Sunday, January 31, 2016

Preparing for the Local / Regional Teacher Training and Final Conference Presentation



Dear EFL Blogging School teachers, 

 To have a better idea of how to prepare the local/regional training, 
please  follow the recommendations below.   
     



1. Investigate all the assignments and topics you covered through the entire EFL Blogging School course;
2.  Look through the topics and extract the three you personally liked the most;
3. Decide upon the reasons you are attracted by these topics  (make notes of each reason);
4.  Think and ponder over how well you have already integrated them into your teaching  process;
5.       Look through the topics you covered with your students, examine how well they were involved in the activities and home tasks they received;
6.       Analyze the entire process of your students’ work  and decide what you can share with your colleagues from other schools;
7.       Be sure you are fully aware of how you implement new tools into traditional way of teaching so that you could share it with the others;
8.       Collect as many positive examples of integrating new techniques as possible; collect the examples you would like to show;
9.       Take several challenges and negative experiences or obstacle the teachers might come across and include them into your teaching seminar;
10.   After you examine the topics you selected, try to deepen and take one you consider the most relevant for your colleagues to present;
11.   Start getting ready by taking all the material you covered, revise and recollect all the sources, examples, notions, information, opinions, students involvement of in terms of your work;
12.   While you prepare the information, keep in mind that many of  participants at your seminar are traditional-thinking teachers with a vast personal experience. For some of them new  on-line tools might seem quite unusual or even difficult;
13.   Try to be consistent and sure that all the notions and information you present is clearly structured and easy to comprehend and utilize  for those who hear about it for the first time in their life;
14.   Get ready for eventual questions , both connected with the topic you cover and/ or any other  far beyond the context;
15.   At the moment you decided upon the topic, revised the materials, collected the needed information for your seminar, make a draft or a preliminary plan of your presentation;
16.    Look what type of presentation you would like to make:  power point or prezi. Be  ready to remake it several times;
17.   Do not leave that for the last three days, as the information will need to be cleary accumulated and the level  of preparation needs more time to be dedicated;
18.   While preparing the presentation, try to order your slides  in such a way so that your listeners would  have a clear idea of what is the main aim of your presentation;
19.   Keep in mind that elaborating the activities is time-consuming and sometimes a tiresome work, and needs revision and even changes;
20.   Be attentive to the time you need  while getting ready for the presentation. Time management is another important issue on implementing new tools  and performing how it works;
21.   To incorporate all the material you want to present into one session, you need to practice at least once , to see how well you integrate yourself into the time offered;
22.   Take into consideration the time that you will need for demonstrating video on-line tools , making it interactive, involve participants in the activities and make a debriefing as well;
23.   Provide the participants with hand-outs, connected with your presentation so that they could also use it and start to implement into their teaching;
24.   Be sure all the equipment works  well and have your presentation printed out just in case something goes wrong in terms of circumstances, electricity or other unexpected occasions;
2   Include in your presentation the best results you have while implementing your new studies about on-line tools and give examples of its advantage.



 You can see the local/regional topics and the procedure organised by the first 'EFL Blogging School" project participants as an example provided to facilitate the task:
Links of EFL Blogging School  Edition II Local/ Regional Workshops:






Ursu Mariana:

 
































































Monday, January 11, 2016

Online Mentoring: Week 5. Voice Feedback from Our Mentors


Dear EFL teachers,

This is our last mentoring assignment - you have time till the end of February to complete it. We connected project mentors to your students via Skype or Google Hangouts. This time, we will bring mentors' voices into the classrooms using online tools.
  • Choose one of the topics you will be teaching in January or February. 
  • Read about how to integrate Voicethread into your classroom here: Engaging Learning with Voicethread and 26 Interesting Ways to Integrate Voicethread
  • Create a student assignment based on Voicethread.
  • Show your students several examples of interesting Voicethread projects first. Use these links to select appropriate examples:Voicethread LibraryExamples of Voicethread for Education
  • Give clear instructions: how many slides the presentation should have, which vocabulary should be used, how the presentations should be structured, how you are going to evaluate the project, etc.
  • Ask your students to post the links to their Voicethread projects on your blog. 
  • Ask your mentor to leave voice comments to each student project posted on your blog. 
  • Discuss the mentors comments with your students - what suggestions did your mentors shared with your students through Voicethread?
  • Post your comments below, as a reply to this Mentoring Assignment
  • Enjoy experimenting with Voicethread! 
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Online Mentoring: Week 4. Inviting mentors to our classrooms