Busy, busy! Will breeze through some happenings since the last update in March.
New releases
- This from Afshin Vatandoost – a new general English coursebook series from Pearson.
General
Jason Anderson and the TATE
There’s a Mercury Music Prize-winning band name if ever I heard one. This post is actually a long one about Anderson, CAP/TATE, British Council and Project-based learning – that didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
I attended Jason Anderson’s webinar last night on contemporary lesson planning and frameworks in TESOL (hosted by DublinTEFL). Really well-presented, very informative.
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Using Loom
Here’s a quick overview of Loom and why I like it.
What’s Loom?
Loom is a video recording / screencasting tool. It is available as a Google extension. I first came across this tool after reading this post last year. It includes a good video tutorial for how to make vids.
How can I get it?
Basically, Google ‘Loom for Chrome’, add the extension, then pin it to your browser. Whenever you want to record a vid of you/your screen/you and your screen you just click the Loom button and you get a drop down recorder appear:
When you start recording you choose if you want to record the entire screen, a window or a tab. When you finish recording the video automatically uploads to your Loom library.
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Text analysis, level checks, profiling, etc
A new subscriber, Gemma Archer, just asked about text profilers. I’ve shared this response as a comment but thought I’d paste here as might crowdsource some more ideas??? Help please 🙂
(Response)
I use, or have used, text inspector (free version 250 words). My go-to for a while.
This is the link for longer texts (thanks Silvina/Teresa)
http://www.englishprofile.org/wordlists/text-inspector
The text analyzer from Road to Grammar:
http://www.roadtogrammar.com/textanalysis/
Lextutor.ca, which I used during my MSc and was a bit more (too!) technical:
It’s not something I’ve used recently and now it looks pretty aaaaargh but useful for checking word frequency I think.
EDIA Papyrus – I used this more when it was in beta but was good.
There’s one from Duolingo now but won’t work on my phone for some reason. Haven’t used it yet but an option maybe (?)
Vocab kitchen, used a few times, basic but ok
https://www.vocabkitchen.com/profile
There are also some sites that make it easy to grade their texts, which I like! NewsELA being one, but it’s not a profiler as such so bit of a tangent there.
Might be worth asking Julie Moore the same question, I think this might be her area of expertise…
*Update* Julie has responded with this AWESOME post!
(End)
WAIT! I’ve remembered another one!!! The NILE Members area (free to join) has a text analysis tool!
Another here, the Oxford text checker, shared by Gordon Dobie via Facebook.
Dan Shepherd (via LinkedIn) just shared this one for Pearson Global Scale of English
Jane Wescombe (via LinkedIn) shared this tool from Lexicool.
Gemma said she’s had mixed success with text analysis tools. Me too. Main difficulty for me has been how some tools seem to analyze words individually, so things like phrasal verbs get missed. Anyhow, they can be a useful starting point or general kinda marker for writers. I think these are the only ones I know but if another one comes to me I’ll add it in the comments/do an update 🙂 please share others and your experience of using them if you’ve time. Cheers.
Tips for writing secondary materials, ELTA Rhine
Teresa Bestwick tagged me in a tweet about materials writing earlier. ELTA Rhine were looking for someone to drop into a training session for pre-service teachers and chat about writing Secondary resources.
Teresa was going to help, I really wanted to help, couldn’t make it timewise. Had kids to look after. But tried to find time to make a vid.
I got home and sat down at about 4.30pm to share these random tips. Made some slides (QUICKLY!), recorded, sent them off at 5.50pm. There’s nothing polished, nothing structured, it’s loose, scatty, trying to be organised but like… er… This is me just, I don’t know just being real ‘me’ maybe?
You’re kinda on the journey with me here on a ‘public speaking’ front so please be patient. There are things I’d have phrased differently, there are some things I don’t explain well (although this is meant as a kinda ‘pause and chat about it’ in my eyes tbh) and I’ve literally chucked examples together. But… it’s me. I’ll get better, but I can’t do that without giving things a go.
Besides, doing this felt like I was on the Krypton Factor or something.
I think there are a few things in here to help pre-service teachers think about planning/writing lessons for teens. Some things maybe not, but certainly one or two of the tips! Thanks for the tag Teresa 🙂
P.s. this was really cobbled together as you’ll see, hence no references. The resources were Sprint 2 (ELi), Beyond A2+ (Macmillan), Learn English Teens (British Council), stuff from this blog for really quick examples.
Cheers
EAL: History / Geography reviews
Here’s another insight into day-to-day EAL planning. Usual disclaimer on the look of the resources – time restraints, okay?!
History and Geography were tough for our EAL learners in Term 1. They are so English-heavy and there’s tonnes to cover. Most of my separate EAL classes during the term focused on some part of the content in these two topics. I mean, there was the odd review of maths terms and some focus on essay writing skills, but mainly I was helping learners access the Hist/Geog content.
At the end of each (half-)term, with writing assessments looming, I help the learners review what’s been covered. These activities are done as a rip-and-run activity so sorta gamified.
Here are some of the examples of my review activities for WW2 key events (the essay involved discussing two of the events in detail…)
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Get published! Working with Peachey Publications
It’s about time I did more than just praise Nik Peachey on LinkedIn and in Twitter posts!
Another six months has passed, the royalties from ‘30 Role Plays for TEFL’ are in. They’ve covered a dentist bill, a crate of beer, and one month’s life insurance premium. Blimey, that last bit makes me feel old.
‘30 Role Plays…’ was great fun to write. See here for details of how it came about. It reminds me of some fun times at the British Council, when the crew at our tiny centre in Bangkok were alive with ideas!
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64 online resources I’ve used for teaching English this year (plus 7 others)
Here’s a list of online resources I’ve either…
a) used in the last year
b) observed other teachers use
c) been told about very recently and am about to try out
Why? I feel like doing a tech vomit today.
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MA dissertation promo cringe
Maria Heron from NILE asked me to record a video about my NILE dissertation. They are promoting the course and are keen to get reflections from alumni. She sent me a bunch of questions and asked for a 5 minute video. It was meant to be unscripted and I guess they’ll be snipping it for the, ahem, ‘best bits’. At least I hope they are, as I scratch my nose and head a lot, say ‘Er’ 8000 times and barely look at the camera. It’s also far too long so not sure it’ll get used.
Why am I sharing this with you? After all, it’s 7 minutes of your life that you won’t get back. Well…
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Using Stories Without End
Here’s a quick follow-up to my review of Stories Without End (Taylor Sapp, Alphabet Publishing).
As you may have read, I thought this was great resource which could be easily adapted to my own context. Here is an example of how I adapted one of the stories.
The resources as they are include a few lead-in questions related to the story content, a bit of vocab pre-teaching, the story, and some creative follow-up tasks.
I bulked these out a bit and created the following sequence around the text called ‘Spooky House’ (in which some kids are deciding whether or not to enter a scary looking house). This was for A2/B1-ish level. I taught it at Primary (without the grammar bit) and also Secondary (full content). Worked well for both.
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