Photo Opportunities

It may be a strange way to begin a post on using photos, but I’ve never really agreed with the popular adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Nor do I believe in the existence of a new “image-orientated generation”, as if it were a newly-discovered tribe whose special needs and distinct sensibilities we are obliged to respect and cater for – more on that in a future post if they let me back. There may be a few more of them about these days, but visual images have always been open to interpretation and the curious-minded have always been open to interprete them … even before someone invented the term “visual literacy”.

What has changed of course is the ease with which we can produce, manipulate and share visual images. And given the fact that language is embedded in images, it would seem foolish not to take advantage of this new image-friendly reality to elicit it from our students.

Here are four tech tools to help you begin using photos in class … and, hopefully, get the most out of them!

1. Make a “Talking Photo” with Fotobabble

Fotobabble is a “Talking Photo” application which allows you to upload a photo and then “babble” about it (i.e. make a voice recording) for a minute. Your creations can be embedded on a blog, as well as shared on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s an example of me describing a photo of a favourite possession.

2. Describe and draw famous photos with Educreations

Educreations is an on-line interactive whiteboard which enables you to record yourself while drawing on a blank “canvas” with your mouse. Your animated drawings can also include uploaded photographs. One of the ways I’ve used this tool is to ask students to record themselves drawing a famous photo. After embedding the animations on a class blog, other students can play the recordings and try and identify the photo being described. As an extension to the activity, students can also upload the real photo to a separate “slide” and, after doing a bit of research, record themselves giving background information on the photo in question. If there are copyright issues, students can provide a link to the photo just under the embedded animation. Have a look at the example below to get an idea of how it works.

Image at end is ‘Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper’, by Charles C. Ebbets
Source: Bettman Archive
Link to original photo on Wikipedia

 
3. Make photo slideshows with Voicethread

As many of you will already know, Voicethread has been around for a good few years now. In fact, if you’re already familiar with this tool, you might like to skip this part. If, on the other hand, you like incorporating  technology into your teaching but have not yet tried Voicethread, … you should!

Voicethread has not really been superseded in versatility by any of its more recent competitors. Many of these seem to have wasted a lot of time and effort reinventing the wheel, and some of them seem to left the odd spoke out in the process. Voicethread is the multimedia slideshow application par excellence. It allows you to upload various different types of media (photos, videos, text documents etc) and then make audio recordings to accompany them. But, what makes Voicethread really stand out from the crowd is the fact that visitors to slideshows can also participate in the action by leaving their own comments. The resulting “conversation” is, for the moment, about as participatory and communicative as anything you’re likely to see on the internet. There are three basic comment functions: making a voice recording with a microphone, recording a video comment with a webcam and leaving written comments. Here’s an example Voicethread that I made a few years back. 

4. Create a photoblog with Instragram + Tumblr

As you’ve probably heard, Instagram has recently done a bit of playing field leveling by releasing an application for Android smartphones. If you are one of those teachers who feel they are able to ask their students to do smartphone tasks without excluding the “have-nots”, why not think about creating a class photoblog? You can do this easily by setting up a Tumblr blog and then getting your students to sync their Instagram apps to it (they’ll need the email address and password of the Tumblr account to do this). Here’s an example photoblog with a few Instagram photos I took today.

One idea you might like to try out for using photos in class is to appoint a class “instagramer” at the end of each lesson. Their job would be to add a new photo to the photoblog for discussion at the beginning of the following class. The chosen “instagramer” could talk about the whys, whats, whens, wheres and whos behind the photo and answer any other questions their classmates would like to ask. You may like to suggest some photographic subjects (e.g. I walk past this every day | I saw something very strange today | This is how I get to work | This makes my blood boil | This made my day | I talked to this person today | In my opinion, this should be in the news | I saw this graffiti etc) or just leave it up to them. If you have any more ideas for ways of integrating Instagram, please leave a comment below. I’ve only been using the application for a few weeks myself and would love to hear them.

Note: Unfortunately, Tumblr doesn’t have a “comment” function, which would
allow students to leave written comments on each other’s photos. You can get around this problem by installing a third-party
comment platform called Disqus. It’s quite an easy process, just sign up for an account and paste the Disqus code into the html of your blog. Here’s a tutorial to show you exactly what to do.

Before I go, here’s a few conversation questions to get your students into a photographic frame of mind. You might like to ask them to discuss the questions in pairs or small groups before you send them out into the field. Happy snapping!
Photography

Have you ever seen or heard yourself teach? Many of us cringe at the thought! It’s strange that people generally fear seeing themselves as others see them all the time. However, despite the initial pain and suffering it is potentially a very useful tool in teacher development.

Our school policy on teacher observation is that there is one round of them each term, which I think is fairly typical of language academies. This year we started with the DoS doing an observation in the first term, focussing mainly on the students and the class dynamic. In the second term we initiated a round of peer observations, which were well-received by the staff and seemed to be quite motivating. This term, we were wondering how to follow this up and decided to offer a choice: either a traditional observation, by the DoS or another member of senior staff, or a self-observation, with a follow up discussion for both choices. When this idea was put to the staff recently, ten out of the thirteen teachers opted for a self-observation.

As we all know, observation is a tricky beast. There is the obvious paradox of having an extra person in the room, as well as the nerves it generates in the teacher being observed. An interesting post I read recently compared the paradox to Schrodinger’s Cat and theories of quantum mechanics. For many reasons, teachers often have an extreme dislike of observations, though fortunately at our school there appears to be a positive attitude towards them.

Self-observations can be done either by making a video recording, an audio recording, or using a reflective questionnaire or a checklist – meaning that one wouldn’t have to endure seeing or hearing oneself. Of course, a questionnaire can be used in conjunction with any recording as well, and I think that is the better option. Hunt (1994) (click link to download doc) proposes the creation of checklists and describes a teacher using one to focus on language foci in his lessons and then engaging in discussion afterwards.

A large number of teachers appear to have taught for years and never seen or heard themselves in the classroom. I had a friend record me on my DELTA course, doing a slightly extreme experimental practice lesson using ‘Silent Way’ techniques. I didn’t get much chance to hear myself, but my miming and gesticulation were amusing! I could observe myself and the students, and noticed all the language that they would not perhaps have produced had my interaction not been governed by a self-imposed silence. It taught me the value of shutting up in the classroom.

In time, self-observation could perhaps lead teachers more towards being able to reflect ‘in-action’. When we are being observed, I think we all consciously self-monitor more than usual, but when another person is watching this can lead to nerves and panic. In a self-observation, this noticing can be done without worrying about things going wrong and being seen by someone else. Through consciously self-monitoring during a lesson maybe we can become more able to make the right decisions and also to recall incidents to reflection ‘on-action’ later, after the class. Richards suggests that “teachers who explore their own teaching through critical reflection develop changes in attitudes and awareness which they believe can benefit their professional growth as teachers”. We all naturally think about classes after the event, but there is benefit in formalising the process, not all the time, but on chosen occasions. In this article, Richards also explores different ways in which this can be done.

In our school’s round of self-observation, the participants will engage in post-observation feedback, as in a regular observation, but will not be on the receiving end of feedback. Instead, they will choose the focus and use the opportunity to verbalise their reflections and hopefully the discoveries they have made through the process.

This process is also designed to raise teachers’ awareness of the fact that self-observation can be done at any time and needn’t only take place during a time which a school has identified as a formal observation period. I think that all types of teacher observation have their place, including those with an evaluative element. However, I think the common form observation, as being done by a superior and the feedback being evaluative, should form only a part of an observation cycle and that mixing up the forms of observation can be of great value.

So, if you have never seen or heard yourself teach, switch your webcam on, set up a video camera, record audio on your mobile phone or laptop, use a dictaphone or an old fashioned cassette player, or any other method you can think of. There are many options, so there’s no excuse for not giving it a go!

Me and maps go back a long way. In fact, I think I’ve always had a map to hand wherever I might be. When on day trips with my family, to be on the safe side, I would pack a few blanket-size ordenance survey maps and diligently inform my father of anything important he might have inadvertently bypassed: “Dad! If I’m not mistaken, there’s an iron age fort in that field. Would you mind stopping so I can investigate further?”

Later on, as a student, apart from posters of Che Guevara and Dalí’s dripping clocks, I always made sure I reserved sufficient wall space for a map or two. Like most people, I eventually grew out of the cult of Che, and waking up to Dalí’s deliriums began to make me feel dizzy. However, to this very day, I’m still not over my cartographic cravings. My current pin-up is a smallish relief map of Catalonia on a corkboard due south of where I am sitting writing this post (Latitude: 41.406943 | Longitude: 2.155488).

But of course, times have changed, and map lovers have never had it so good. Thanks to Google, we can now geo-position ourselves on Google Maps, jet-pack along the Grand Canyon with Google Earth or beam down to street level with Google Street View. There is indeed a “mapp” for almost anything!

But, what is it that makes maps so universally appealing (at least in my universe)? In my opinion, it’s simply because we enjoy mapping our lives onto maps. We can express our identity (“I’m from here”), talk about our experience (“I’ve been here”) and communicate our dreams and objectives (“I’d like to be there”). Maps are both spatial and temporal. They don’t just deal with north, south, east and west, they also encompass past, present and future, and are the perfect vehicle for personalised communication activities. Which brings me round to the main purpose of this post: suggest a few tools with which you can get your students mapping!

1. Create an animated “flightpath” of a journey with Tripline

Tripline allows you to create animated Indiana Jones-style “flightpaths” of journeys you’ve made (see example below). Sign up for an account, click on “Create a new map” and start adding content (text and uploaded images) to the different points on your journey. You can even add background music if you like. Animations have their own unique URLs and can also be embedded in a blog. If you’d like to see a step-by-step tutorial on how to create your first Tripline, click on the following links: Tripline Tutorial – Part One | Part Two

2.  Add voice recording to a map with Map Maker and Vocaroo

As you’ve seen, Tripline content is largely text based, which is ideal for writing tasks. If, however, you want your students to record themselves describing a place and then position the recording on a map, you might like to consider combining Vocaroo with Map Maker: you make your voice recording with Vocaroo (probably the simplest podcasting tool on the internet), then embed it into a Google Map using Map Maker. Here’s a quick example (click on the red marker to open the Vocaroo audio player).

So, here’s what to do! First, record yourself in Vocaroo and copy the embed code. Then, zoom down to your chosen location in Map Maker, give your map a name and paste the embed code into the “Popup content” field. Place a marker on your map by clicking on “Add marker” (if you make a mistake, select the edit icon on the right of the screen and drag the marker into a new position).

You are now ready to embed your “map + voice recording” into a blog: click on “Save map” and then on “Share your map” to get the embed code.

Unfortunately, Map Maker doesn’t allow you to embed recordings into Google Street View. If your students want to take visitors down to pedestrian level, suggest they embed a “Street View” of their location just below their Map Maker creation. Here’s the “Street View” of the location described in the Vocaroo recording above.

Ver mapa más grande

3. Record and share your impressions of different places with Woices

Woices is a community-based platform which allows users to create and share recorded descriptions (called “echoes”) placed at specific locations on a map. Here’s an example of an “echo” positioned at Lake Bohinj in Slovenia. “Echoes” can also be accompanied by text and photos.

Note: Although not animated like Tripline flightpaths, “echoes” can be grouped together into “walks” in order to illustrate the different places visited during a trip or holiday. Here’s an example: A Night Out in Gracia

And finally, here’s a few ideas for activities students can do with the tools above:

• Descriptions of journeys, trips, excursions and holidays
• Descriptions of specific places (a city, a village, a national park, a beach etc
• A favourite view
• A favourite building or landmark
• Instructions on how to get somewhere
• A description of your street
• Recommending a holiday destination
• Anecdotes of good or bad holiday experiences
• Somewhere you’d like to visit
• Walks down memory lane (e.g. the beach where I learnt to swim)
• The location of a historical event
• Somewhere you’d like to live in the future

How do we validate, or legitimate, the individualized knowledge we have about teaching?

Answers:

 Portfolios

If you took a training course such as Trinity TESOL or CELTA, you must have had a portfolio in which you clipped your lesson plans, worksheets, and other teaching materials; as well as, perhaps, some reflective writing.

That must have been part of your assessment; which means that in one way or another it is good for assessment, so…

What if you kept a portfolio with the very best lessons you planned, the resources you most used, photos and videos of your classes, and some feedback from your students?

Take that to your next job interview. (Thank me later after you got the job )

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Blogs

Perhaps I don’t need to say much about the advantages of blogging. But it’s worth mentioning that:

• A blog can be your best business card if no-one knows you.
• A good blog shows much more what kind of knowledge you have to offer than a certificate does. A blog can give hints and insights on the way you think, whereas a CV is pretty insipid.
• Increasingly, I’ve met people who were offered jobs or other opportunities because of their blogs.
• Blogs balance the amount of information about our profession, bringing it down to Earth, the at-the-chalk-face factor (or IWB-face nowadays). Enabling practitioners to exchange loads with other practitioners from all over the world, which has potential to create a high level of transferability, validity, reliability in a very 21th-century fashion – i.e. bottom-up knowledge.

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Conference presentations

When you set out to do your first presentation, you’ll see that the pre/while/post work of it all will be one of the most valuable developmental experiences you can aim at.

As for me, while the peaks of my professional development have been achieved through reflective practice through blogging; the peaks of my professional knowledge have certainly been achieved while preparing talks for conferences.

Due to their low academic rigor (not necessarily a bad thing), ELT conferences are one of the few in the broad Education/Linguistic fields to open space for the purely pragmatic, the hands-on, and the wrongly-labeled ‘inexperienced’. It turns out that in conference circles, professionals who are actually teaching have been gaining a lot of recognition and support from those who moved on to be writers/authors, for example.

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All in all, documenting your knowledge construction can make a big difference not only for your own benefit, but also for the development of our profession as a whole. I think we share this responsibility.

So there you are; my three ways to answer the question above: portfolios, blogs and presentations. And below, what made me stop and write this and the previous post.

To build a broader knowledge base for L2 teacher education requires that we accept as legitimate knowledge that is generated by and from practitioners as they participate in the social practices associated with L2 teaching and learning (…)

For practitioner knowledge to become part of the knowledge base of teacher education, Hiebert et al. (2002), suggest that it must be made public and represented in such a way that it is accessible to others and open for inspection, verification, and modification.

Johnson (2009: 24-25)

Johnson, K. E. (2009) Trends in Second Language Teacher Education. In Burns & Richards (eds.) The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education. New York: Cambridge University Press.

What’s the difference in your development as a teacher between engaging in:

• Formal, assessed training
• Less formal workshops or INSET (in-service training)
• An ELT conference
• Planning a lesson
• Thinking about a lesson you taught, what worked and what didn’t.
• Reading books, journals, magazines in the field.

?

 By engaging in any of the above, or in none of them, consciously or not you are structuring a knowledge base that will permeate and influence your teaching in a historical manner. By historical I mean each action being influenced by previous actions; each idea being influenced by previous and actual mindsets, yours primarily, and other’s secondarily (in fact, where other’s finish and yours start is pretty blurry).

Let’s suppose that after 10 years teaching you have formed a very clear idea of what good teaching is. Even if you often revisit and challenge your own ways of thinking about teaching, there are probably some rooted conceptions that will make you stand where you are. And let’s say that these roots are what gives you a sense of identity as a teacher (and as a person, why not?).

You’re then faced with a new challenge: to teach following someone else’s guidelines, principles, ideas, etc. Maybe because you moved to another country, or you’re taking an assessed training course, so you have to fit in the box; but the box is full of things you don’t believe.

You’re a bit confused now – the course has somehow changed your beliefs, and you started to agree with many things you would’ve considered ‘wrong’ before the course.

The body of knowledge that the course is offering you (or imposing) is validated by an external organization, delivered by more experienced professionals, accredited by top universities, and recognized in the market place as the best measure and screening device for recruitment and pay scale. Moreover, the body of knowledge offered there has a price, a timetable, a certificate, and other administrative qualities.

Now, your knowledge, if you are technically undertrained (though you might be ultra-developed) was acquired by ‘mere’ practice, and it doesn’t have any of the above. Who accredited your 10 years experience? No-one.   Therefore, your knowledge has a much lower value, if any.

In practice, we know it is not true. What we learn by doing is indeed priceless and timeless.

So, the question is:

how do we validate, or legitimate, the individualized knowledge we have about teaching?

The most basic answer is: you talk about it, you make it public.

How you do it and what you get from it will depend on an array of factors, of course. I’ll address a few in the next post.

In the meantime, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

]]> http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/blog/teacher-training-and-development-whose-knowledge-is-it-anyway-part-i/feed/ 8 http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/blog/teacher-development-walking-your-own-path/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=teacher-development-walking-your-own-path http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/blog/teacher-development-walking-your-own-path/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:31:02 +0000 Richard Whiteside http://www.tesoltraining.co.uk/blog/?p=3549 Continue reading →]]> Reflections on teacher development from Richard Whiteside (@nutrich) in the first of a series of guest blogs. Thanks very much Richard and welcome to SGI: it’s great to have you on board.

I recently gave a talk at the TESOL Spain conference in Spain about using Twitter a self-constructed PLE (Personal Learning Environment) to access development opportunities online. As an introduction to the talk, I outlined a range of values and philosophies about teacher education to identify where I was coming from. I always appreciate an introduction to a talk that identifies some beliefs that the speaker holds, so it’s possible to locate what they say in the wider scheme of things. I also think it is of value, in general, to discuss the philosophies that inform one’s teaching and development. This post is a summary of this thinking, plus a few added musings. I hope that I can prompt some reflective comments!

One quote regarding teacher development to which I often refer is from Julian Edge, who was a great influence on me during my MA last year at the University of Manchester. I enjoyed the teacher education module tutored by him immensely, and much of the reason for that was the opportunity to engage in some deep thought beard stroking (if you haven’t got one, you can always get a false one) and engage in some philosophical discussion. He wrote that: “You can train me and you can educate me, but you can’t develop me. I develop.”

Another golden nugget the aforementioned Mr. Edge introduced us to, which he attributed to Spanish poet Antonio Machado (though I believe it is a quote with an unknown origin, possibly with origins in Tao), was this one:

“Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.” 

Translated into English as:

Wayfarer, there is no way. The way is made by walking.

The idea of which, as far as I see it, suggests that teacher development cannot be set out by others, everybody has to discover their own route to educational enlightenment, as it were. Also, I think these quotes suggest that waiting for some big opportunity to develop or waiting to ‘receive’ development (i.e. shelling out cash for a course), is certainly not a particularly good the only way of looking at things. Perhaps online portfolios demonstrating knowledge and continuous development will one day replace CVs and expensive ‘accredited’ certificates?

If you are involved in teacher education, it is perhaps not a reasonable thing to be looking at developing teachers in a particular way, but to guide them towards discovering their own path. In some contexts this might be quite a subversive activity, as not all teachers are allowed to think about how they would like to do things; they merely have to deliver the education that is expected, by society or the institution.

Another belief that informs my thinking is that teachers should always keep learning. I have followed Harold Jarche’s blog for a while, the wonderfully named “Life in Perpetual Beta”* (I recently discovered that this is taken from a documentary film). His blog is not directly related to education, but regularly provides some great thoughts to ponder regarding workplace structures as well as professional development.

As far as I see it, these philosophies connect with the idea of reflective practice, which Schön (1983) refers to as “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.”**

I don’t think it is particularly outlandish to suggest that we teachers should endeavour to provide the best education we can to our students. Which, I suggest, requires us to consider our situation and try to identify what exactly ‘best-practice’ is for us in our context. This thinking encourages me to be extremely wary of anybody insisting that there is one method or approach above all others, which I discuss here, for example. There is no best way, there is only what is plausible for you, in your context, at any given time, according to Prabhu (1990).

In fact, regular discoveries of ‘GREAT NEW METHODS’ seem to have been rolled out across the world throughout the modern age of TEFL (since Grammar Translation became extinct); usually emanating from the West. I think this is an important area to consider for many of us in EFL, particularly those of us who are travelling NESTs (native English speaker teachers) living in a context that is not ‘our own’. I have personal experience of teaching at a school where there was a clash between the local teachers and the presiding (NEST) management with regard to the ‘correct’ techniques and methods. I’m sure that many others have had these experiences as well.

In a nutshell, self-directed personal and professional development (two things that can probably not be separated) is how you can go about improving, developing and becoming the best teacher you can be. Teachers are adult learners, and therefore should be able to identify goals and the methods by which they need to learn; having the motivation to do this, of course, is another kettle of slippery fish. Furthermore, as we are talking about teachers, all the better prepared than the average person these learners should be to engage in self-directed learning.

Research suggests that a phenomenal amount of learning is informal and I suppose most online engagement can be referred to as informal, as well as staffroom chat and suchlike. Teachers do not only learn from weekly workshops or other organised development sessions, but informally all the time. Are these weekly or fortnightly sessions are worth the hassle that many schools have in trying to persuade teachers to attend? Informal learning is generally not recognised institutionally in development records or things like that, which is perhaps something to think about if you are involved in teacher-training or school management.

As I suggested in my talks (although I’m probably speaking to the converted here), engaging with a network of other teachers in an online environment is great way to go about this self-directed development. It isn’t a replacement for any face-to-face contact, however it is certainly something that can augment the development opportunities you get in your day to day teaching context. Perhaps if this effort was recognised somehow by institutions as work, those of us who are engaged online might not appear to be the TEFL-obsessed loonies that some of our contemporaries probably think we are.

Notes:

* ‘Beta’ is a term generally associated with software applications that are still in development, with the designers requesting feedback that leads to change.
**much quoted reference from Wikipedia, supposedly from the book, but I’ve never actually been able to find the page. Hmm.

References

Edge, J. (1999) Managing professionalisation or “Hey, that’s my development!” IATEFL Issues, 149, 14-16.

Prabhu, N. S. (1990) There is no best method – Why? TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 24: 2

Schon, D.A. (1983) The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

Last night was the IATEFL Pecha Kucha. It’s a fun event that is becoming a mainstay at some TEFL conferences.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry because the host, Jeremy Harmer introduces the principles of Pecha Kucha at the start and then (at 17:20) you can see SGI teacher, Willy Cardoso performing in the Colesseum of TEFL… promoting CHAOS as always!

Part 2 of the Pecha Kucha session is here.

Also, I thought you might like to see and download these images to whack up on your staffroom wall to keep that IATEFL vibe frothing into next week and the months beyond, as we all give ourselves a big slap on the back for being great teachers!

Thanks to Teaching English on the BBC website for these free downloads.

And here’s one that I saw on Facebook today which is also probably a good one for the staffroom…. although not strictly teacher related, it’s probably quite useful on certain occasions!

Many of us have heard of IWBs or even seen them in classrooms but I am yet to visit a school that actually uses them. They have been around for a long time but thanks to this project we may now have the right ideas and confidence to use them properly.

Paul rightly points out that there are countless teachers who have IWBs at their disposal but don’t actually know what to do with them. This is what Paul’s project is aimed at solving and I think it has taken a decent step in that direction.

Paul sees IWBs as highly beneficial as they can help to:

1. Integrate new media into our classes.
2. Enhance learner interactivity and engagement.
3. Support the development of digital literacy.
4. Meet diverse learner needs using multiple types of media.

During his talk, Paul underlined that we, as teachers in a communicative language teaching environment, need the confidence to develop our own IWB resources and to experiment with them. He believes that IWBs are a great tool to remove teacher dominance and shift towards learner autonomy. However, they have to be approached with caution as some teachers may overload students with too much tech. He even goes so far as to say that we shouldn’t use them all the time, just when appropriate. This is probably true for any tool or piece of tech but the initial novelty value makes it hard to resist.

Paul’s team has actually created a handbook for primary, secondary, CLIL and FE incorporating mixed skills flipbooks, notebooks, vocab and grammar work. In fact, he’s already delivered workshops to many groups of teachers. What made these different is that they then went away, experimented and came back with their reflections. The resulting lesson plans and teaching ideas and materials are all being added to a website which will be further updated by the project participants. The continuing goal of Paul’s project is to create a community of teachers working together to create lessons with IWB and sharing resources online. This pretty impressive and may just succeed where expensive and often complicated IWB software has failed.

He has also recorded students and teachers giving FB. Anyone who has ever taught difficult teens will be happy to hear about one of his teacher’s successes with using their uploaded photos for visually making groupings, doing the register, behaviour marks and even funny dialogues. This could become a lifesaver for teachers in these tough teaching situations. As most of us teach techie-minded kids who have mobile phones and laptops, it’s not surprising to see them uninterested in paper books. Therefore, IWBs may appeal to them and provide an excellent tool for delivering lessons and re-engaging these types of students.

So, what can we learn from Paul’s talk? Well, I now feel more confident about using an IWB when I know that teachers are already making and developing resources and plans which I can use. I would also feel better about having a go myself using the guidelines from this project. I do think this could be the key to finally getting whiteboards dusted off or replaced and also to making them into a real teaching and not just something to show off or have in 1 room. Furthermore, I think the structure of the project should also be applied to working with iPads, mobile phones and other tech. We teachers learn best together and I for one would feel better about using some software or an App that has been tried and tested by other teachers than one fresh off the shelf of a shop.

Paul’s presentation (including the presentation slides):

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/sessions/2012-03-21/interactive-integration-iwb-effective-classroom-resource

Firstly, is there anyone in the TEFL game that doesn’t love Jezza? Sometimes, I’ve heard it being said that Scott Thornbury polarises opinion {I personally like watching his stuff, just for the record…although he does go on about food quite a bit } as do some other TEFL big names, but I’ve never heard a bad word about J-town Harmer. Have you?

Anyway, in the short interview, Jeremy plugged his new foundation level teacher training book. Actually, is that where all the goodwill comes from – that fact that most trainees encounter Jeremy’s legendary book during a stressful time and it’s like a godsend?

The topic of ‘English teachers who are also musicians/performers’ is raised. Jeremy confesses to being a failed singer-songwriter and Nik says that he is a failed jazz musician. They go on to mention others who have starred in Conference Open mic nights, including TESOL Fr legend, Bethany Cagnol, Russell Stannard…and Adrian Underhill opened and closed his Glasgow plenary by performing music. SGI’s very own Willy Cardoso is a bit of a player and surely, David Crystal would love to tread the boards as a Shakespearean actor, just like SGI DoS, Josh Round. I am also an amateur musician that spent a good deal of time trying to ‘make it’, as do a lot of teachers that I have come across (although not every teacher is a muso, actor or magician, of course). This is an interesting point and for me it raises a big question…

Should we let our students know that we have tried (unsuccessfully) to become famous performers?

Now, being a performer of whatever sorts obviously assists in the ‘pantomime’ of the TEFL classroom, but is it a good idea to let the students cotton on to the fact that..
 
a) Your real (or first) passion lies (or lay) elsewhere, other than in teaching
 
b) You are an ELT teacher because you failed at something else (that’s simplifying it a bit, but I’m sure that it is interpreted by many students as just that)
 

On occasions, I have let my students in on the secret that I’m a gunslinger guitarist…that was giving into egotistical temptation. However, when that happened I always felt that my respect as their professional teacher (not a traveller, who speaks English) had deteriorated somewhat. What was the point of doing all that CPD, getting more qualifications and trying to be the best teacher I could be in every, single lesson, if the learners suddenly thought, “Oh, he’s just a shitty musician, and NOT really into teaching, or us”.

Of course, teachers are allowed to have lives too and I think that they should bring their interests and anecdotes into the class: it’s only fair, isn’t it? Teachers ask students about their personal and professional lives constantly! But does this “I wanted to be something else” admission, cross a barrier that shouldn’t be broken for the sake of maintaining “We’ve got a good teacher that cares about our learning” status from the class members? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that teachers should be put up on a pedestal as “all-knowing-knowledge-givers”, but in my experience, when my classes have thought of me as a “fully-committed-to-the-teaching-profession” teacher (as I am), then it just felt like the classes, learner motivation and all the good shit just worked better…somehow.

Am I completely barking up the wrong tree? Is there any truth in what I’m saying? Let me know if you’ve had any similar experience.

Anyway, here’s Jeremy Harmer’s interview at IATEFL in full…

 
If you’re interested, here are all the other interviews from IATEFL Glasgow 2012. And here is the live IATEFL video channel.

My tweets from Making Sense with Metaphors in Language Teacher Training by Richard Chinn & Marie Willoughby

(As this is Twitter, you will need to start reading this post from the bottom and work your way up. I realise that this is a bit silly, but there’s no way for me to easily rearrange the order of my tweets! Sorry… )

• Great ideas 4 using metaphors. “To make a diff we need to reach the gut and touch the hearts of our participants.” -malderez&wedell.#iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Use metaphors in evaluation and feedback. http://t.co/nJBZZDSe Trainees write their own to sum up post-lesson thoughts. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Poss problems with metaphors – diffs in context, interests, cultures. Don’t overdo them, it’s off-putting! #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• With @brunoelt making metaphors. Activating schemata is a dark tunnel getting brighter or an energy saving lightbulb, gets brighter.#iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Not all metaphors will work for everyone, so ley them come up with their own. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• How is dividing up a pie like lesson aims? Answers on a tweet please! #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Build up a bank of the metaphors and use them with trainees as a reflection tool on the #celta course. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Use metaphors to clarify complex concepts for trainees. Makes ideas more accessible. Relates to trainees life experiences. #celta #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Metaphors = snapshots of teaching beliefs to help trainers to know what they are dealing with on a course. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• Why use metaphor? Process feelings and experiences, allow for playful work, surface subconcious thoughts, develop instinctive Ts. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012
• About to watch Making sense with metaphors from #ihlondon celta trainers. #iatefl Mar 21, 2012