Teacher Workshops

Well, I told you about the wonderful experience we had with Berni and told that the whole thing was part of a professional development course. We started with advanced grammar and continued with getting students to write, use technology tools (blogs, wikis etc developing ideas), or the traditional way.

The following day was about improving listening skills, broadening vocabulary, using authentic materials and in the afternoon we discussed Bronte novels, compared them and talked about the place of the women in society.

Wednesday was the day of the Bronte visit and walk to the moors.

On Thursday we continued with humour in the classroom, games and game like activities. We found out riddles, jokes, quizzes, puzzles will be great as a warmer or to finish the lesson. You can find a great collection on Gapfillers.We finished the course with error analysis. We talked about all the traditional methods and Berni suggested language audit which was new for me and will give it a try.

We talked about how we can integrate technology to traditional efl teaching. Alex was full with wonderful links. I’d like to share some of  the ideas and the links with you.

Links:

A warm up or a filler: Choose a category or a topic and set a time limit and then tell students to write without stopping until you stop them. Works well when you brainstorm too. You can do the same with Write or Die which is a site allowing you to write whatever you want. You choose a word goal and a time goal and then start typing.

livetyping

PicLits is a wonderful site to give your students picture prompts to write their creative stories.

Ink Think Tank

Plinky  is great sites that everyday they provide a new prompt, a question, or a challenge, and everyone gets a chance to answer.

Phreethings  is another site for writing with your students. They can create their own postcards.