TEFL All Inclusive

  Kolk, Melinda.  earthdrawn.jpg . Oct-00. Pics4Learning For a number of months now I have been taking groups of students on virtual tours to all corners of the world, and beyond! We have been learning about different countries, increasing vocabulary, improving  communication and cooperation skills and growing in autonomy. In this lesson, I wanted the learners to reflect that, although enriching, there is always an environmental price to pay when travelling. Like many others, I have recently been commenting on the continued patchy cover of environmental issues in tefl materials. As well as this, I have noticed that interest in this topic is not continued over time by many teachers. They will address some small aspect of the environment in one or two lessons, then that's it! There also seems to be a general lack of ideas about how to incorporate resources into interesting and motivating lessons. I feel that it is important to do what you can to remedy this – no matter how small. T

Photo by Free Birds on Unsplash If you have students who are interested in art and culture, this is the perfect virtual tour for them! It is suitable for all, as the resources I made are all easily adaptable for all levels. As always, these virtual tours have a strong focus on learner autonomy and group participation and communication. In particular, this session will help the students to develop listening skills in a variety of ways. They will use Total Physical Response (TPR), Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), and collaborative and cooperative learning throughout. To lead in and create interest in the topic, I created a simple Zoom poll to get the group talking about art galleries in their countries. After this, they are asked for their ideas about the location of the virtual tour. I elicited that it was France and that it was The Louvre and one of the students was able to guess the Mona Lisa.  The students then take part in a sensory activity, designed to stimulate their c

  Photo by >>> niedblog.de on Unsplash My latest virtual tour is to the world-renowned Kruger National Park in South Africa. It became South Africa’s first national park in 1926 and is the largest game reserve in the country. Kruger National Park is reportedly home to 500 species of birds, as well as 100 reptiles and almost 150 mammals. In addition to taking a 4x4 safari   with the ranger, which is what we do on the virtual tour, visitors can take take a bush walk or view the park from a hot air balloon. This session has a strong focus on learner autonomy running throughout all the activities.   We use peer teaching for vocabulary building,   a KWL graphic organizer to allow the students to take more control over their own learning and track their own progress and to decide if they have met their objectives, a quiz where the students are in charge of the questions, and finally we use an activity based on Twitter to allow for self-reflection. To activate the students'

Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats is a tool that is used by individuals and groups, often in business- in industries such as finance, healthcare and manufacturing- for problem solving and brainstorming. It has recently been used in online teacher training. See here for an interesting article on training physical education teachers. It can also be used in the classroom to develop the students’ skills of analyzing things from different perspectives, as well as to develop their critical thinking. It additionally promotes inclusivity and ensures that all participants are actively engaged in group work. In case the technique is new to you, basically it involves six hats – blue, green, red, yellow, black , white- and this allows for a group of people to explore a problem from a range of perspectives instead of looking at it from a narrower point of view only. Each hat represents one particular way of thinking (blue = process, green = creative, red = feelings, yellow = benefits, black = cau

  Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash I’m sure that you’re familiar with the video sharing too  Flipgrid , which has seen a huge jump in popularity over the last year or so. It’s so popular now that it’s even been called ‘Flipgrid fever’. If you’ve been teaching online recently, you have probably used it or researched its benefits, as it is a very useful tool to use for learners to connect, communicate and collaborate with each other by sharing and commenting on each other’s videos. It has been very beneficial during the pandemic as one way of reducing the distance and isolation that both teachers and students can feel online. Flipgrid is extremely easy to set up and use, and it is completely free. It has some very nice extra features that would appeal to younger adults and teenagers in particular, such as the ability to add filters, frames, text, emojis and drawings to the video. They can also pause and record their video, to ensure that they are happy that they are submitting th

  Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash Many of you will be aware that I was running an online book club during the first lockdown, here in the UK, and that this continued afterwards. Recently, I have been looking again at the research that I completed into extensive reading as part of one of my assignments for the DipTESOL, as I sometimes feel that the students are initially needing a more structured approach to their reading, to avoid them becoming overwhelmed and demotivated.  I looked in particular at my research on Literature Circles. I have used these successfully in the past with Primary School aged children (aged about 9 -11 years old in the UK), and I decided that I would try this approach to lessen some of the barriers to reading that my students have been encountering. Literature Circles are defined as, ‘a group of students gather together to discuss in depth and share ideas about a piece of literature they read’ (Hill 2007, p. 1). Harvey Daniels was instrumental in the develop

                                                                    Photo by William Olivieri on Unsplash My students were interested in visiting one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites on a virtual tour, to be able to explore a place of cultural or physical significance that would not normally be possible for them to visit. I decided to take them to a country that none of them had ever visited – China- and we set off to visit The Great Wall of China! For this virtual tour I used quite a few different resources to give them the best experience possible. Several of these ideas were inspired by a webinar I have just attended as part of the excellent Macmillan Back to school series: Key Tools and Approaches to Hybrid Learning, on 12 th August. The presenter was the always amazing Russell Stannard. I sometimes use Google Earth to set the scene and as Russell Stannard reminded us in the webinar, it really brings the place to life. So, we zoomed in on The Great Wall of China, and the