There is a new craze happening on Twitter. It’s called ‘Tweeting what you’re Eating’. Everyone is at it. A couple of nights ago, for example, Scott Thornbury shared this with us:
@thornburyscottHome again, and homely food: butifarra amb moniatos:
A few days before that, Gavin Dudeney was kind enough to offer us his airport lunch:
@dudeneygeAirport… Served with side order of scowl…
Anyway, as you can imagine, cookery seems to be establishing itself as a metaphor for language teaching. A few nights ago, for example, the question of Dogme cuisine came up when Scott tweeted that:
We then had some fun comparing sandwich toasters with interactive whiteboards (have a look at this silly link). After this Scott asked:
@thornburyscottSeriously though, isn’t technology to teaching what fast food is to dining?
To this, Graham Stanley replied:
@grahamstanleyno, technology is to teaching what technology is to cooking.
Technology affects every human endeavor in some way or another. Perhaps then, instead of looking for an analogy to describe the relationship between technology and the classroom, we should be looking at parallels. Here is one that I would like to share - the technology is good / bad debate in medicine.
First of all, the ‘technology is bad’ corner. This is represented here by the ‘machine that goes ping’ and ‘the most expensive machine in the hospital’:
And now, in the ‘technology is good‘ corner, here are some photographs of Barcelona pediatricians Marta and Roser at work. A few years ago these ex-students of mine set off to Sierra Leone to get involved is a Médecins Sans Frontières project.
Marta with some friends
Roser playing Pick-Up Sticks with Alhaji
Roser feeding baby Kargbo
This last photograph shows Marta performing ‘telemedicina’ - a long-distance diagnosis which was made possible by a live video link to specialists in Barcelona. She told me:
“We explored the babies with ultrasound (echocardiografy or abdominal ultrasound), connected to Barcelona specialists, who gave us the right diagnoses in dificult cases.“
A few months ago, I posted a lesson plan called Do and Make collocations. The activity involves using Google to investigate frequencies of collocation pairs - this sort of thing:
The use of search engines to investigate English is a quite a well-established practice. Google, for example, is often consulted for quick reference by the the writers at Language Log. In this article, Michael Rundell refers to the search engine as the Biggest Corpus of All. And for anyone interested in more ideas, here is an article I wrote a while back called Google Fighting in the Classroom.
But of course, as with any resource, technique or tool that we use in the classroom, student enthusiasm will be divided: Some will like it. Others won’t.
Anyway, it was very interesting to hear from a fellow teacher who seems to have lost his job after a discussion on the merits of Google fights. He wrote:
Hello Jamie
I’m not sure if I should mention this to you but I have a pretty funny story about one of your lesson plans. I used the Do and make collocations lesson plan recently. Personally, I think that the idea of using Google to investigate English is very valid. In fact, my Spanish girlfriend, who is an English learner, often uses it when she has any doubts. But I was using the lesson with the German boss at my school. He hated the idea and said that it had no value. Being that he prides his school on progressiveness, I told him that I thought he was wrong. Well, as you can imagine he hasn’t renewed my contract this year.
What amazes me is the boss is constantly babbling on about innovation in learning and they drilled this into me at the interview stage. It does raise some interesting questions regarding innovation and technology in teaching:
Does having a projector in a room make for cutting edge teaching if you’re just going to look at the BBC website? It’s exactly the same as a handout.
It’s obvious that companies like that are just using tech as window dressing to get the students in, then not bothering to at least to experiment or have an open mind. Or, they’ve just completely missed the point themselves.
The Venus of Willendorf (below) is an icon of prehistoric art. It is housed in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. One day, a visitor to the museum asks a guide how old it is. The guide replies that it is 25 thousand years and 8 months old. The visitor is surprised and asks the guide how he can be so exact. The guide replies, “Well, it was 25 thousand years old when I started working here and that was 8 months ago.”
This is a variation of the Tyrannosaurus Rex Joke: An activity that was posted a while back.
1. Start by writing The Venus of Willendorf on the board and ask your students if they can tell you what it is and what they know about it.
2. Show a picture. The one on the left was obtained from Wikipedia. There are a couple of others included in the pdf file lesson plan (above).
3. Tell your students that you are going to ask them to draw a picture. Ask everyone to have a pen or pencil and a piece of blank paper ready.
4. Tell everyone to put down their pens (no drawing yet!) and then give the following instructions:
“I want you to draw a picture of a visitor in a museum. He or she is pointing to the Venus of Willendorf and speaking to a guide. The Venus of Willendorf is in a glass case in the foreground of the picture. The visitor and the guide are in the background. The visitor is on the left hand side and the guide is on the right hand side. There are two large speech bubbles: One coming out of the visitor’s mouth and another coming out of the guide’s mouth.”
To strengthen students’ comprehension of the instructions:
Use gesture. For example point in the air to demonstrate “pointing at the Venus of Willendorf”
Change your standing position to demonstrate “on the left/right hand side” or “in the foreground/background”
Demonstrate what a speech bubble is by drawing an imaginary one in the air (coming out your own mouth) with your finger.
Speak clearly and write any new language on the board
Repeat the instructions 2 or 3 times.
Learn the instructions off by heart. Instructions are clearer when they are not being read from a piece of paper.
5. Before your students draw their pictures, ask them to relay the instructions back to you (there is a lot of useful language here). You could even ask them to write them down from memory.
6. Let everyone draw their pictures (one drawing per person). Tell them not to write anything in the speech bubbles at this stage. The drawings don’t have to be masterpieces like the one below.
(Drawing by Mariola)
7. After letting everyone compare their artwork, ask them to suggest what the visitor and the guide are saying to each other. A typical exchange will go like this:
Visitor: My God! Look at the size of those! Guide: Yes, they all say that.
NB The speech bubbles should still be left blank at this stage.
8. Tell your students that the visitor is asking a question. Elicit a few examples and write them on the board and help with grammar and language as you go. Possibilities:
Why is it called the ‘Venus of Willendorf’?
Where does it get its name?
How long has it been in this museum?
How did the museum acquire it?
Did they discover anything else next to it?
What was it used for?
What do we know about the people who made it?
Who made it?
What does it represent? / What does it mean? / What do you think it meant to the people who made it?
How much is it worth? / Is it valuable?
Why does she have such big bosoms? (Inevitable)
9. Draw/write the following on the board:
Use the answers in the cloud to elicit more possible questions that the visitor asks. Add these to the board.
Q: What is it? (A: A statuette)
Q: What is it made of? (A: Limestone)
Q: How was it made? (A: It was carved)
Q: Where is it kept / displayed / housed? (A: The Museum of Natural History in Vienna)
Q: Who discovered it? / Who was it discovered by? (A: Josef Szombathy)
Q: Why is it important? (A: It is an icon of prehistoric art)
Q: When was it discovered? (A: 1908)
Q: Where was it discovered? / Where is it from? (A: Near Willendorf, a village in Austria)
Q: When does it date to? / When does it date from? / How old is it? (A: Sometime between 24,000 and 22,000 BC)
10. Divide your class into two groups: Group A and Group B. Bring everyone’s attention back to the drawings.
11. Tell students that you are going to dictate the captions for the speech bubbles. Dictate the following
(For A students only - to be written into the visitor’s speech bubble): Can you tell me how old this statuette is?
(For A students only - to be written into the guide’s speech bubble): Yes, it’s 25 thousand years and 8 months old.
(For B students only - to be written into the visitor’s speech bubble): How can you be so exact?
(For B students only - to be written into the guide’s speech bubble): Well, it was 25 thousand years old when I started working here and that was 8 months ago.
12. Put your students’ drawings up on the classroom wall. Make sure that you pair up student A drawings with student B drawings so that the comic strip makes sense.
Follow up
Ask your students to go online and find out the answers to any of the unanswered questions that arose in step 9.
So I just want to say thank you very much to everyone that came along to my Webinar last night (’Using Images Creatively‘). Just in case you didn’t make it, here’s what you missed:
22:45: Ten minutes to go before the Webinar is due to kick off. I log onto the platform and wait. 22.50: I hear voices - it’s Tyson and Tania! They are the organisers from English Central. We chat. 22.55: I look over my notes as you do before a presentation. 23.00: We go live! Tyson introduces the event. He asks where the participants where they are from. I hear Canada, Spain, Turkey and Ireland. There are other countries represented but I don’t catch these as I am adjusting my headset at this point. 23.02: Tyson gives me control (Webinar terminology). I say thank you to everyone for coming alone. I tell them where I am in the world - I am staying with my brother in Reading, UK. I tell them what time it is here. I give a bit of background information about myself and mention what I am going to talk about. 23.09: I tell a very funny joke about two bumble bees and a dolphin 23.11: I am walking around the sitting room, straying as far from my laptop as my headset will allow. I’m talking everyone through one of my favourite activities: ‘Mental Image Dictation’. I always get a bit carried away with this one. 23.12: I ask Tyson a question but get no reply. Strange - I thought we would be in audio contact throughout. I look at my computer screen and notice that the signal bar icon has no reading. This is bad - it means ‘no Internet’. 23.13: I run to the router which is under the desk. I unplug it and plug it back in. I bump my head on the underside of the desk. It was quite hard but it didn’t hurt. I get my brother involved. I ask him to have a look. 23.15: Still no internet. We repeat the unplugging/ plugging in process. I am stressing out my brother quite a bit. He doesn’t deserve that at all. 23.16: Still no internet. No idea why. 23.17: I realise I have to get in contact with the organisers of the Webinar. I can’t get their number as I don’t have online access. I need someone who does. 23.22: Start calling friends and family members. Everyone is either out or not at a computer. I mean what is going on?! I thought everyone had iPhones these days. I’m swearing quite a lot. 23.27: I finally get through to my sister in Barcelona. I wake her up but she doesn’t seem to mind. 23.30: My sister should have been able to get her computer up and running by now but she says that it is being extra slow this evening. 23.33: Still waiting 23.37: Everything is beautiful. My sister’s computer connects. She manages to find me the contact number as well as the dialing code for Canada (the organisers’ location) 23.39: Get through to English Central. Manage to speak with Tyson. I apologise. He is very understanding and says that we can reschedule. He tells me that Gavin Dudeney stepped in for me. I have jealous visions of him entertaining my participants who are all thinking to themselves, “Wow this is great. I’m really glad it all worked out like this.” 23.42: I hang up. 23.45: The Internet returns. 23.50: My brother phones Virgin, the Internet provider. Apparently there was a fault in the area. What absolute perfect inconvenience. I am in awe of their timing. I take the phone and congratulate the customer services agent. She thinks that I am being sarcastic. I really don’t know if I was.
Anyway, sorry about all that. Reschedule information will follow. Watch this space.
A couple of months ago, I saw this interesting-looking bird outside my window. I took the picture and then tried to find out what it was by typing the following description into Google image search:
.
.
.
Unfortunately, the resulting images didn’t help much and I was unable to make a positive identification.
The bird kept coming back to the same spot on the grass. I kept getting distracted from work, thinking how I could find out what it was. It occurred to me that Twitter might do the trick. I tweeted my snap shot and asked if anyone could help.
Twitter is perfect for this type of thing. If I had shown my picture to one or two people, they probably wouldn’t have been able to help. But if I stand up in a room of 150 people - some friends and some strangers - and draw their attention to the unidentified bird, you can see what happens.
Here are three other instances when I have turned to the microblogging site (or rather, the people I follow) for help:
.
Lesson planning
Recently, I was asked to give a workshop in Spanish, for teachers of Spanish. I thought about adapting one of the activities in my book but needed examples of words such as paraguas (umbrella), abrebotellas (bottle opener), lavavajillas (dish washer), etc. Here’s what I got:
Thanks to my fellow Tweeters, I now had enough material to plan my workshop.
.
Teacher support and resource recommendations
Throughout the summer, I have been working with teachers from Europe who are going to be teaching their own subjects (science, art, PE, history, music, etc) in English. This is an incredibly scary prospect for many of them. One of the recurring questions that came up on the courses was:
“How can I find the content words and phrases in English that are relevant to my subject? They are not in the dictionary.”
José, a maths teacher from Spain, asked this question just after I had demonstrated Twitter to the class. Here is what we did:
The link that Adir included went to this site - perfect for what José was looking for.
.
Technical help
Last month I bought a new MacBook. I started to panic when I realised that I couldn’t write blog posts on Wordpress, the platform that I use to write this blog. All sorts of techy weird things were going on and I needed help.
This is exactly what I was I needed to know.
.
The power to ask questions
Many people who don’t use Twitter will roll their eyes at the mention of it. I heard a presenter at a conference last March saying, “If you use Twitter, just remember what the first 4 letters of the word spell.” (See here)
I thought that this was funny at the time. But I wonder now if the presenter would be so quick to rubbish Twitter if he knew its potential.
Different people have different reasons for using Twitter. Similarly, different people adhere to different Twitter-etiquette. My thoughts now are that I have to start putting as much in as I take out - to reach a balance between giving and receiving. I have to keep a close eye on the people that I follow so that I can support them when they need help. It’s a karma thing, I suppose.
