Just tweeted: http://twitter.com/cheimi10/status/6572938964

Do you know what I hate? Photocopiers. That’s what.

It doesn’t matter if I’m trying to print two-sided copies, enlarge originals, or select the A3 option - my lame efforts will always result in wasted paper and lots of swear words.

You see, I lack a fundamental intelligence that Howard Gardner and his followers have so ruthlessly chosen to ignore: Photocopier Intelligence. I know I am not alone.

Sometimes I wonder why the Interactive Whiteboard gets all the attention as the most evil piece of technology. To me, the photocopier poses a much more serious threat. And it should be exposed for the dirty monster that it is.

Let’s start by asking the question, “Exactly what problem did photocopiers solve when they were introduced to the world?” For teachers, the answer to this is quite simple: Any situation in which we need all of our students to have a copy of a text, a map, a diagram, etc.

When I was at primary school, there was only one photocopier between all of the teachers. It was quite an event to be given a warm, damp sheet of paper that smelled of nail varnish remover. Do you remember that? In my class, we used to try to get high from the fumes.

I imagine that back then, it was more expensive to make copies. As a result, teachers would have had to decide very carefully what they were going to hand out. Despite this new technology, they would have been expected to resort to the old methods whenever possible. For example:

1. Using text books (where every student has his/her own copy)
2. Writing a text on the board and asking students to copy it into their notebooks
3. Dictating a text

Now here’s my problem: I have often found myself in lesson planning situations in which I go straight to the photocopier without even considering options 2 and 3. I wonder how many other teachers can say the same? This is a shame because options 2 and 3 should be absolute basic techniques of the language classroom.

Let’s consider option 2 (writing a text on the board and asking students to copy it into their note books).

Surely this is a great technique for the language classroom, especially if we want to use short texts for intensive reading and intensive thinking activities. When a language learner copies a text word for word, there is a lot more potential for noticing and engaging with the language.

I was speaking to a friend and colleague about this point recently. She said something very real and interesting which I asked her reiterate in an email. She said:

“When I had to copy texts at school, I used to try to get exactly the same number of words on each line as the teacher had on the blackboard. I didn’t do this because I thought I had to. I did it for the personal challenge. But as a result, I took no notice of what I was writing.”

I’m sure most of us can relate to this in some way or another. So perhaps the key is to create a thinking task which will require students to interact in some way with the text that they are copying.

Here are a few examples of texts/thinking tasks I have used in the past:

Example text 1

What is ‘it’?

“Joe brought it home from the office. He gave it to Betty and one of his kids and to Betty’s mother. But Betty’s mother went back to California the next day. On her way to the airport, she gave it to a cab driver, a ticket agent and one of the charming stewardesses.  At school, Joe’s kid gave it to some other kids and Mrs Meryl got it and gave it to her husband. In California, Betty’s mother gave it to her best friend Dotty. But Dotty had a heart condition and she died. But before she died, Dotty gave it her girlfriend, the mailman, the paper boy, and her vet when she went to pick up her Chihuahua.“

Example text 2

Can you fill in the missing words?

Example text 3

What is the missing word (it is the same word in each case)?

__________ is not the lowest form of art. Despite having to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually the most honest artform available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on some of the best walls a town has to offer, and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

The people who run our cities don’t understand __________ because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. But if you just value money then your opinion is worthless.

They say __________ frightens people and is symbolic of the decline in society. But the people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back.

Example text 4

What are the missing words?

Saturn is probably best known for its system of ________ (a) which extend from 6,630 ___________(b) to 120,700 ___________(b) above the planet’s __________(c). They average approximately ______(d) meters in thickness and consist mostly of ________(e) particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust.

There are two main theories regarding the origin of Saturn’s rings: One theory is that the rings are the remains of a destroyed _________(f). The second theory is that the rings are left over from the original nebular material from which Saturn formed.

Example 5

What are splurgs?

Splurgs fly through the air but they don’t have wings.
People like to hit splurgs with sticks.
Splurgs are small and white.
People try to put splurgs into little holes.

The answers

1. http://www.teflclips.com/?p=239 
2. http://www.teflclips.com/?p=80
3. ‘Graffiti’ Text taken from this book
4. http://www.teflclips.com/?p=267
5. Golf balls

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Incidentally, the image that shows the second text (see above) is my first attempt with an Interactive Whiteboard. I wrote the song lyrics while my students copied them into their notebooks and attempted to fill in the missing words. The advantage there was that I was able to save the display and display it again later that week to revise the language.

Of course a computer, projector and screen would be adequate for this. The five example texts above could be shown to learners on big screen. That way, the learners aren’t at the mercy of the teacher’s handwriting. And while they are copying/thinking, the teacher is free to think about/prepare what to do next.

For texts that are too large to expect learners to copy, it is still not out of the question of displaying them on the big screen for reading activities. ‘Heads up’ reading can have a more social dynamic than ‘heads down’ reading. Here is an example lesson plan that uses a Power Point text for a ‘heads up’ reading activity: Splurg April Fool.

Of course, there is still the problem that students won’t be able to take home a copy of the text. So put it on the class blog/wiki. Or send out links if the text is online. Or invite students to take photographs of the screen - anything to bring an end to that paper churning monster in the staff room.

I made the above Wordle Cloud as part of a global warming vocabulary activity. Students have to match the nouns to make 2-word collocations. So, for example, we have:

• Global warming
• Ice caps
• Climate change
• Environmental policy
• Etc

But there are two problems:

1. I wanted the word Greenhouse to appear twice. It forms two collocations: Greenhouse effect and Greenhouse gases. But in the word cloud, it only appears once (although it is twice as big as the others). The same applies to the words Carbon and Ice.
2. What happened to the word Sea? It forms part of the collocation Sea levels and Wordle has decided to omit it from the cloud.

How to solve these problems

Problem 1: One of the characteristics of word clouds is this:  The more frequent a word is in the source text, the bigger it will appear in the cloud. So, in the noun list that I used to make the above word cloud, the big words Greenhouse, Ice and Carbon appear twice:

Last week I showed how to create phrase clouds (click here for posting). The secret all comes down to a little symbol called the tilde, the one that looks like a squiggly hyphen (~). This sign can also be used to prevent repetition of words in a word cloud. So, for example, if you copy and paste the following word list into the Wordle text window, you will see what I mean: 

Age
Caps~~~Carbon
Carbon
Change
Climate
Dioxide
Effect
Environmental
Footprint
Fossil
Fuels
Gas
Glacier
Global~~~Greenhouse
Greenhouse
Ice
Levels~~~Ice
Policy
Retreat
Sea
Warming

The result:

The tilde sign (~) can be used to ensure that individual words are repeated in cloud. Thanks to Maribel Boender who left a comment in the last posting. She pointed out that when using this technique, we can use multiple tilde signs (~~~) to increase the distance between words.

In the comments of the last posting David shared a slideshow of Wordle images of jumbled questions (see here). I mentioned that the tilde mark could also be used to avoid repetition of words in those images as well as the ones I made a while back to revise the blue whale sentences (see here).

Problem 2: Wordle will automatically remove common words from the word cloud. Usually, we are considering words such as prepositions, articles, pronouns, etc. But in this case, the program must have decided that Sea is a common word. This is most inconvenient for me.

You will notice that in the second word cloud (above), the word Sea is included. This is because I clicked on the Language tab on the Wordle page and clicked on the Do Not Remove Common Words option:

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While I was at TESOL-France in Paris a couple of weeks ago, I met Sylvie Dolakova, a teacher, teacher trainer and writer from the Czech Republic. She was giving a talk and also presenting a poster titled Storytelling? Young Learners? Limited Vocabulary? Why Not?

Like many of us, Sylvie is a big fan of Wordle.net, an online application for making word clouds. She showed me a really useful little tip that opens up all sorts of new possibilities - a way of including phrases in word clouds. Look below and you will see what I am talking about. The phrase that Sylvie demonstrates is “Once upon a time”.

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If you look at the above word cloud, you can see that there are three other phrases/collocations included in Sylvie’s word cloud: “Lesson plans”, “Body language”, and “Young learners”.

Sylvie showed me that the answer lies with the tilde sign (~). Whenever you are pasting text into the “Paste in a bunch of text” window, insert that character between any words that you want to keep together:

This really does increase the possibilities for Wordle. Here is a Phrase Cloud that I made which could be used in conjunction with this lesson plan.

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One last thing about Wordle - the site allows you to make print off the Word Clouds and Word Phrases that you make. But if you want to create jpeg images and store them on your computer, you will have to use the Screen Capture. I made a clip a while back that demonstrates how to do this:

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A Pecha Kucha is a short presentation that lasts exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Why 6 minutes and 40 seconds?

• Well, the presentation has to consist of 20 power point slides
• Each slide is displayed for exactly 20 seconds (the presenter has no control over when the slides change)
• 20 images x 20 seconds = 6 minutes 40 seconds

Here is one that I did at TESOL-France n Paris last Saturday night. It’s a bit difficult to understand at times, especially when I panic!

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There were five other presenters. Here they are:

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Thanks very much to everyone at TESOL-France on a great job.

Look! The good people at English Central recorded my webinar: ‘Using Images Creatively’:

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