Eleven

I've been tagged in a blogging meme Eleven by my dear friend Arjana Blažić.

This is how the challenge works: 

• acknowledge the nominating blogger.
• share 11 random facts about yourself.
• answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
• list 11 bloggers.
• post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer, and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. Don’t nominate a blogger who has nominated you.

11 random facts about me: 

1. My two sons are two most important persons in my life.
2. I like to read or watch a good mystery
3. I love growing my own herbs. 
4. One of my New Year's resolutions every year is to start a new diet.
5.  I am thinking seriously of changing no. 3 because it never works.
6. I love teaching in a school in my neighbourhood.
7. I  have found out why a number of old age pensioners  I sometimes meet in my neighbourhood say hello like they know me when we meet: they sometimes bring their grandchildren to school. Their grandchildren are not in any of my classes and it took me some time to realize who they are. 
8. I am not very sporty but I love swimming in the Adriatic Sea. 
9. If I lived somewhere on the coast I'd try to go swimming all year round like I see some people do. I envy them a little. 
10. I believe virtual worlds can be used for learning a foreign language. I even have a certificate for teaching in Second Life. 
11. I like planning  both teaching and other activities even if I know I am not going to stick to the plan. Planning makes improvisations more fun. 

My answers to Arjana's questions: 

1) What is your favourite book?

I don't think it is one book. When I read a book, even if I don't like it at first, I keep reading to see what's in it for me.

2) How much time on an average day do you spend online?

Much more than I would like to confess.

3) iPad or Android tablets?

There is an Android, usually somewhere around the living room, but I almost never use it.

4) What do you consider the most valuable thing you own?

I don't care much about how valuable things are as long as they serve the purpose and I like them.

5) What is your favourite way to waste time?

Lying in the sun with a paper book in hand

6) If a movie was being made about you who would you choose to play you and why?

Too difficult to imagine :)

7) If you could have an endless supply of food what would that be?

Fresh fruit – nicely arranged in big bowls or baskets, none the same as the previous

8) What's the best holiday you've been on?

I guess it was when I was a child and used to spend a week or so with parents, brother and sister on a boat or a campsite next to the most beautiful sand beach. I miss the peace and quiet and the simple life of the time that is hard to find nowadays.

9) What's the worst haircut you've ever had?

It was when I decided to stop dying hair and to keep it short and grey like it is now. My hairdresser showed a lot of inventiveness and a lot of people actually thought I wanted my hair to be in two almost opposite colours. I knew the truth and thought it was awful.

10) What three things do you love most about your best friend?

easy-going, honest and positive

11) What is your favourite smell and what memory does it remind you of?

Lemon tree in blossom  - I find myself opening the window in the morning in my parents' house. It smells great and I remember it combined with the picture of a beautiful tree and the blue sky.  I try to find it in perfumes and other cosmetic products because it makes me calm and happy. 

Thank you, Arjana, for tagging me and for this very interesting set of questions.

My set of participants - I tag: 

Dora Božanić

Marijana Smolčec

Anna Conway

Maria Bossa

SvetlanaObenausova

Jose Antonio da Silva

Merve Oflaz

Saša Sirk

Larisa Dubova

Claudio Azevedo

Ozge Karaoglu

And I'm looking forward to your answers to my 11 questions: 

1. What are you going to do differently in the new year ( at least during the first month)?
2. If you could get a free ticket to any destination in the world, where would you like to go?
3. If you could choose to live all year in one season, would you choose winter or summer?
4. What do you find hardest to teach your students?
5. What do you like about the space where you teach (your classroom)?
6. Which  is most important quality  you look for in a community of practice you belong to
7. If you weren't a teacher, what would you do?
8. What is the best way to share what you learn about teaching?
9. What do you never go to work without?
10. Can you think about and share one thing that people usually don't know about the part of the world where you live?
11. If Santa was to bring you only one gadget you can use for teaching or in your free time, what would you wish for?

 Happy holidays everybody!

 

Three most important elements of CoPs

I have been asked to write three most important reasons that make me appreciate a community of practice, why I find some communities more useful to my needs as a teacher than others. 

I believe that three main elements that are essential in a CoP are:

• It is a group of people coming from various backgrouds, with various levels of expertise in teaching, both mentors and mentees. It is important because it makes it possible to see every problem from different angles and get different perspectives. Every discussion is more fruitful.
• The atmosphere is the one of collaboration and sharing, the willingness to help and ask for help. Even if there are differences in age and expertise, teachers don't feel they will be asking a stupid question if there is anything they need help with. 
• Most of the teachers are active. They care about the community and believe in the power of the community: projects are started, surveys done, papers read and discussed, members comment on one another's blogs and it is easy to get feedback. 

These are my two cents :)

I am looking forward to reading other teachers' opinions. 

Blogathon 2013

British Council organised a blogging competition on their webpage for English teachers,TeachingEnglish. It was a blogging marathon  for English teachers  from Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, Israel, Romania, Russia, Spain and Uzbekistan.

Blogathon  lasted for a month, from 4th February until 4th March. English teachers created blogs on TeachingEnglish and wrote Blogathon posts not longer than 250 words, read and commented on other participants' posts.  

The blog entries made reference to a variety of ELT themes and class activities. A lot of interesting and original content was shared. All bloggers were very positive and respectful. It was interesting to take part in various discussions on the usual ELT topics  but also to learn about  different teaching situations  and problems.

After the end of the Blogathon, British Council  team chose the winners. Three teachers got the first prize – the participation at the IATEFL annual conference in Liverpool  - as roving reporters.

All my Blogathon posts can be read on  bsanja'sblog on TeachingEnglish, but also on Blogathon page of this blog, because I'd like to keep them in my diary, too.

I'm very happy and excited to be one of the teachers travelling to Liverpool on 7 April.

speakpipe.com

One of the advantages of being a Webhead is that when you are  in the company of such enthusiasts, you  never stop learning about new tools to use with students or in your communication with colleagues.
While reading the messages in our Yahoo group yesterday, I came across a very interesting tool - http://www.speakpipe.com/.

The ad on the page summarises the use of the tool. It says:
"Don't force your customers to type a text message. Let them talk and show them you are listening."

It's just what I need for my blog, I thought. It is very easy to install: you can add  it as a widget with the HTML code you copy after registering on the page and it can be seen as a sign of a microphone on the right-hand side of the blog.

The use seems very simple, too. All you need is to click on the microphone and send a voice message to the owner of the widget.

Now I'm waiting for the first messages to arrive. And what are you waiting for, dear readers?
Send me a voice message :)

Keeping young learners safe online

In my PD plans, January is the month for the first weeks of  TESOL EVO online courses.  “Digital Storytelling with Young Learners“ is one of my favourites.

One of the topics the teachers discuss this week is how we keep our young learners safe online. Participating teachers from different parts of the world contribute their ideas and examples from their experience.

This is how I contributed to the discussion:

How can we keep our students safe online? What do I do as a teacher?

1.  Students learn to introduce themselves properly (first names only, no portrait photos)
2.  I constantly remind them about the importance of keeping the information about their passwords to themselves.
3.  I carefully choose webpages to use with students. I only recommend the pages safe for kids.
4.  I teach students to evaluate pages they visit when looking for information.
5.  I respect copyright and give credit to the authors. I teach about copyright and plagiarism.
6.  I involve parents. Teachers can't be the only responsible for children. There are “Parent permission“ forms and I encourage them to contact me and take interest in their children's work.

The resources on the wiki are great and I am sure I'll learn a lot of new ways of keeping my students safe and aware of the possibilites and risks of the internet.
I have added the following sites to my list of the materials to use with students in different age and language level groups:

1 BrainPOPJr video and quizzes, vocabulary exercises, activities, etc 

2 Common Sense Media – a site with great video and text resources which  all make great reading and listening material and a starting point for a discussion in class: 

• digitalcitizenship
•  online safety: 
• illegal downloads
• searchingand evaluating websites: wikipedia tips for parents 
• cyberbullying

In my opinion, this is the topic we must teach continuously throughout the school year, in all age groups of learners. That's why I am definitely going to use these materials to create some lessons for my students.

New Year's Resolutions

Last year was a quiet one for this blog - not too many posts. It wasn't so because nothing interesting was happening in the classroom or various professional development sessions I attended. Simply, teaching and learning took a lot of time, I spent some with my family and friends, wasted some more...

I hope this year is going to be different - my first decision is to blog more regularly. What other New Year's Resoutions should I mention here to mark the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013? It's not easy to say at once.

I'll  embed an Answer Garden here - for me to add more answers when I feel like it, and for the readers to add some they feel would be right for me:)

New Year's Resolutions a Teacher Should Make... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Why teach about Thanksgiving?

I teach EFL in Croatia, a small country in Europe. Should I include the holidays like Thanksgiving in my English lessons? A lot of teachers, parents and others who are interested in what children learn at school think it is a good idea, while others say that the children in Croatia have their holidays and don't need American holidays, too.

I teach my young students about a few holiday that belong to other cultures, Thanksgiving included, and my reasons are numerous:

• Children should be aware of how similar and how different countries are, which holidays people celebrate and how. School is the best place for them to discover the world, learn how to ask the right questions and learn.

• Holidays always tell stories that include history, geography, singing, dancing and acting, crafts. They are excellent opportunities for children to make sense of all the school subjects they usually learn separately and to show their talents.

• Thanksgiving in particular is a holiday that can teach my students a lot of positive messages of how to see the world not only through how much of material things we have but what else we have to be thankful for.

This year I've made a selection of great websites with ideas for the use in the classroom. I am going to use them with different groups of students I teach:

• http://printables.familyeducation.com/tv/printables/booklets/ThanksgivingActivityBook.pdf

- an activity book with pages for colouring , word search, writing a poem, even doing some Maths :)

• http://tech.dcboces.org/~oneill/thanksplay.html

- a very simple (and simplified as a story) play for a group of students; seems interesting to combine it  creating some finger puppets of the characters or simplified paper costumes;  or simply as a reading activity after watching a video about Thanksgiving;

• http://www.scholastic.com/scholastic_thanksgiving/voyage/index.htm

- a great listening and reading activity, with a timeline of events, great pictures, a lot of useful information about history and geography, presented in a very interesting way, e.g. The Mayflower virtually, Daily Life at the time of the first Thanksgiving, etc.

• http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/games/moregames/funnyfillinpictureperfect/

- a funny fill-in activity.

I have discovered some great resources:

• Shelly Terrell's blog: Teacher Reboot Camp :                          http://teacherrebootcamp.com/2012/11/09/20-thanksgiving-ideas-resources-apps/
• Sue Lyon Jones: ESOL Courses                           http://www.esolcourses.com/topics/thanksgiving.html

• Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Sites to Learn and Teach about Thanksgiving: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/10/27/the-best-sites-to-learn-teach-about-thanksgiving/

I am thankful to the people who created these materials and shared them with students and teachers.

Talking Cultures Project

The last day of this school year is approaching and it is time to think about what went well and what could have been done better, the lessons that worked and the lessons to be improved if I want to use them again. Talking Cultures Project is one of the projects I want to continue next school year.

Talking Cultures is an international online project which celebrates cultural differences. It is a project for students in grades 7 and 8 of primary school, organized by British Council,. This school year it has had participant classes from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Russia and Ukraine, divided into 9 clusters, with one class representing every country in every cluster. My students are in cluster 7, with classes from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and we work on our wiki 

British Council created a wiki for every cluster. A wiki is a special online platform designed for students to upload their work and share it with partners. It is a safe place on the Internet, only members can read and edit it.  The teachers are administrators of the wiki and the students are writers. They edit the pages together, uploading their writing, photos, video and audio files. The students can edit only their own project pages but can follow and comment on the work of all the partners on the wiki, which is an excellent way to learn about a new culture.

At the beginning of the school year the teachers were offered the Teachers’ Toolkit, a set of nine lesson plans, with a lot of ideas and materials, to use or adapt. Every teacher adapts the lessons, deals with all new vocabulary and structures that appear. After the lessons at school, we add a digital part, different web 2.0 tools to upload students’ writing, discussions, polls, pictures, widgets, audio files and all other different ways we use to share our ideas with partners.

The topics of all nine lessons are very appropriate for the age and language level of the students, but also so general that they can be used with students of all age and language level groups:

Lesson 1: Class Biography

Lesson 2: Our Country

Lesson 3: Food

Lesson 4: Famous People

Lesson 5: Festivals

Lesson 6: Music

Lesson 7: Holidays

Lesson 8: Sports

Lesson 9: Farewell

The work on the project is benefitting for the students in a number of different ways. Firstly, students learn to share, to collaborate and to think critically and decide on the material to present to the partners and share on the internet.

With the use of the wiki, learning does not stop with the end of the lesson at school. Students access the lessons in their own free time and do the tasks on the wiki. That makes them more autonomous in their learning. They are very proud of their work because it stays on display forever. A very important part is also reading and commenting on other groups’ work, which teaches the students to be positive, tolerant and polite.

Working on the project I have noticed a few problems, too. The first problem I had to deal with were privacy settings of the wiki. Because of the young age of the students, the organizers thought it was the best idea to set the wiki completely private, so that only the members can see any content on it. That sounds right, but in fact all parents, other teachers or students from our school would have to become members in order to see our work. The other problem was that all our partners used the wiki to upload the final versions of their presentations on various topics. I thought we needed to use one more advantage of the wiki – collaborating on various stages of the tasks. The problem was we did not want to be the only ones showing their work in progress.

The way to solve the problems for me seemed to create another wiki, for my students only. I set the privacy settings a bit differently – everybody can see the content, but cannot communicate with students or edit the wiki.

Our classwiki,  is safe, too, and it offers one more opportunity for learning for the students – they have learned about the responsible use of the internet: they never upload portrait photos, display their full names or write personal information. The use of our own wiki helps us in two ways: it allows us to use the wiki not only to share our work on the internet but also to work collaboratively outside the classroom. We have all our work on the internet and continue working on the tasks between the lessons at school. There is always a lot of work in progress on our wiki. Students add their part when they can, correct one another and help or finish their friends’ work if they think they have a better idea. We also show our work to parents and other teachers. Our two wikis seem now the perfect way to finish all the work on time and display its best version for our partners to see and comment.

Discussing different aspects of Croatian culture and everyday life, comparing them with British culture, sharing the information with students from different countries and learning about their different cultures are the main aims of “Talking Cultures”, but there are other equally valuable advantages for my students:

• they use English outside the classroom and understand its importance in an authentic communication with peers,
• they have become more confident in the use of the language,
• they have become much more confident and responsible in the use of the internet.

This project is making it all possible and my students can’t wait for next school year. They are looking forward to new topics and the teachers are already working on the list. 

Love from the World

Love from the World is not a project with a primarily language learning aim but I didn't hesitate for a moment to take part in it as soon as I first heard about Sun Ho's beautiful idea to ask teachers from around the world to help students create the flags of their countries and send photos to her, and send the flags in the post to her Singapore address.

 I was very happy to see my students as excited about it as I was. Two of my students, Maja and Klaudia (13), painted the flag of Croatia on a piece of cotton cloth of given dimensions. I took a photo of them with the flag and sent the flag to Sun Ho.

I loved the idea behind the project: Sun Ho is going to sew all the pieces together into a patchwork. I can't wait to see it. It is also great to see the gallery of photos on the website of the project.

This project teaches children love and respect for other people and countries and gives them the opportunity to meet children from around the world and learn about their countries. If they use English language in the process, that's only one more reason to choose to be part of it :) 

Easter baskets for irregular verbs

This is the lesson I created this morning, for a group of 11 year olds, to be used in a classroom without a computer, three days before our Easter break.
I was very happy because my students loved it and I could see they were learning and having fun.

The aim of the lesson was to revise a set of ten irregular verbs.

I brought a number of paper sheets in various colours and a pair of scissors and started by cutting out egg shapes. My students immediately guessed they were Easter eggs and joined me. I distributed the paper stripes to be folded and cut. They exchanged eggs because they all wanted the eggs in all colours.

While cutting, we talked about the story we read in the course book. When we mentioned an irregular verb, I wrote it on the blackboard. I chose to write only the ten irregular verbs I wanted to focus on.

I suggested writing the verbs on the eggs. We wrote the simple past form, too – on the other side. Now they could check if they remembered all the irregular forms.

I had more paper. The sheets were square – shaped. I challenged the students to play a game and win a prize, a paper basket to keep the eggs. I saw this beautiful paper basket used in a lesson on http://www.daniellesplace.com/html/easter.html where I also found the link to the instructions on how to make a basket: http://www.wipapercouncil.org/origami.htm

The task was:

1 Ask me a question in the past, using the verb on the egg I pick from your desk.
2 Listen to my answer (Yes, I did / No, I didn't; Yes, I was/No, I wasn't)
3 Make a sentence about what you have learnt (Ms Bozinovic … /The teacher didn't )

While my students were making their questions and sentences, I was quickly making the baskets and giving them their prize. After I'd made a few, some stronger students joined me in making the baskets for friends. Then they asked and answered the questions in pairs and I only monitored.

As a follow-up activity the students wrote five interesting sentences they remembered.

They took the baskets and eggs home with the task to decorate the eggs and revise the verbs,
and to add a handle to the basket ( a piece of thread, wire, a straw, or whatever they find appropriate).
The optional task was to use the verbs to tell a short story.

At the beginning of our next lesson I expect some stronger students to share their stories and the weaker students to show that they can use the past form in single sentences. I am sure they will all want to show me the decorations on the eggs in their beautiful baskets and all kinds of handles.

Video interviews - what a treat!

It's been a busy day. I had to miss some events at the conference in Glasgow. The consolation: there are recordings to be watched on a quieter day, there are reports written by four roving reporters and a whole group of registered bloggers. There is no reason to be sad.

What I can't miss is the forum.The forums are very lively. I introduced myself in Young Learners and Teens Forum and already met people enthusiastic about international projects.

The choice of today's videos is also great. The list of people interviewed today is impressive:
Vicki Hollett
Lindsey Clanfield & Luke Meddings
Associates from around the world
Michael Carrier
Penny Ur
Jeremy Harmer
Robert Hill
Associates from France, Japan and Bulgaria
Hornby scholars from Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria from Venezuela, Yemen and Nigeria
Interview with associates: Patricia Rose (the Netherlands), Simon Gillett (Korea) and Dimitrios Primalis (Greece)
Scott Thornbury
Hornby scholars: Awgichew Arega and Getachew Melaku Yitbarek (Ethiopia)
David Graddol
Catherine Walter
Meet the Online Team with Marion
Russel Stannard
David Heathfield
Andrew Hockley

Do you know which interview I saw first? Of course, Marion and the Online Team, the people who have been making this all possible for teachers from all over the world for six years now. Then I had to see a few more videos... :)