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Tear down the little red walls ...
One person tries to illustrate a word by drawing. All others try to guess the word. A fun game for learning English vocabulary.
This news story suggests the basic literacy and numeracy of British teachers is rapidly declining.
This is just too amazing. An iPhone/iPad app that uses your built-in camera, OCR, and instant translation to instantly translate any foreign-language sign. A whole new level of machine translation.
Check out Naruto Character Creator. Great for practicing vocabulary for describing people, and for talking about clothing.
Posted by Steve Roney Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 8:30 AM 0 comments Labels: clothing vocabulary, describing people, vocabulary
Google, in accord with their search roots, has adapted their entire Google Books database for use as a corpus. Way fun!
Posted by Steve Roney Friday, December 17, 2010 at 2:07 PM 0 comments Labels: corpus linguistics, vocabulary
Michelle Rhee's demise in Washington last month was, I think, deserved. To my mind, she was always an illustration of Aesop's fable of the frogs who asked Zeus to send them a king. Because she acted decisively and harshly, she was popular. Teacher-bashing plays well with the public, and teachers have no one but themselves to blame that this is so. But that does not make any approach that is hostile to teachers right.
Rhee had a grand time grandstanding to the media. Nobody wanted to notice, for a while, that she was acting capriciously. It really all just amounted to Rhee firing people she personally disliked. Everything was up to the “judgement of the chancellor”--that is, Rhee. Challenged, she made unsubstantiated, defamatory McCarthy-like blanket accusations against teachers she fired. She hinted that those fired were child molesters, no less.
Her methods did improve performance on most measures. Most dictatorships do—for a few years. But I doubt her achievement would have been sustainable. For a while, raw fear can make everyone work harder in hopes of waiting out the firestorm. But fear is a brittle motivator. The moment there is the slightest opportunity instead to subvert the system, or to escape it, the dictatorial approach becomes disastrous; and such a moment always comes. Strong and efficient institutions are built instead on a shared sense of purpose, shared ideals, and a sense of fairness.
This is also an important lesson to understand for discipline within a classroom. Harsh and arbitrary measures may look good for a day or a month, but are self-defeating.
Rhee was and is the worst possible enemy of any true educationsal reform. Why? Because education reform is desperately needed, and McCarthyites like Rhee are giving it a bad name. Just as McCarthy almost single-handedly discredited the claim that there were Communists in the US State Department.
Even though there were.
Posted by Steve Roney Monday, December 13, 2010 at 11:41 AM 0 comments Labels: Michelle Rhee, teacher evaluation
Using YouTube to make an interactive movie. Great potential for things like listening comprehension and conversation practice.
Here's yet another spelling bee program--this time featuring Canadian pronunciation and spelling.
This is like their spelling bee, but focuses on definitions. Again, you can use your own word list, which is cool.
Here it is, folks--an online free spelling bee program that lets you enter your own word list.
An online spelling bee, like that at Visual Thesaurus, but with British pronunciation and spelling. A few other word games here too.
The classic spelling drill. Unfortunately, you can't use your own word list unless you have a paid subscription.
Posted by Steve Roney Friday, December 3, 2010 at 10:44 AM 0 comments Labels: action research, teacher training
Posted by Steve Roney Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:19 AM 0 comments Labels: tertiary education, universities
One more flashcard system, but this one is specifically designed for learning vocabulary. Choose from pre-set vocabulary lists for intermediate ESL, advanced ESL, grades from 7 through 12, or SAT or GRE words.
Posted by Steve Roney Monday, November 29, 2010 at 12:42 PM 0 comments Labels: advanced, EAP, intermediate, vocabulary
Ace way to practice giving and following directions--using Google Maps and Street View.
Seems as though everyone is putting up flashcard sites on the Web now. OK--here's another one. Nothing special so far, but it includes one pleasant little game.
Hit them where they live. Create your own class iPhone app.
As language teachers, we ought to, and rarely do, research the first languages of those we teach. By doing so, we can learn what items in English they are most likely to struggle with--it will be those aspects of their mother tongue that most differ.
This site, 101 languages, gives you a quick run down of the sounds and grammar of 101 different languages. Just a page or two might do.
Another ripping contribution from the always industrious folks at Hong Kong Polytechnic's Virtual Language Centre: two games of grammar roulette. Nice for breaking ice, or for filling in an unplanned half hour once a hard lesson' s done.
When shown graphically, it sure looks unsustainable. Especially in a recession.
A professional ghostwriter of academic essays spills the beans about his work:
I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)Pretty depressing reading. Unless you're a professional writer.
Sorry to say this, but it actually sounds to me as though this guy is boasting about how good he is at bullying children. It's all about telling kids what to do, and nothing about telling kids something new. That is to say, nothing about actually teaching. And then, of course, if the student is bored--that's the student's fault.
The most chilling thing is that he gets a lot of applause at the end.
Some human benefactor has listed all TED talks in a Google spreadsheet for easy reference.
Here's a cool tool: open any other website from Lingro's website, and it will automatically either translate or give a definition for any word you click, and will also save it as part of a word list for you.
Great for listening exercises: grab a video from the web, post it here, and make a comprehension quiz to go with it. More or less awesome.
A good source of illustrations of vocabulary for the classroom, if limited in selection. This was once a popular newspaper comic strip. Jacques keeps running into trouble because his understanding of the word is too literal.
A place to look up that English idiom -- or to find an idiom using a vocabulary item you are teaching.
Nice use of multimedia to make something memorable.
Posted by Steve Roney Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 11:12 AM 0 comments Labels: learning objects, multimedia
The Melfort, Saskatchewan, local museum hosts an online exhibition of what it was like a couple of generations ago to go to school on the Canadian prairies.
Posted by Steve Roney Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 10:54 AM 0 comments Labels: history of education
From Library and Archives Canada, a view of what school was like in Canada a hundred years ago.
Try this link for a quiz on basic cultural literacy: how well do you or your kids do with a basic quiz on cultural allusions from Mother Goose?
Test of concept for ProProfs Quiz School.
Posted by Steve Roney Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 3:42 PM 0 comments Labels: cultural literacy, reading, reading comprehension
A nice place to make free quizzes online. Allows for images and video, automatically marks, and collects statistics.
The complaints about the university system today are starting to sound a whole lot like the complaints about the mainstream media just as they started to go South. The following from Seth Godin's blog today:
The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.
A simple little flashcard system that you can put on your iPod or iPhone. Allows for graphics.
I'd call this an exemplary use of the computer's multimedia capabilities to illustrate a point.
Click on the title above to see.
Question: how can the teaching profession actually manage, as shown by comparison with the results of home schooling, to do worse in their chosen line of work than people pulled randomly off the street?
All modern, secular approaches to education are based on the premise that teaching should be a "science."
The human mind (other than our own) cannot be observed.
This approach reduces the student and the mind to an object, which is fundamentally incorrect. They are independent subjects.
Each new theory necessarily must distinguish itself and its practitioners by doing something, in common teaching practice, that violates common sense.
If they did not, there would be no way of telling if a given teacher was applying "the method," and there would be nothing in practice for the new theory to teach.
The educational “-isms” are perfectly designed to weed the best teachers out of the profession.
Posted by Steve Roney Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 10:13 AM 0 comments Labels: educational philosophy, teacher training