESOL has published a new set of Sample Papers for the Cambridge English: YLE Tests.
You can access these on the Cambridge English Teacher Support Website.

Here is the link to the Starters Sample Papers (Sample Paper B is the new one)

And the even better news is that on the same site, you can find the audio files for the listening tasks!


In addition to the new Sample Papers, there is also a new Handbook.

https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/digitalAssets/117422_Young_Learners_English_Handbook.pdf

I wanted to point out that there have been some adjustments and additions to the wordlists for the three different levels.

You can read about this topic in Issue 46 of the Cambridge ESOL Research Notes.  Some (but not all) of the modifications and additions are mentioned on page 20:

As usual, I found myself nodding in agreement at the changes and additions and the justification for making them.

While I write this post, I am listening to the news.  They have just said that today is apparently the most depressing day of the year because it's post-Christmas and the mornings are so dark at this time of the year (and it's Monday of course!)  They suggest going out for a walk - I won't be doing that just yet as we are in the middle of a storm here!

Have a great week!

If you've never failed, you've never tried anything new

I was looking at the latest posts on Facebook by friends and pages that I'm subscribed to.

I came across this and liked it (in both senses - I clicked to say I liked it and it struck a chord!)

http://www.facebook.com/HealingwithArt

Then, I clicked on a link on a friend's Facebook page and ended up on YouTube, watching a short video.

I think it would be a great video to use in class.  You could ask them what they know about some of the people mentioned in the video (Walt Disney, Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein, Eminem...).  Ask them what thing the people have in common, then they watch the video to find out.

For more information and material to use in class on this topic, you could try some of the activities on Famous People Lessons, for example, this text and activities about Albert Einstein.


Hope you feel inspired now!!!

Yesterday, I was along the coast in San Sebastian (for the second time in a week!).   Beautiful city (in fact, the first city I visited after I first came to Spain all those years ago to work in Madrid!)

Yesterday, I was there to give two seminars:  Teaching Cambridge English: Advanced for the First Time and Teaching Cambridge English: First for the first time.

Many of the participants attended both sessions.  I knew this was going to be the case, so I made sure that the sessions complemented each other and didn't repeat materials or ideas.  I also knew that 95% of the people who were coming WEREN'T new to either of these exams, but rather, had come along for advice and ideas for them to train teachers new to the exams.

Near the end of the second session, on First, I asked different groups to discuss their ideas, tips and advice for each of the five Papers of the Cambridge English: First exam, using this handout.  (I adapted this from a document for IELTS I downloaded from Usingenglish.com here.)  Precisely, I wanted to draw on their experience and expertise (there was a lot of this in the room, believe me!)

What I suggested to the people at the seminar was that I would share this document via the Teaching Together Blog.  Then, I will write up the suggestions that the groups in San Sebastian came up with and consider each of the five Papers in five separate blog posts.

It would be great if readers of this blog could also send in their ideas!  We can learn so much from each other!

Black Cat Online practice for Cambridge ESOL exams

This morning I received an email updating me about the resources available on the Black Cat Readers blog:  

Did you know that you can find hundreds of different kinds of interactive exercises on the Black Cat Readers blog?

Click on w.w.w.blackcatreaders.com/quizzes and discover a world of useful and interesting activities to practise your English: Grammar exercises, Vocabulary, Pronunciation and Listening activities, but also sections specifically designed to help you practise Cambridge ESOL exams.

Access is free! Hurry up!

 Given my obvious and known interest in any website or blog that claims to help students practise  and prepare for the Cambridge ESOL exams, I clicked on the link and checked out the materials there.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can search for Exam skills for the different levels of the CEFR - for Cambridge English: Key, Preliminary, First and Advanced.

As the next seminar I will be giving (November 9th San Sebastian) is about Cambridge English: Preliminary for Schools, I selected the activities available for B1 and this list appeared:

It looks very useful.  I'll be recommending it to my students and colleagues to try out.  If you recommend it or use it, let me know what you think!

Have a great weekend!

An internet invention?

While I was catching up with friends and family on Facebook, I came across a post on a friend (and fellow Cambridge ESOL presenter)'s page:

"The Marquis de Gouvernet replied saying that he should accord only a small number of leaves, not to those who said they were sick, because the abuse was too great, but to those who could prove that they had important business to attend to."

This had me confused for a minute - what on earth was Phil talking about?

Then I read on:

It's international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don't mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your status.

Here is 5th sentence from page 52 of the nearest book to me (the one on the top of the pile of books I have just read):

"It was a wonderful surprise, particularly after the shock and worry of Gary's accident."

It occurred to me that this activity could be done in class.  Students could be asked to find this sentence  (page 52, 5th sentence) in different books in English and then they could discuss which sentence they think comes from which book (looking at the cover), what the book is about.

The sentence from Phil's book shows that the book is about an older period than my book probably.   

I did a search to see when International Book Week is and found that there isn't actually an official international book week!  There is a World Book Day on April 23rd (but this takes place at the beginning of March for the UK and Ireland apparently!)

I also checked to see where this meme had originated (as well as checking out what the word 'meme' itself means! = an idea or pattern that spreads via email, blogs, Facebook...).

Oh, and while I was searching the web to find photos and information for this post, I came across another interesting challenge:

my mission to read a book from every country

As the planet celebrates World Book Day, I'm midway through a plan to read a book from every single one of the 196 UN-recognised countries. Have I gone too far?

You can read more about this challenge here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/23/world-book-day-read-country

And as usual, this led me to another interesting webpage:

  http://www.pbase.com/abott/196_photos

Many of the photos on this page could be useful for class - you could show students the photos and ask them where each one was taken.  If you showed me the UK photo, I would never have said it was taken there!!!

A well guarded secret

Last Friday, I wrote about the Olympic Opening Ceremony.  I, like many other people around the world, was wondering who would be given the honour of lighting the Olympic flame to burn in the stadium for the duration of the London Olympics.

The people chosen to do the honour were not on anyone's list.  Even Steve Redgrave did not seem to know the exact procedure that was to be used or the names of the people who would take over the torch from him.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19024475

• Rower Cameron MacRitchie, 19
• Sailor Callum Airlie, 17
• London 2012 Young Ambassador Jordan Duckitt, 18
• Runner Desiree Henry, 16
• Runner Katie Kirk, 18
• Javelin thrower Aidan Reynolds, 18
• Runner Adelle Tracey, 19

The Olympic torch was brought to the stadium along the Thames in a speedboat by David Beckham,

who then passed it to five-time Olympic gold medallist rower Sir Steve Redgrave.

He was met by the nominated young athletes, who ran along the stadium track before being joined by the six other Olympic winners who had selected them.
Sir Steve himself chose rower Cameron MacRitchie - the 19-year-old finished fifth with partner James Edwards in the men's pair at the 2012 GB rowing team under-23 trials in April.

Inspiring young people like these often feature in the reading and listening texts on the Cambridge English: Key for Schools and Cambridge English: Preliminary for Schools, so I thought I'd check them out on the internet and find if they had pages.  I suggest they would be good to use in class or for your students to read about.

Here are the pages I found:
Adelle Tracey:  http://www.adelletracey.co.uk/
Callum Airlie: http://www.bankofscotlandlondon2012.co.uk/en/In-your-community/Local-Heroes/Callum-Airlie/
Cameron Macritchie:   Cameron kept lighting of stadium torch secret from his family
Desiree Henry:  A video with an interview with Desiree outside Leicester Square before the premiere of the film Fast Girls.
Katie Kirk:  An interview with the runner the day after the ceremony.

For the article about Aidan Reynolds, students could be asked to read the article and to match the people in the story to the actions:


Who ...
1  - lit the Olympic flame?                                                         Aidan
2  - went to bed before the ceremony finished?                      Aidan's mother
3  - plays basketball for Wales?                                               Aidan's sister
4  - throws the javelin?                                                             Aidan's grandparents
5  - nominated Aidan for the Olympic ceremony?                 Aidan's neighbours
6  - brought some champagne to celebrate?                           Lynn Davies
7  - went to London to the Olympic Ceremony?


Key
1  Aidan   2  Aidan's grandparents     3  Aidan's sister     4  Aidan    5  Lynn Davies    6  Aidan's neighbours    7  Aidan and Aidan's sister


And there is a great article about Callum Airlie and the fact that the ceremony coincided with his 17th birthday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-19037304.
I suggest that you could use this article in class to practise sequencing and past tenses.
Procedure
1  Identify the events that Callum mentions.
2  Put them into chronological order.
3  Write a narrative (students write a diary or letter as if they were Callum) using the events.

 I hope these links and suggestions are useful! Let me know!

Olympic sports

If like me, you like interesting facts that you can share with your students, then I think you will also like the Olympic Sports page of the London 2012 website.

You can click on any of the sports listed on the left or on the blue icon for it.  This will take you to a new page where you can read about the dates the event will take place in London, the venue.  There is a video illustrating figures about the number of players taking part, etc.

For example, for Table Tennis:

Key facts

Venue: ExCeL

Dates: Saturday 28 July – Wednesday 8 August

Medal events: 4

Athletes: 172 (86 men, 86 women)

I particularly liked the 'Did you know?' box on the page.

Other names for Table Tennis include ‘Ping Pong’, ‘Whiff Waff’ and ‘Flim Flam’, reflecting the sound of the ball being struck and bouncing off the table.

There is lots of material here for all levels, including lower level classes.  And as sport usually features in most coursebooks and on most syllabuses, it should fit in - especially this year of the Olympics.

British Council Seminar on choosing and using resources

Yesterday, I received my weekly newsletter from British Council Teaching English.  (Another site I'm subscribed to).

If I have time, I look through the areas mentioned in the newsletter as soon as it arrives and click on the links to find out more about them.  (If not, the email gets transferred to my 'subscriptions' folder

and stays there till I have time to look at it properly!)

I decided to have a look at the email this morning when I switched on my computer and clicked on the link to

Choosing and using resources with ESOL learners Dot Powell, manager of the British Council's project to create a portal for ESOL teachers and learners, looks at criteria we use to make judgements about ESOL materials.

This took me to the Seminars section of the Teaching English website.  I clicked on:

I then watched Dot Powell, Project Manager for ESOL Nexus in a seminar with teachers discussing the criteria we need to apply when we are choosing and/or preparing resources for students.

Dot then provided examples of resources and applied the criteria with the teachers at the seminar.


The seminar lasts just under 20 minutes, but I found it so interesting and well-presented, that the time just flew by.

I then paid a quick visit to the ESOL Nexus website.

The site is targeted at a particular group of ESOL learners:

ESOL Nexus Welcome to the ESOL Nexus page for learners. The materials here have been specially designed and identified for learners who are working and making their home in the UK. We are sure you will find lots of interesting and motivating activities here which will help you to improve your English in lots of different ways, understand more about UK culture and learn more about UK society and work.

But I have just tried out a couple of activities from the site and I think that many of them would be useful and relevant to our students.
There are many listening activities and the Magazine articles seem interesting.
I liked the several of the poems in the Poems and Stories section.  I hadn't come across the No poem before!

I hope you will visit the Nexus site too and find it useful.  (Most of the stuff there is for higher level learners.

In a few minutes, I will look at the teachers section of the site - maybe for a future post......?


The British Council has lots more seminars on its website.  Here is the direct link to the start up page.

Text analysis and UsingEnglish.com

I have just subscribed to another site.  I had used various worksheets before from UsingEnglish.com but hadn't really got round to looking round the site when I'd visited it previously.

Right now, I am working on several seminars that I have coming up - most of them are on Cambridge English: Advanced, so I'm enjoying preparing activities and tips to share on all five papers - Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking.

Back in November, I shared with you a tool for making Word Clouds by feeding in a text to Wordsift.

I have found another very useful tool for working on and analysing texts.

I fed the following text from a CAE Reading Paper  into the Text Content Analysis Tool on the UsingEnglish.com website.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Time was when physicists dreamed of a final theory of fundamental physics, a perfect set of equations that would describe every force and particle in nature. Today that dream is being overtaken by the suspicion that there is no such thing. Some even fear that all attempts at a deeper understanding of nature are dead ends. This will lend support to those who have long claimed that research into fundamental physics is a waste of time and money; that at best it provides answers to obscure questions which few people understand or care about. So do these reservations undermine pure physics as a scientific pursuit? Surely, it makes no difference if the truths that physicists seek turn out to be more complex and messy than they once hoped. It could even make the search more intriguing. There are as many profound questions out

there as there have ever been, and to answer them physicists need the kind of hard experimental evidence that can only come from pure research. Can we, therefore, justify spending the huge sums of money that such research demands? What it boils down to is whether we think the search for fundamental truths is important. This quest for knowledge is a defining human quality, but it’s hard to quantify how our lives have been ‘improved’ by it. There have been plenty of technological spin-offs from the space race and other experiments. But the spin-offs are not the point. In showing us how the universe works, fundamental physics could also tell us something profound about ourselves. And for that, a few billion dollars would be a small price to pay.

After clicking on the 'calculate' button, I was impressed by the information I obtained about the text, all in a matter of seconds.















I found out that:

• The Total Word Count for the above text is 273 words.  
• 165 words appear only once in the text.  
• There are 15 sentences.  
• The average number of words per sentence is 18.2. 
• 25 of the words in the text are classed as Hard - they are three or more syllables long.

Lexical density

The text is lexically dense.  (The lexical density is 60.44%)

This is calculated by taking the total number of words in the text, dividing it by the total number of words and multiplying that by 100.

The programme also made me a Word Cloud for the text and I could sort this either alphabetically or in order of frequency of use in the text.

I then tried out the same text in the Advanced Texts Analyser (you have to be registered with the site to be able to use this).

I could then obtain:

•  graphic information about the words in the text (For example:  there are 64 four letter words and 42 of these four letter words only appear once in the text).
• information like the fact that there are 7 2-word phrases that appear more than once in the text (e.g. fundamental physics, spin offs, have been)
• 94 of the words belong to the Common Words word list.

I will certainly be trying these tools out again soon and sharing them with teachers at the CAE Reading seminar!

Hope you will try it too!

A personal recommendation

Yesterday, I was reading a blog entry by Clay Shirky about the way newspapers are changing (and will have to change in the future) in order to survive and to give their customers what they want.  It discusses the issue of whether people are prepared to pay for reading a newspaper online at all, given the fact that

'if you rank readers by pages viewed in a month, the largest group by far, between a third and half of them, will visit only a single page' 

 Newspapers are faced with the challenge of how to generate income.  With paper editions, this was fairly straightforward:  their income came from the sale of newspapers and from the advertisers who placed ads in the papers.

Source:  cps.k12.in.us

But online readers object to having ads on the webpage.  For one thing, it slows down the loading of a page.

Source:  blog.nielson.com

This made me think about the sites and newsletters I am subscribed to (several - including English Profile Word of the Week, as I told you in a previous entry).

As well as free subscriptions, I also pay to subscribe to a small number of websites and their contents.

One of these is its-teachers.com.  I remember years back that the school where I worked had a subscription to the paper version of this magazine.

Right from the start (1990), the magazine was extremely popular with all the teachers in the school.  We looked forward to its arrival because it always came packed with very practical, immediately usable activities.  I for one found (and still find) that the suggestions also inspired me to produce my own activities for use in the classroom.

If you want a taste of what 'its' has to offer, why not sign up for the free monthly email newsletter.?  This will give you a taste of how a subscription might be useful to you.

And please share any subscriptions you have with the rest of us.  Sharing tips is the key feature of this blog.

newspapermap.com

How did we ever exist before the internet? I’ve been having tremendous problems with my internet connection. Among other things, it has meant that I haven’t been able to add any new entries to this blog for over a week.

And I was itching to share newspapermap.com with you.

As so often happens, I can’t remember where I first heard about newspapermaps – maybe I stumbled upon it on one of those days when I had time to look through the ‘for later’ bookmarks on my computer.

Anyway, it is a gem! It works like google maps in that the start up page shows you a world map with pins pointing to the location of the newspapers. The pins are colour coded showing the language the newspapers are written in. There are nine different languages labelled separately. English has by far the largest share of newspapers, with Spanish, French, Portuguese and German following on.

The reason I like this site is like many other websites for a mixture of personal and professional reasons. I was delighted to be able to take a quick look at the Sunderland Echo – my local newspaper where I grew up. I hadn’t seen it for years.

And for classes, it could have endless uses – accessing articles on the same theme and comparing how the story is treated or focused. At lower levels, this could be in terms of how much space the story is given on a page and whether photos are used or not. At higher levels, the actual language used (for example, level of formality, use of passives, use of nouns versus verbs….)

And I have just tried out the translation tool on the Sunderland echo (by clicking on ‘español’ in the translation option)

Artista Sunderland en Londres llamando al

ARTISTA Alison Barratt ha conseguido un papel de trabajo para la ciruela, el alcalde de Londres.

I deliberately hadn’t looked at the newspaper in English first, so didn’t have a clue what was meant by ‘working for the plum’.

Compare this to the original headline and first sentence:

Sunderland artist’s London calling

ARTIST Alison Barratt has landed a plum role working for the Lord Mayor of London.

Thank goodness that we still need humans to translate and to teach!

Hope you enjoy this link and why not share your ideas for using it with students?

What kinds of texts are used in the Cambridge ESOL exams?

Texts are used right from the start!

At Starters, in Part 4 of the Reading and Writing Test, students read a text about an animal or a thing and have to choose 5 words to complete the 5 gaps in the text.  (The words all have pictures to show the meaning).

For example, in the text here, Starters candidates read a text about a horse.

How can we help students read texts?

We can show them a picture 

and ask them questions:

What’s this?  (a horse)

How many legs has a horse got?  (four)

Do horses live in houses?  (no!)

What do horses eat?   (grass, carrots, …)

What can horses do?  (run, jump)

Then, students can read the text through and find what it says about horses.

Why is this useful?

In real life, we use information like the title or pictures that appear with a text to predict what we are going to read about.

When we are looking through a newspaper or magazine, we might decide to read or not read an article because of these predictions.

As students move up the levels, the texts become longer and the tasks get more challenging.

This means that it is extremely important for our students to know the best way to start reading each text.  

 Watch this blog for ideas on encouraging students to use the best approach!

Did you know?

The way the text and the questions appear is a clue!  If the questions appear first (e.g. First Reading Part 3 or Advanced Reading Part 4), then students should glance through the questions BEFORE they read the text!