Make your own smartboard!
Perhaps you like the software that comes with whiteboards, smartboards or interactive boards which are pretty much en vogue right now.
Perhaps your school does not want to shell out more money to get you one of the boards and accompanying software after they’ve already given you beamers and laptops/classroom PCs.
Well, here is an online solution: Virtual Manipulatives.
The website is terribly easy to use and you can print out your creation once you are ready.
Responsibility for learning
Ed lists 10 ways to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning. Great points but I think I have one more:
11. Moderate, don’t lecture
Seems like a very obvious one, but is actually quite hard to achieve. As a teacher you have to change your role from Mr (or Ms)-Know-It-All to a moderator of learning experiences. This of course needs courage and enormous flexibility on the teachers part. But it will make your classes more interesting as well as more student focussed.
More cold water…
As the school year is coming to an end, it is time to evaluate what time and energy I have spent on my Moodle install.
All in all, I think that testing Moodle in one of my classes was a positive experience for both me and my students. They’ve acquired technological knowledge, had fun while learning English and did more of their homework than before. 
All valid reasons to broaden the experiment to further classes next year!
I’m ready to jump into the cold water…
..that is: I’m ready to test Moodle in up to three of my classes. I’ve taken down my personal website and installed Moodle 1.9.x (weekly whatever) on it.
So far I’ve already started a course for the book I’m reading in an English class. Two history courses (on industrialisation and the First World War) will be added shortly. Tomorrow evening, the first bunch of students is going to get their feet wet with creating accounts in Moodle and giving the system a go.
I plan on using one lesson to get them ready with the system and another two hours of first real work in it. This should give them enough time to try out forum and chat as well as the glossary and whatever nice tasks I can think of.
BTW: as a starting point, this book is a nice introduction to Moodle.
Free English lesson plans
Over at his blog, Sean Banville tips his hat to several teaching colleagues who, despite their full time jobs, create free English lesson plans for us.
Definitely worth a visit!
Aside: Sean’s websites themselves are full of great free lessons!
Collaborating with fridges …
Have you ever wished you and your students could collaborate online by …
- … sticking notes to fridges?
- … rearranging those notes?
- … commenting on these notes?
I know I have. So I was very excited when Opera Software introduced Unite into their browser. Unite offers several applications running in your browser. One of them is the Fridge, which let’s you collect notes from other surfers. (These surfers don’t need to surf with Opera, BTW.)
The only remaining problem was that I really don’t like to let my computer running when I’m not at home, so the Fridge would not be available for several hours per day. Add to that the different surfing habits of my students and you realise the problem: When the Fridge was available, no one but me was surfing. When the students were connected to the net, the Fridge was unavailable.
Luckily, there is Wallwisher. Accessible 24/7 and no need to keep my computer turned on. Just how I like it!
Interesting new links
From those whom I follow on Twitter these interesting links emerged today:
- Comics
- Top 12 Sites To Watch Videos That Are Better Than YouTube
- Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators (free ebook)
- Moodle Hosting (Free basic Moodle hosting. I have no idea how good they are, how nice they will play in future or else. I just thought you might be interested.)
Educational Linux distributions
If you are looking for an educational Linux distribution, you have at least three choices:
- openSUSE Education is a live and install DVD based on openSUSE 11.2.
- Edubuntu is the education version of the quite popular Ubuntu.
- LernTux and KinderTux are Mandriva derivates created by Dieter Schütze.
- UPDATE: Skolelinux based on Debian. (How could I forget this classic?)
KinderTux is especially interesting, because it isn’t aimed at pupils or teachers but at younger children to help them enjoying computers. The only alternative to KinderTux I could find was Quimo, which uses Ubuntu as base system.
Reading strategies
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!
What to do if …
… 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?
