Books, workshops, creative materials and everything that makes me a better teacher and DoS
Today there is no blog post… only a bedtime story, although maybe not suitable for little children 
🙂
The story is by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and includes no blasphemous evil, no unspeakable terror lurking from the murky water… only cats.
If you want to read “The cats of Ulthar”, you will find it here.
Enjoy!
I consider myself lucky, as I had been working as an online teacher for years before the massive switch online (aka Covid19) happened. I’m sure most of you already know what teaching online looks like, and you’re getting quite experienced in this field. However, as a teacher, and a DoS observing quite a lot of online lessons, I must admit there are some universal truths worth sharing.
2. Use a camera: it’s way easier for your students to see you eye to eye
3. Crack a joke: we all need a little bit of laughter.
4. Dress up: it’s fun! Or, if you don’t feel like changing your style, remember to wear something bright and colourful to keep your students’ attention.
5. Pay attention to your background: it doesn’t have to be a blank wall, it may be your library, just make sure it’s tidy and clean. Sure, you can use an app-generated background, but you won’t look so natural, and it may also affect you connection.
6. Teach the way you’ve always taught: your students have their coursebooks and can use them. To be sure, the lesson pace will probably be slower, but your students don’t expect online madness, they just want to have a regular lesson with you.
7. Make your students move a bit: kids and teens quickly get restless in an online classroom, ask them to dance to a song or introduce a short activity where they can move.
8. Get to know each other better: the moment you switch online, you invite your students to your room – if you have anything your students might find amusing, use it. Cats, dogs, hamsters, children? I’m sure your students will love it.
I’d love to see my teacher online with his pet tarantula! One of the teachers I’ve trained asked me during a short chat ‘how are your cats?’ She explained she’d watched me so many times on my workshops, she felt like she knew my home and my pets. That was cute!
9. Be extra nice: you don’t know what’s happening on the other side of your screen. It’s more difficult to sense whether your students have some issues (not necessarily school-related). Being polite costs nothing.
10. Relax after each lesson: in an offline life you have a break. Be sure to have one online, as well. Get some hot coffee (yay, you may enjoy hot coffee nowadays!), dance for a while, play with a cat – chill before your next class, it will be easier to smile!
1. Panic: that’s the worse thing you can do. If a problem arises, be like Penguins of Madagascar:
2. Expect perfection: yes, there will be technical issues, there will be problems with cameras or audio, there will be cases when your presentation doesn’t work. Happens. You’ve probably worked with technology before, so you know, sometimes Murphy’s Law gets the better of you.
3. Make fuss about the background noise: if you’re not a professional online teacher it’s perfectly fine if your environment isn’t dead quiet. Accept it, and make sure your students realise the same – it isn’t a normal state, so relax a bit.
4. Forget to wear pants: there are some things you don’t want to experience, this may be one of them. If you think you’re safe as the camera only shows your top, you may be sorely mistaken.
5. Ignore the security issues: your class could get visited by a troll, it happens. The only thing you can do to prevent it is read carefully the security guidance of your teaching platform and act accordingly.
6. Come unprepared for your class: apart from your regular materials, have a short story ready to share when your students are still connecting, come up with a simple procedure what to do when someone gets disconnected (and practise it once in a while)
7. Neglect your appearance: working from home may sound nice when it comes to dress code, and sure you don’t have to wear a suit or waste time on full make-up. However, you really should take a shower before your lesson… and do brush your teeth!
8. Presume you’re alone with your students: because you probably are not. There are parents in the background, or siblings and maybe even grandparents, trying to be quiet, but ever watchful. Just think about your online lesson as a regular lesson only with the classroom door wide open.
9. Slurp, sigh, write on the keyboard: you’re using a microphone, which means all the unnecessary sounds will be perfectly audible. That includes sniffing, using your mobile phone, tapping the keyboard – try to limit them if you can
10. Forget to tell your students that you really do like them: and that you respect their ability to switch online so well, and to keep studying so hard!
These are my ideas… But I’m sure you’ve got yours! Share them and make our teaching a better experience!
The weather is getting more and more enjoyable, and the evenings are simply made to go out, breathe in the scent of spring flowers and listen to the birds clearly enjoying their human-free time. Unfortunately I can’t enjoy a nice evening walk… but I can still enjoy a May evening, with a great online course.
And this May brings some really interesting courses you can also enjoy.
Start: open
Duration: 3 weeks
Recommended for: educators, teachers, lecturers, and trainers who have to rapidly move from face-to-face to online teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
You will learn:
Start: 04/05/2020
Duration: 2 weeks
Recommended for: people who have contact with young people during COVID-19
You will learn:
Start: 11/05/2020
Duration: 5 weeks
Recommended for: people who want to take IELTS Academic or improve their IELTS score
You will learn:
Start: 11/05/2020
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: people who want enhance and develop their professional network
You will learn:
Start: 18/05/2020
Duration: 2 weeks
Recommended for: people who want to explore project management
You will learn:
Start: 25/05/2020
Duration: 3 weeks
Recommended for: people with an interest in robotics
You will learn:
Start: open
Duration: 10 weeks
Recommended for: people with an interest in learning and its future
You will learn:
And for now – stay safe!
I hope you’ll find the courses interesting and enjoyable. Hopefully it’s the last month of self-isolation – I do realise life won’t be the same for a while, but I would love to switch offline for a week or so…
Self-quarantine. Week 4.
With the weather getting nicer with every passing day, it’s more and more difficult to stay in. I generally love staying home, but even for me there’s a limit to delicious tea, good books and cosy blankets. I feel like I need something extra to keep me at home, and fortunately there’s Netflix!
I think almost every language teacher recommends watching films and documentaries in the target language, as it helps develop listening comprehension skills. Naturally, Netflix is really helpful with giving us access to the material of various genres, languages and accents.
I’m sure everyone has their favourite type of TV series or films, so I’m not even trying to recommend any. No, this post is about something else.
Last month I had a webinar about funny ways you may work on your English at home, and one of those ways is obviously watching Netflix with LNN. And I was really surprised when I realised nobody has yet heard about it – so I’ve decided to write about it on my blog.
LLN is a Chrome extension that gives you new learning opportunities with Netflix. It makes studying languages with films/series more effective. The subtitles can now be adjusted to your needs. The machine translation is the literal one which will help you understand the structure of the sentence in the language you are studying, and the human translation focuses more on expressions and idioms.
The LNN offers a catalogue to help you find Netflix titles with high-quality subtitles in the language you study. More than this, LNN has some study tips that will help you use the extension best depending on your linguistic level, so everyone can use it.
Another good thing about LNN is that it’s not only about English – you may now learn Spanish while watching La casa de papel or even Polish, if you’re brave enough! There are many languages available, so feel free to use it – because the best thing about LNN is that it’s free!
I want to recommend this solution to everyone, both teachers and students, as it may help you watch Netflix with a proper excuse – after all you’re going to learn a language, not only waste your time watching TV series!
I hope you’ll have fun and it’ll make your self-quarantined times easier. Remember, every day brings us closer to the happier days!
Enjoy!
Self-isolation, week 3.
Do you also have the feeling that you’d like the good, old times back? And only a month ago I was travelling, having fun and definitely not thinking about expressions like covid, self-isolation, quarantine, social distancing. What I need at the moment is an illusion that nothing has changed – and I know that my favourite online courses will help. Just learning something new will help me feel better.
If you also want to escape into the world of education, feel free to join me. I know you must be pretty tired, so I carefully left out all the courses on teaching online.
Start: 6/04/2020
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: people who want to explore project management
You will learn:
Start: 13/04/2020
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: people interested in developing digital products, who are using agile methods and have some experience working in the digital space
You will learn:
Start: 20/04/2020
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: teachers (primarily STEM) interested in their CPD
You will learn:
Start: 30/03/2020
Duration: 2 weeks
Recommended for: people who have digital skills but would like to build confidence in using digital technology in the workplace
You will learn:
Start: now
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: teachers of English as a foreign language at all levels
You will learn:
Start: 30/03/2020
Duration: 4 weeks
Recommended for: people who work with autistic children in schools, such as teachers and teaching assistants
You will learn:
Start: 06/04/2020
Duration: 3 weeks
Recommended for: teachers delivering cybersecurity lessons in the classroom
You will learn:
I hope you’ll like the courses I found for you – they are all quite short and easy to take up, so I’m sure they’ll give your brain the time to relax and focus on something new, rather than, well, quite grim reality.
Stay safe, and stay home!
You know I like activities requiring as little preparation as possible (no, I have never been a lazy teacher, I just need time to plan taking over the world). One of the areas that needed much preparation is explaining comparatives and superlatives, especially when the only language you’re using in the classroom is English, and you don’t want to translate the adjectives – you’d rather make your students create mental images of the English words.
I used to prepare some pictures that I could use to present the adjectives along with their comparative and superlative forms, but when it comes to some words, their meaning is quite arbitrary – like beautiful, bad or happy.
The internet somewhat helps, but sometimes you can’t trust it…
When a friendly neighbourhood Teacher’s Corner introduced a new game called Memome, I thought oh, it’s basically just a typical memo activity. And to be honest, I was right… but it turns out to be much more versatile. First things first, though: what is Memome?
A set of 30 illustrated cardboard cards with 15 English adjectives and 15 corresponding comparatives. It comes with an instruction how to play memo and basically you’re ready to use it. Simple? Definitely, yet you may use it in various ways!
The thing that I like most about Memome is that it’s made of nice, thick cardboard, which means you can use the cards in various games and they won’t get destroyed in those clammy paws of our youngest students. For a while now I’ve been observing lessons for children and I must admit that quite a lot of teachers don’t let them move as much as they need to.
Memome can be a great solution here, because all you need to do is to hide all the comparative cards in your classroom, divide your students into groups, give them the cards with the basic forms and ask them to find the corresponding cards somewhere in the classroom. The group that finds their set first is the winner. Simple, easy and makes kids have fun – they love treasure hunts.
One might think illustrated cards won’t be useful when working with teenagers – which is nonsense, as teenagers will accept literally anything that will give them an opportunity to banter with one another. So the activity goes like this:
It’s a simple activity, but it makes your students revise, communicate and have fun at the same time.
I find Paolo Coelho and similar coaching-style mottoes an invaluable source of inspiration in my classroom. First, they are usually simply silly (one of the reasons they’re so hard to forget). I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, your Facebook wall is probably full of your friends posting stuff like this:
Do you see my idea for the exercise? Ask your adult students to practice basic and comparative forms by drawing two random cards and making a motivational quotes a’la Paolo Coelho. You know, like taking bigger and more beautiful and transforming them into:
The bigger the tears on your face, the more beautiful my grave is.
or something like this
You may divide your students into groups, give them dictionaries and observe the chaotic flood of hilarious quotes!
As you can see, simple 30 cards can be used in various activities… but since there are only comparative forms here, you may encourage your students to come up with their superlative forms. With children, I could do a project when they make some extra cards by themselves. With teenagers and adults, I would probably use some sentence-building, like:
Anna was the youngest in her family until her younger sister was born, however, they died young as their parents didn’t vaccinate them.
the end
Anyhow, I’m sure you’ll have fun with Memome.
Enjoy!
I received this product for free, courtesy of IceBreaker.
My favourite colour is red, however every year, mid-February, I’m somewhat sick of it – you know, all those hearts, roses, ribbons, hearts… Did I mention hearts? Yes, it’s the dreadful Valentine’s Day!
Personally I had never celebrated this day until one day I told my then-boyfriend we’re skipping the date and I made an appointment with a guy who was supposed to lend me a film (Rurouni Kenshin OVA, not really overly romantic thing). Long story short, I met the guy who turned out to be pretty much into RPGs and proper metal music… and we’ve been together for nineteen years. And still not celebrating Valentine’s Day, as you can probably guess.
So here it goes, if your preferred shade of red is rouge de Tarantino and you do appreciate love stories with a little bit of a twist, I’ve got something for you – a collection of evil (well, sometimes not so evil, just a tiny bit malicious) Valentine’s songs I collected on Spotify. To bring a wide variety of music genres I asked my friends to collaborate, so as a result you have the opportunity to listen to many various songs with only one thing in common: the twist.
I made sure all of the songs have lyrics you can easily find on the net (just Google the artist, song + lyrics) and quickly make your own fill in the blanks activity by removing some key words. And then you can have a lot of fun with your students, celebrating Valentine’s Day in a new, refreshing way.
Before you go full enthusiastic (never go full enthusiastic around Valentine’s Day!), let me be clear that my collection includes some songs that with quite explicit lyrics (child-friendly Spotify marks them with a letter E, you can’t miss it). You may also find some songs offensive which is definitely not my intention, however I’m the Evil Mistress of the World (in the Making), so I don’t think you could expect anything else from me.
Where to find my Spotify playlist? Just follow the link to my Facebook page (click!) and enjoy! And if you want to fill my little black and rotten heart with warmth, do like my page to keep me motivated, as the motivation of a blogger is fuelled with likes and positive feedback.
Which basically is quite sad, but here it goes, we all like counting our likes and shares.
Enjoy your Valentine’s Day however you celebrate it!
All the people who are currently enjoying proper winter – I’m really jealous! In my place we’re more likely to see snowdrops than snowflakes and it’s really sad. Fortunately you can learn something new regardless of the weather (although it will be far more comfortable for those who can snuggle up enjoying some proper snowy evening).
I mean, I’m from Poland, whatever happened to the polar bears on the streets!
As usual, I found seven interesting online courses that are useful, enjoyable and free.
Start: 3/02
Duration: 4 weeks
For whom: people interested in self-development
Mindshift is the course that provides practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even if you’re an adult. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning so you can achieve your full potential. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed!
Start: 3/02
Duration: 3 weeks
For whom: people who are applying for jobs or courses
Experts from The Careers Service at the University of Sheffield share their top tips to help you write exceptional applications, CVs (or résumés), covering letters and personal statements, you’ll also hear from employers and admissions tutors to find out what they really look for in a candidate.
I think it’s a great course for your adult student who think about moving abroad looking for a better job.
Start: 17/02
Duration: 6 weeks
For whom: people who work with presentations
This course covers fundamentals of scriptwriting, argumentation and language. The main focus is not on how to fabricate a catching tale, but rather how to structure your ideas, facts and data into an interesting story you are going to tell during your presentation.
Start: 10/02
Duration: 6 weeks
For whom: parents, educators, people interested in the area of child development and language acquisition
I have already recommended this course, but I find it really useful, especially for those, who have just started working with children. You will explore how young children learn English and investigate many more aspects of early childhood learning and development. You can learn how to best talk to young children; how to create the best environment for them to learn English as an additional language; and how to monitor their progress. Moreover, you will be offered tips, advice and downloadable resources.
Start: 4/02
Duration: 8 weeks
For whom: students and teachers preparing for Academic IELTS
This course will give you immediate access to over 80 hours of interactive practice materials covering each of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Each section of this course includes engaging multi-media presentations reviewing key test-taking skills, strategies and techniques along with authentic IELTS-style exercises and interactive activities.
Start: 24/02
Duration: 5 weeks
For whom: teachers, curriculum leaders, teaching assistants etc.
On this course you’ll learn how to identify your learners’ thinking, clarify learning goals and fine tune your teaching to progress your students’ understanding, both in and between lessons. If you haven’t worked with Formative Assessment before, you should start now and see how it can change your classroom for the better.
Start: 10/02
Duration: 5 weeks
For whom: everybody 🙂
Your instructor (and my instructor as well, wouldn’t skip this opportunity!) is Jane McGonigal, the woman who’s changed my life and is likely to change the world (just take a look at my old note). What is the course about? You’ll learn how to create and share “preferred futures”, which are highly persuasive, compelling visions of the changes you want to make real. You’ll use them to identify obstacles, recruit allies, collect resources, and plan action to make your vision real.
I hope you’ll find something useful that will help you develop your Awesome Teaching Skills.
Have fun!
Aliens are awesome, I guess. I haven’t met any real extraterrestrial yet, but then again I’m talking about classroom – and here aliens are alive and breathing. Ever since I read “How to be An Alien” by George Mikes as an EFL student, I realised learning a foreign language is basically learning about alien civilisation and sometimes one feels like Erich von Däniken discovering absolutely unbelievable things.
Anyway, I think teaching is pretty much like discovering aliens, getting familiar with them and trying to communicate with them – and as a bonus, aliens are a really nice topic to talk about in the classroom. After all, there are no good or bad answers, and everyone can share their wildest ideas!
This lesson is about aliens and humans, the way both sides may look at one another – but it may also be an example of introducing the topic of inclusion, prejudice and reminding the simple fact that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
Everyone knows something about aliens, so all you need to do is come up with some simple questions, for example:
Divide students into groups and ask them to do some brainstorming and make the following lists:
This activity needs some help from social media. Some time ago Tumblr user Teaboot shared ‘supporting evidence’ to show us that actually, looking from a more objective point of view, we are an adorable little species:
To tell you the truth, I feel an uncontrollable urge to smile happily whenever I read this post, and I believe your students will also warm up to the idea of creating 5 own “findings” about humanity – ask them to work in groups and prepare their ideas.
Time for a little roleplay! Ask your students to imagine they’re alien scouts based on Earth and upon returning to their mothership, they are asked by their government officials to share their new exciting intel.
Each group chooses a representative to share their findings collected during previous activity, and the group that had the most original ideas, wins and gets promoted to Humanity Befriending Group.
It’s easy to ask your students whether they have learnt something new during this lesson – probably not, as the whole idea revolve around the simplest habits and routines. As a homework, ask your students to look at their most difficult challenges from the perspective of a friendly alien, to see a bigger picture and smile a little bit.
Enjoy!
Have you ever taken part in something we call YouTube Party? It happens when you meet friends, chat a bit and suddenly someone goes like “have you seen this video on YouTube?”… and you’re doomed; you know that for the next two hours you’ll be watching random stuff telling you more than you want about your mates’ interests.
I don’t really remember who took me to this unknown area of the Internet and showed me David Armand and his interpretative dance in Fast and Loose, a British TV series, but whoever that was, I owe them. Just take a look at something that never fails to put a smile on my face – the interpretative version of “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen:
The curse (or the blessing) of a creative teacher is when you see such material you know it’s literally ready to wrap it up in some more or less educational principles and you’re ready to go with a lesson. So, naturally, here I am with some ideas that you can use to make your classes a bit more festive.
The most obvious activity that may work well with adults, as I don’t think many youngsters will know all the songs (you may find more songs here). Just show the video (make sure not to show the title) and ask your students to guess the song. You may do this as a group activity to encourage competitiveness or simply ask for answers whenever someone is ready to guess.
Once we guess the song, we can easily observe that the gestures are not random – some base on metaphors, others on puns etc. Watch a chosen song with your students and try to identify all the words. Then try to apply them to another song – it will be easier to guess it now!
If your students like this activity and are quite creative, why not encourage them to create their own “code” and act it out before the whole class? To make it easier, divide your class into groups and each group may come up with a different song – of course the song has to be kept secret, so the rest of the class will have to guess it together!
When you listen to the song for the first time, you’ll probably get some words oh, so wrong – but stick to them! Write them down and try to make a completely new song with them. Bonus idea? Try to sing the new song along!
I hope you liked my ideas on how to use interpretative dance in the classroom – if you and your students come up with more inspirations, please share them with me.
Enjoy!
That is Evil! 