Tefltecher Interlude

As I seem to be looking at a rather grueling next couple of months, I have decided to take a brief interlude from blogging. In the timeless tradition of Fred(a) (Blue Peter’s trans-gender tortoise) and providing there are sufficient air-holes in my cardboard box, I should be coming out of hibernation sometime in the spring.

I leave you all with The Test Card! Goodnight! … Give me a kick in springtime!

Note : Older followers of this blog may prefer to view The Potter’s Wheel, which incidentally went on to inspire director Jerry Zucker’s classic Demi Moore Pottery Scene in the 1990 film “Ghost”).

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P.S. I will still be @ij64ing during this period!

Tefltecher’s Yuletide (B)Log

Here are five Christmas activities I’ve used over the last few years! Nothing very original I’m afraid, but then again Christmas isn’t, is it? Feel free to take your pick!

1. Personalised Christmas greetings from Santa

Get your students to send each other personalised Christmas greetings direct from Santa. Here’s an example message. You’ll find the website here.

A message from Father Christmas

2. Christmas questions

Put your students in pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss the following questions.

View this document on Scribd

3. Christmas Wordle definition game

Put your students in two teams and give oral definitions of the items in the Wordle below. Students identify the words. Award points for correct answers.

Christmas Wordle

4. Retelling Mr Bean’s Christmas

Bean is Back! Take advantage of a whole new generation that don’t have the faintest idea who Mr Bean was!

Put your students in pairs. Student A watches 00:00 – 03:38 and describes what happens to student B. Student B then watches 03:38 – 08:00 and explains to student A. Pre-teach any vocabulary you feel necessary e.g. mousetrap, turkey, stuffing, cracker etc.

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5. The best Christmas song ever!

I make no apologies for this! George Michael is The Chosen One and your students should be informed even if their parents weren’t even a twinkle in their grandparents’ eyes in 1984! Gapped lyrics here (tell your students not to panic at the number of gaps in the chorus, they will hear it several times).

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Merry Christmas and see you next year!

Many thanks for the votes and nominations!

Hurrah! It’s Edubling season again! Medals are pinned to chests, backs are slapped and awesomeness abounds. As always, the key to maintaining a sense of proportion at this time is to avoid getting carried away. While I wince at the sometimes desperate-sounding pleas of vote-for-me, vote-for-me, vote-for-me, I also tend to cringe at overly-earnest don’t-vote-for-me-I-am-NOT-a-commodity discourse.

Fortunately, most people seem to keep a clear head and treat the whole thing as a bit of harmless fun which makes people feel good about their blogging. Because, let’s face it, the need for peer validation is probably as hard-wired into us as our desire for food, drink and the occasional spot of rumpy-pumpy. In moderation, and taken with a pinch of salt, it’s quite nice and makes us go all gooey! … And, for those who are worried about the feelings of bloggers who were not nominated, to be perfectly honest I’m sure they won’t lose any sleep over it. As the nominated/winners will also remember: it really isn’t that important. Life’s too short and there are far more important things to worry about!

Anyway, back to the main point of this post. Although I’ve largely taken a back seat as regards this year’s Edublog Award festivities (apart from taking the proverbial Michael now and again), it would be ungrateful of me not to thank the people who have been kind enough to support this blog. So, I hereby express my gratitude to everybody who nominated or voted for Tefltecher! … Thank you!

Note : I am particularly grateful to Kieran Donaghy, Pascal Shaw and Steve Muir for their blog post nominations (if I’ve left anyone out, please accept my apologies).

I was going to gush a bit further, but as gushing is not really my thing, I thought I’d just post a new lesson plan. The theme is …  you guessed it … thanking! I hope you find it useful! Ian James | @ij64 (13/11/11)

The Thank You Lesson

Step One : Lead-in

• Show your students the “Thank You Wordle” below and ask them to identify the languages.

Thank You Wordle

• Answers : Shukran – Arabic | Eskerrik asko – Basque | Xièxie – Chinese | Dank u – Dutch | Merci – French | Grazie – Italian | Danke schön – German | Grazie – Italian | Arigato – Japanese | Mange takk – Norwegian | Obrigado – Portugese | Spasiba – Russian | Gracias – Spanish | Diolch – Welsh
• See if you can agree on which sound the most “thankful”. You may also like to do a bit of research and then chat about the etymology of some of the expressions.

Step Two : Conversation

• Give your students time to read and think about the following questions.
• Ask them to discuss the questions in pairs or small groups.

View this document on Scribd

Step Three : Video

• Focus on Question 7 from the above activity and do a little open-class chatting on the shoulds and shouldn’ts of expressing gratitude when receiving presents.
• Show your students the video below and ask them to take notes on the advice given. To round up, ask your students to what extent they agree with the advice.

How to thank someone for a present

Step Four : Write or record your thanks

• Ask your students to think of someone in their family or social circle that they would like to thank.
• Give them time to think, then ask them to explain who they would like to thank and why.
• For homework, suggest that they express their gratitude to their chosen person in one of the following ways (you may of course like to give feedback on your students’ work before they send it off):

• Write and send a Thank You letter using a simple text-publishing tool like Pen.io.
• Record and send a Thank You audio message using a voice-recording tool like Vocaroo (tutorial by Russell Stannard here).
• Record and send a Thank You video message using a video-recording platform such as MailVu (tutorial by Russell Stannard here).

That’s about all for now! But, before you leave …

… click here for a final Thank You from me!

How to set up a video resource blog

In most staff rooms when a teacher comes across a video with teaching potential news gets around by word of mouth. This sort of sharing is of course jolly helpful, and benefits everyone … that is, everyone who happens to be in the right staff room at the right time.

Last academic year, the English Department of the Servei de Llengües UAB decided to facilitate the sharing process a little bit more by setting up a video resource blog. You can have a butcher’s hook (US Eng: check it out) at how it turned out here.

The idea was simple: to create a blog, and then encourage teachers to publish any  interesting video-finds so that the whole department could benefit from them. We chose Posterous as a blogging platform because it enables posting via email, something that even the most tech-reluctant of teachers wouldn’t find too intrusive. Posting via email basically means that when a teacher wants to post a video the only thing they have to do is send the blog an email of its URL. The video content is then automatically embedded in a new post, which takes as its title the Subject of the email.

To see how easy is it to post a video to a Posterous blog via email here’s a short tutorial!

There’s not much more to it than that really. But before I sign off here’s a couple of tips you might like to bear in mind if you decide to set up your own video blog.

Tagging

Once videos start coming through, be a little careful with the nomenclature of your tags. Things can get awfully messy if teachers are posting videos on the same theme but using a variety of different tags, e.g. Food, Eating habits, Diet etc.  You will probably want to appoint somebody to be responsible for making sure there is no duplicating of concepts, which may require a little manual editing from within the blog itself.

Email syntax

Care should also be taken with the syntax of emails. The slightest divergence from the example below (e.g. not closing the brackets in the subject field) will result in a fail mail. It may be worth posting this up on your staff room wall as a reminder.

That’s all for now! Cheerio!

Hope you find this post useful!

Dear Victim | Dear Burglar

This lesson is a fleshed out version of an idea I tweeted last week.

The video in question is the true story of a 16-year-old burglar who, as part of an Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme for young offenders, is made to write a letter of apology to the victim of his latest crime. However, far from expressing remorse, our hero shifts the blame onto the victim for not securing their home, and throws in a few insults for good measure.

The first three steps of the lesson (a lead-in conversation, the video and error-correcting the burglar’s semi-illiterate letter) build up to the main task of writing the victim’s reply to the teenage burglar.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin!

Step One : Lead-in conversation

• Introduce the topic of burglary, then put your students into pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss the following questions.

View this document on Scribd

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Two : The video

• Show your students the video, which appeared on the BBC’s website on 24th November 2011.
• I haven’t had time to design a listening comprehension task for this, but you might like to ask your students to take notes on what is said and then hone in on some of the language used: I’m not bothered about …, He has a point, adjectives like obnoxious, rude, unrepentant etc

Step Three : Correcting the burglar’s letter

• The burglar’s letter is full of wonderful spelling and punctuation errors. Ask your students to search and destroy (i.e. identify and correct) them in pairs.
• When you’ve discussed the errors ask them for their reactions to the content of the letter.

Step Four : Letter writing task

• Put your students in the role of the victim and ask them to write a letter of reply to the burglar.
• You may like to scaffold the task by feeding in some functional language such as How dare you … | Given the fact that … I am prepared to … | I hope you feel … | If I were you I’d … | You should be ashamed of yourself … | I wouldn’t have dreamt of … when I was your age | …. is no excuse for … etc
  

Hope you find this lesson useful!