A BIT OF EVERYTHING

British Council Istanbul regularly organizes workshops for language teachers in Istanbul. The workshops are given not only by the teacher trainees, but also by the teachers who are willing to share their experiences with other teachers. This week I blogged for their blog site and wrote my reflections about the workshops. Please click here to read my post.

Medea Awards is one of the most remarkable one that encourages innovation and good practice in the use of media in education. It was launced in 2007 and the number of the submissions have significantly increased in the last 2 years.

In 2010 the committee will present the MEDEA Overall Award and the European Collaboration Award. The deadline is 31 July, 2010.

My students and I submitted our ‘Children’s Garden’ video as it matches with the pedagogical and technological aspects of the competition.

If you have any colleagues that have created/are creating a project in which video/sound/media in general or media-rich applications are being used, please forward the competition information to your network. Multiple entries are welcomed, too.

Good luck everyone!

After a long year working on our media piece (one hour a week), our final copy is ready. The video is a part of iEarn-Adone Youth Voices project. The aim is to create a media with a purpose. Please check out AYV’s website because I believe that your students will enjoy the experience as much as my students did.

Hope you will like our video-The Children’s Garden.

The Children's Garden

Football is one of the global topics that some teachers (including me) use a lot in the classroom to attract students’ attention. I am sure at least once in class, we’ve all heard a student mention Messi, Ronaldo or Beckham or asking us which team we support on the very first day of the school. To give an example, when I put up the Barclays Premier League poster provided by British Council on the wall, it suddenly became the center of attention. My students now know all the vocabulary on the poster.

Today’s teenagers love football and follow it regularly. As it is a very global topic, British Council has provided us with a website where they cooperate with the Premiere League to deliver community sports development aound the world. They launch projects in different countries like China and Uganda and coaches and players from different teams visit these countries, too.

This year, they have organized a competition where students connect their city to the city of their favourite Premiere League team. 20 winners will win the shirt of their team and one participant of 20 will have the chance to travel to the Uk to watch a football game.

The instructions, guidelines and suggestions are clearly mentioned on their website. Two of my students who dearly love football worked hard and prepared their videos. The research and media preparation processes were very informative for them. The competition helped them widen their horizons in many ways such as copyright issues, surfing on the web with a purpose, higher thinking skills, media creation and working towards deadlines… The result was very satisfying for them as they prepared a media piece based on their favourite sport.

Please check out the competition and its rules. I am sure that your students will love it.

Below are the videos created by my students.
Manchester

Liverpool

IOC finished on Friday, but luckily the online and poster presentations will be available for the next six months. I have only been able to attend and view 2 online sessions and 2 poster sessions so far due to work and time difference, but still have 6 months to view the rest. I was impressed to see hundreds of online attendees for the online sessions. Congrats to the conference organizers. Everything went smoothly.

“All board – Virtual Field Trips” by Ellen Manning, Julieta Beam and Laurie Hansen from Kaplan University was one of two poster session I watched.

The presentation was very informative for me as I never thought about anything like it before. The idea doesn’t only meet 21st century skills we want our students to have, but it also fun at the same time.

Presenters emphasize the importance of relevancy and appropriateness of virtual field trips as it should aim our course goals. Steps to follow are also mentioned very clearly, too. If it is planned and supported carefully, both online and face-to-face classes can acquire a lot from it.

There is also an example trip to a museum in their presentations. The example proves that the trip can be either a synchronous or asynchronous one.

I definitely want to apply it to my classes as we have computer labs in our school. After some careful planning and searching, we can easily do it. Maybe the next step can be an asynchronous one.

Please check the presentation out and share it with everyone…

ELt teachers in Istanbul are looking forward to a conference which will be held on 27-28 March, 2010 at Yeditepe University. The conference theme is “ELT in a Globalized World: Exploring New Opportunities and Meeting the Challenges of Today”

The speakers for the plenary sessions and workshops make the event the best in town. Gavin Dudeney who has been very insprational for me will have a workshop on webquests. Some of the other speakers are Ken Wilson (yesss), Jeremy Harmer (yay), NickyHockly, Luke Prodromou and many more…

Please check the event’s website and wait for my reflections after the conference…

Vocabulary plays an important role in language learning. After the interest received in the lexical approach by Michael Lewis, teachers started to pay more attention to this important issue. Lately, I had a lot of time to find and read interesting articles and blog posts related to vocabulary. Here is the one that I learned a lot from:

BNL2709 (The Bare Naked Lexis Project): The educators working on this Project mainly argue that every student learning English must master the use of 2709 common words in order to become proficient in English.

They also have their blog where they show why educators should also focus on which words to teach while most of us (including me) put the focus on how to learn aspect.

In their blog, they have 8 videos by Steve Neufeld that guide teachers on why and how to use different online corpus and vocabulary profiling tools such as Compleat Lexical Tutor to analyze texts and the frequency of words.

I personally found part 7 very interesting as Mr. Neufeld encourages teachers to pay more attention to frequently used words which are in their 2709 list as they enable fast mapping proficiency. He elicits possible exercises to improve students’ vocabulary knowledge.