Ebaby! Blog

How can I get my students to review vocabulary or grammar for hours? How can I get them to encounter the words hundreds of time? By making it fun! I have talked about taking advantage of students’ free time and using online games is yet another way to engage students during their free time.

Now, you could try to use normal games and make them educational. There are lots of ideas about how to make games educational by creating fill-in-the-blank tests from normal games for example. Read this excerpt from Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s article titled Adapting Online Computer Games for the Classroom:

Example: (from the MOTAS walkthrough game):
Level 1:
Look under the pillow to find the _1._ and take the _2._ from the wall Use the _1._ to open the _3._ . You will find a _4._ in the _5._
Missing words: locker, screwdriver, key, box, poster

That seems educational to me. And it also seems like a homework packet students wouldn’t mind doing in their free time. Here are some gaming sites recommended by Larry Ferlazzo for use in the ESL or EFL classroom.

Besides those games, I got really excited about quia.com yesterday. And I think I am going to stay excited, too. On Quia, teachers can create their own games. Then, the games can match your lessons perfectly! You can make battle ship games that require students to answer a grammar question before they can sink a ship. Like this one that tests your knowledge of the possessive.

But battle ship is just the beginning, there are 16 different types of games! Now, there is one catch: it costs $50 a year to create games. But you can use other teachers’ games for free and once you create a game it is online forever! So I think, it might be worth the money. Especially if you could get one of your computer addicted students to play for hours.

I hope, I can convince my department to finance the fun on quia.com. I really think that the more students encounter English outside of class the more they will learn. So why not help them by providing fun online games!

A while back, I wrote about using English, baby! or other social networking sites to teach students how to make inferences when they read. Today, I am going to talk about another reading lesson that you can do on social networking sites. I did it in my class this week and it was a bunch of fun. We practiced scanning for information and looking for headings on profiles.

I went ahead and found some good profiles. You want to find ones that are completely filed out and have some interesting information and nothing inappropriate. That is really the hardest part of the lesson. Well, prepping usually is. On our computer lab day, I had students get into pairs. I had already set-up the computers so that each pair had my profile on their screen and in another tab there was someone else’s profile. I had a student read my profile aloud. Then, we went through some of the vocabulary. I used a handout like this on social networking vocabulary and the scanning activity. Then, we practiced predicting where the information would be and scanning the profile for it. I had a list of questions for them to answer on the handout. Next, the pairs went off and scanned a different profile. When everyone was finished, we came back together and people shared interesting things about the person that they read about. It was so much fun.

The students were most interested by how many friends everyone had. I guess people do have a lot of friends on here! So maybe all of my teacher friends should give this a try and tell me how it goes.

I have been working with another teacher and I have learned so much from her successes. In part because she has gracefully succeeded at teaching areas that make me want to pull my hair out. One of those is teaching essay writing to low level English speakers. I have blogged about structured and fun writing. But to teach the basics, my general approach has been to do brain storming (with some graphic organizer) and then discuss the structure of the essay as review and have the students write.

But I have learned in the past year, that to improve most lessons, the teacher should just provide more schema activation (more examples). So I don’t know why I was banging my head against the wall with that basic writing lesson. The teacher I work with has a beautiful process for essay writing that begins like mine with brain storming on a graphic organizer. (Like this interactive graphic organizer) Then, however, she provides an important example. She shows them an essay she has written on the topic. She reads the essay aloud and then, the class goes back through the essay looking for its parts. They find the hook, then the thesis, then the topic sentences and details of each paragraph and the conclusion. Next, she hands out an outline of her essay and a similar blank handout for them to write their outlines. She shows them what she wrote on the outline about her hook and then they write a hook. She repeats this process until their outlines are done. Finally, the students are able to work on their own and produce wonderful essays. Look here at one of the first draft of one of their essays.

All in all, I have always loved teaching writing, but at the beginning I found it to be a painfully slow and daunting process for students (and me). And I should have realized that they just needed more examples and more ways to organize their thoughts before they wrote.

“Hoe was Saturday? I hope you had a great wicked.” Well, those sentences are really confusing because they have some pretty BIG typos or spelling mistakes in them. They should read: “How was Saturday? I hope you had a great weekend.” It might be hard to even guess what the person really meant, but I am getting really good at it. I have begun teaching typing to my ESL students and those are some of their actual mistakes! That’s why typing can be so much fun in an ESL classroom.

My students seem to like working on the computers a lot and are generally excited to learn anything (with some exceptions). So we have been spending a good amount of time in the computer lab. They all have pretty low computer literacy, so starting with typing seemed logical.

At first, we practiced some basics. But then I got more creative, I had them make a man by typing with the text centered. Like this:

llllllllllll
0 0
j
v

I
wwwwwwww
ttttttttttttttttttttt
wwwwwwwww
ttt tttttttttttttt ttt
o wwwww o
ttttttt
wwww
oooooo
ooooooo
oooooooo
ooo ooo
ooo ooo
bbbb bbbb

We highlighted the man and changed the alignment to right. So he looked like this:

llllllllllll
0 0
j
v

I
wwwwwwww
ttttttttttttttttttttt
wwwwwwwww
ttt tttttttttttttt ttt
o wwwww o
ttttttt
wwww
oooooo
ooooooo
oooooooo
ooo ooo
ooo ooo
bbbb bbbb

One of the students said the man looked like he had fallen from a tall building (all smushed). It was funny. And everyone was relieved when we changed the alignment back to center and the man “came back alive.”

Now, this may seem like a silly waste of time, but when students write paragraphs we often ask them to use three different types of alignment. Their name and date are right aligned. The title of the paragraph is centered and the paragraph is left aligned. Spending just a little bit of time teaching this can make a real difference for students who aren’t familiar with computers. And my 16-21 year old students love the little bit of whimsy and creativity in this lesson.

I personally love teaching creative typing. This is just one of the fun activities I have done. But I need to figure out how to help them use spell check because wicked instead of weekend just isn’t good. Do you guys have any ideas?

What would you do if your students always came thirty minutes late to class and never did their homework? Well, you might pass it off as cultural or time management problems. On the other hand, you might say, “Who cares why they are late! They should be punished!” I don’t often think about punishing students. I tend to empathize with them.

Most of my students work at least one full-time job and many of them work two jobs. Some of them work a night shift and a day shift. So I find it hard not be impressed by what they do. They are my inspiration. They work so hard and they normally manage to come to class three days a week for two and a half hours.

The problem is that class is four days a week for three hours! And despite how busy they are, I am responsible for teaching them all of the course material. So the other teacher and I decided to “punish” them for missing class. Two days a week, we instituted a half hour homework time after class that is mandatory for students who come late or don’t complete their homework.

The first two Homework Half-Hours went brilliantly. Even students, who weren’t required to stay, decided to stay and work on extra homework or help other students. The time was very productive and I thought they were all very motivated.

But maybe they were just motivated because they wanted to leave! Because last night (which would have been a class followed by the Homework Half-Hour), only three students came to class. All three of them had completed all of their homework and didn’t have to stay after. I can’t help but think that the other students did not want to get “punished” for not doing their work, so they decided to skip class. It was very depressing because we only want to make them successful. And we just aren’t sure how to do that if they are gone so much! I honestly feel like I got punished last night.

It was so exciting as a kid to start summer camp. And let me tell you, as an adult, it is still exciting. This week I joined pbwiki’s summer camp for educators. Pbwiki is a simple place to make a quick publishing, collaborative website. I have been excited about my class’ wiki for the entire school year, but I need more ideas.

So for the next six weeks, I will be going to summer camp along with a thousand other educators. Together we will complete weekly assignments, learn how to maximize our wikis’ features and earn cool free stuff. If you’re interested, please sign up. It should be fun.

This week on our wiki, the students used the wiki to teach the world about English simple past. They even recorded little descriptions of simple past pronunciation rules with example sentences. Besides the recordings, our wiki is pretty simple looking. So I am excited to go to camp and learn how to do more exciting things.

Some people love worksheets, but I love note cards. No matter what the lesson is, I can always find a way to use note cards to improve my ESL lessons. I have already talked about using slips of paper or note cards for grouping activities. But here are more ideas:

1. Use note cards to practice word order in questions and sentences. I put each part of speech on a different colored card and then let students play around making sentences and questions. The colors help them “see” the difference in word order.
2. Note cards are great for beginning and advanced writers because they can rearrange their ideas and correct mistakes without having to start over. Have students write each sentence of a paragraph (or essay) on a note card. You can also use this as a brainstorming activity. Then have them arrange the sentences in order (or for essays into paragraphs) and write a topic sentence and conclusion. If you’re working with advanced ESL students, after they “finish,” give them three or four more cards and have them add details, reasons and examples. Some students feel really comfortable and accomplished on note cards. They end up with a big stack of cards that they can play around with.
3. I always use note cards when I talk about conjunctions. I create some cards with sentences on them. On different colored note cards, I put conjunctions and commas. Students play around with the cards rearranging the sentences, commas and conjunctions. It is really fun!

Generally, note cards are good because they let students move around and experiment. It is also really easy to use color well on note cards. Note cards help so many different kinds of learners. That’s why I use them at least one a week!

Do you ever wonder how your students are grading you? Or what they really want from you? To begin the new term, we made posters of what it meant to be a good student, a good group member and a good teacher. To me, the most interesting poster was what it meant to be a good teacher. Look at their poster!

A good teacher:

• is on time
• respects students
• helps students
• makes students happy
• has good behavior
• is a friend to students
• teaches well
• explains the work
• makes students do group work
• is happy

Some of these qualities were exactly the same as the qualities they listed for a good student. They thought both good students and teachers should be “on time,” “respect” one another, and have “good behavior.” To me these answers were the least thought out and the most generic. (Although they are true.)

I was more excited by how important students thought happiness was. They said a good teacher was happy, that a teacher should make students happy and that students and teachers should be friends. I guess, I am pretty lucky that I love my job and my students because my students think that is a big part of being a good teacher. And sometimes all I have is my love for the job. Luckily, that is enough. So if you aren’t happy with teaching right now, take this holiday weekend to relax. Because your students expect a happy teacher. And they deserve one too.

I have talked about using social networking sites in the classroom (and so has John). But today I would like to highlight del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. Instead of saving your favorite websites as links on your computer, you can save them online and share them with the world. It is so easy to use del.icio.us. First, you set-up an account and put two little buttons in your toolbar.

From there, it is pretty simple. Every time you want to save a great website, you click the “Tag” button and put in some tags or keywords. And it is saved and everyone can view your favorite links. Browse my links at: del.icio.us/mitchelk

Here is a YouTube video about using del.icio.us

Here are some classroom uses:

- Research Projects

• Create a network and share your materials.

- ESL Reading Assignments

• Identify a webpage’s topic and subtopics. Use topic and subtopic as tags.
• Summarize webpage. Write the summary in the del.icio.us note section.

So I have to report back on how well my new cellphone policy works. It is kind of amazing. I didn’t explicitly tell students that my policy changed, but I started encouraging them to use cellphones at different parts of class. After what happened in my last class, I am convinced that cellphones are an asset.

We have a big test coming up, but the students still have lives and jobs. So sometimes they have to miss class. Well, yesterday two of my most dedicated students missed class and I wanted to know what was going on and make sure they got the information. The solution came really quickly! A student took out his cellphone, texted the missing students, realized they were at work, and sent them pictures of the chalkboard. The missing students wrote back some questions about the things on the board. I was sold! Cellphones have the power to bring the classroom anywhere!

Now, imagine if I had a great classroom website. They could view that at work on their cellphones. But I am not there yet. Cellphones will have to do for now.