You know how January often goes: we go back to work full of energy, new ideas, and willing to start giving our best. As a blogging teacher, I also decided to start summarising each month, looking at my teaching highlights, challenges, questions, doubts, and whatever else I might find worth sharing. Here’s what happened in January.
3 Highlights
#1 Zaption
I managed to Zaption my first ever video and I turned it into a homework assignment for one of my online students. I used a video made by Luke Thompson and discovered his great blog featuring a variety of podcasts. I’ve seen what this tool is capable of on Milada Krajewska’s blog and I really wanted to give it a try.
Why Zaption? I’ve been looking for a way my students could work on their listening skills at home and I could observe and assess how they were doing. I’ve been familiar with ED Puzzle but it turned out students had to have accounts to access virtual classrooms and materials. I needed something with fewer strings attached (i.e. no log in for the student necessary) and here’s where Zaption came in. The only downside: I was only able to check my student’s answers to multiple choice questions even though the platform offers you the option of adding open-ended and true/false questions to the videos as well. It might be due to my free plan or missing some vital piece of instructions, so please, correct me if I’m wrong.
All in all, my student liked the assignment and did very well. I enjoyed the process of preparing it and broke the cycle of hearing about cool stuff available online and never following through with using it myself.
#2 Spotlight
I’ve been looking for a place online where my more advanced students could practice their listening skills for free. The idea was for them to listen on their own, for fun, and to generate some extra conversation topics. Ideally, the website would be updated regularly, would already have a considerable amount of material available and it wouldn’t be a BBC podcast (which my students have been using for a long time and grown a bit bored). Trying to find something matching BBC podcasts in quality was probably the biggest challenge. Nevertheless, I’m quite happy with what Spotlight offers (topics selection, audio quality, and transcript availability) and so are my students which was the whole point after all.
#3 An old student coming back
On a more personal note, January also saw one of my oldest students resuming her class with me. We’ve worked together since 2013 and I’ve been proudly observing her progress as an English learner. I think students coming back is a nice ego boost for any teacher and a sign of our job being well done. On top of that, she has always been a pleasure to work with so I am genuinely happy to be teaching her again.
2 Challenges
#1 IELTS Writing
This is a big one. Since November, I’ve been teaching two students whose goal is to take IELTS in 2016. Their struggle with exam writing tasks reveals that they lack a lot in terms of grammar and vocabulary, and probably haven’t written anything longer than an email to a friend in a very long time. I’m in the process of redesigning this course and figuring out the best way to ease them into the world of IELTS writing and it’s a pretty overwhelming task!
#2 Kids’ spelling
I’ve spent 3 years working with Spanish speakers and learned a bit about what is particularly difficult for them in terms of spelling. Now that I’ve started working with children who are either bilingual (Polish and German) or attending German-speaking schools it’s a whole new ball game. I see my younger (10-11 years old) students making totally unexpected spelling mistakes in English or confusing very odd pairs of consonants/vowels. It’s hard to say which language interferes more here, Polish or German, and these two are already very different. As a result, I end up with confused kids who happily produce such monstrosities like schue ( which is a mix of English and German for shoe) or skert (which is how a Polish person would phonetically write the word skirt ) There seem to be a lot of spelling fires to put out here and I definitely need more background info on multilingual children!
1 Burning Question
Instagram?
Is there a way to effectively use it in an EFL classroom? Is it worth using with students?
I’ve never heard about Zaption before. Thank you!
If you have internet access in your classroom give it a try. You can also use it with groups of students in real time to check comprehension (they answer qs on their mobiles and you can track their results)