Let’s face it: reading is necessary for learning.
However, reading a text and comprehending or creating meaning from it are two different things. To help students you can show them various strategies that will help them get along. Quite a number of those strategies have been collected here. Some even with videos!
… you suddenly realise, right in the middle of a lesson, that the text you gave to your students is way too difficult?
Let me explain the situation.
I’ve, well, inherited, a class from a colleague who claimed that said class was really good and advanced. Right in the first lesson I realised that my colleague obviously meant something different by advanced. Not good!
I managed to save the lesson by explaining a lot of words and on the fly “invent” activities that only barely relied on the text itself. It went quite well, but I’m not happy about this.
The question is: what do you do in such situations?
Ok, the headline is lame. But still, it is nice to listen to David Crystal talking about how new inventions in media changed and still change language:
As a side benefit, the video links to Global from Macmillan Education where you might find some useful elessons. I did.
Following other teachers via Twitter has its uses. I probably wouldn’t have found this lovely site without it: Blogs: Free ESL Materials.com | Blogging | Lesson Plans. If you are an ESL teacher like me, it is a great resource.
I especially like Breaking News English. Here you can find not only topical texts but also
In fact, for every text you’ll get a complete lesson that you can adapt to your needs. Great stuff!
If I ever have to teach TV news again, I’ll definitely use this lovely video:
It is hillarious, it is so true, but it will definitely need subtitles or a transscript for my students. Nevertheless, it is worth the work!
I got bitten by this ugly bug (Bug 555027 – autologin failure …) and could no longer login to my lovely Gnome. With the help of the fine lads at #opensuse-gnome on Freenode and in the forum, I was able to find a patch here.
Now everything seems working again.
If you (like me) have no idea of what to do with Inkscape, hop over to Inkscape Class Day 1 « Máirín Duffy for an eight session course by Máirín Duffy.
Originally held for 7th grades in the Boston area, all of us can enjoy the course via blog and PDF.
Impressive!
This book (Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching) seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Strangely, there are no reviews on Amazon for it yet. The contents are impressive, as is the price tag: a hefty €35-40.
The book is promoted in the Moodle Language teaching community and probably worth the money, so I’ll get it eventually and read it.
Now, is there a similar book for history teaching?
For starters I’ll read the teachers’ manual here (German).
… this might help you: GnomeLoginHang < Computing < LEPP TWiki.
It sure helped me this morning.
