Projectiles

Like many teachers I get tied into my coursebook and curriculum, exams etc but recently have had some space to work on mini projects with my young teenagers. Wonderful to be reminded how rich the language input/output can be when they are involved in something that catches their imagination! A dogme moment -)

Another curiosity was that when I introduced the concept of the project and what we were going to do, there was initial disbelief that the first stage did not involve switching on Google and doing some “research” or rather simple “search”. I know from my own daughter’s projects how they all start with Google for images and Wikipedia for content (with some music videos on Youtube is nobody is watching). Lots of cutting and pasting and lots of parential involvement from supervising internet, to printing, to buying glue and pizzas so the group do not starve along the way.

Once they got over the initial shock, my own students did manage to create some content all by themselves. On the subject of how IT can be blended or even welded into education, Nik Peachey gave this interview at the IATEFL conference http://tinyurl.com/d3ft2qz .There are lots more fascinating recordings from speakers at IATEFL on the same site.

Shake it up speare

Four short days to the TESOL-SPAIN 2012 convention where David Crystal is one of the plenary speakers and will also be doing a reading of Shakespeare at the opening cocktail. I have followed his blog for a long time but have only recently become acquainted with his website on Shakespeare www.shakespeareswords.com following an interview on the TESOL-SPAIN website. The shakespeareswords website is absolutely fabulous if you have any interest at all in the man, his work, or simply the English language. Do check it out!

Listen up!

Here is a TV panel discussion on the need to learn English at the moment, given the current economic crisis and employment situation. The panel is made up of four colleagues from the board of TESOL-SPAIN. Good stuff … well done all! http://tinyurl.com/6p9ssgs

Crystal clear

I had the pleasure of seeing Professor David Crystal giving the opening plenary at ACEIA (www.aceia.es) training day last Saturday. Wonderful as always, he was talking about language in the Internet age and dispelling some myths in the process. One example he used was illustrative: it’s often presumed that abbreviations used in SMS and emails are “damaging” our spelling in some ways but as he points out, you can only effectively use abbreviations if you CAN spell correctly. One of his main points is that new technologies mean we are reading and writing more than ever and this has a positive effect on literacy. To finish he encouraged the study of the language used in these new technologies pointing out how enormous and fascinating the whole area is and will be, particularly when, in the near future, more and more audio will become the norm.