How to remember vocabulary

 Some tips to help you remember what you are studying

1. Enjoy the learning process. Read what you like; Listen to what you enjoy; Watch films you find interesting We remember better when language we encounter  is  meaningful. The more relevant is what we study the more we remember.

2. Spidergrams What comes to mind when you think of the word DARK 

3. Break it down 

4. Look at word formation: prefixes and suffixes

5. Synonyms and antonyms

How long does it take??

It's all up to you .. It's a long journey  and you need to be prepared to practice every day or at least as often as possible .

EdPuzzle

Where have I been all this time ..? This is how I felt when I came across this wonderful piece of technology EDpuzzle.com. It was thanks to my savy-tech man who is very much into technology who introduced it to me and it was kind of love at first sight!

No need of  an awful lot of training to get familiar with it  - It didn't take too long before realizing what I could do with it:

• I can crop any youtube, ted talks, Khan Academy or National Geographic video
• I can insert my own audio notes or I can narrate over the video
• Finally, I can insert questions at any point in the video to create open questions, quizzes  multiple choice or short answer quizzes.
• I can create classes or import a classs including students directly from google classroom if I am already using it.

Once you have your video prepared - this is then saved in a data bank called "content"  for you to use whenever you need to do so.
From  there these videos can be used anytime including as a lecture video to be shown in the classroom. Students too can create their own video and share it with the rest of the class, especially if they are working on creative class project.

There are however some limitations. If EdPuzzle is going to be used as part of my google classroom I need to remember that I still need to share that video on EDPuzzle classes otherwise my students can not access to the video.
Also when the students have completed their activity I can only assess their completion from EdPuzzle not from google classroom. That means if accountability is what I am mainly concerned about then I think it is better to assign those videos to students directly from EdPuzzle class - This will enable teachers to keep track of how many students watched the video, what percentage of the video students watched, when they watched it, what questions in the video students managed to answer.

Here is my first example of a video created with EdPuzzle 

Vocabulary Expansion

Last week  I started a new course in Matera - The course is named "Percorsi di formazione linguistica e metodologica". There are all kinds of teachers on this course: primary, middle and secondary school teachers. Most of them are language teachers, mainly English language teachers but there are also some subject teachers who are strongly interested in acquiring new teaching strategies.

The first lesson was quite a practical one - participants were involved in carrying out activities aimed at promoting speaking and listening  activities

a) "meet the teacher" through photos ‘WH’ QUESTIONS – Asking and Answering Questions / Speaking and Listening Skills / Getting to Know the teacher

b) Vocabulary reinforcement - Participants were asked to write down adjectives which would fit the the given definition. This was followed by a speaking activity with a funny roleplay: Hello I am Mrs reliable 

c) Dictogloss

d) Lead-in vocabulary before presenting a new topic - Sit down when you hear your word

Activities for Gruppo di ricerca autogestito

Think about one of your techniques which is really successful in your class when you want to work on vocabulary expansion - Share it with your group to see if it can be adapted  or have some changes made to it - Describe your activity in the comment area - If you produce anything as a group - please write down the names of those teachers who took part in the activity

Critical Thinking

This lesson kicked off with an ice break : Find someone who
The idea behind the questions being asked was to develop question formation skills in different tenses - At the same time the answers given gave me an idea of how much participants really knew about the next topic "Critical thinking"

- We talked extensivly about 21st century new skills with an emphasis on "Critical Thinking"
Here is the presentation given during the session "How to promote Critical Thinking"

Activities for Gruppo di ricerca autogestito

Look at those Bloom's questions I gave out during the lesson and try to come up with one or two activities where it is shown you are actually including and promoting those HOTS we talked aboout - Please share your group work in the comment area - thank you

CLIL Methodology_3

Focus on Speaking Skills in Clil Contexts 

This session gives  us the opportunity to talk about the importance of communicative competence in clil, in the light of, what in clil terms is called, "reconceptualization of language". A brief overview of some learning theories about learning and second language acquisition (Vygotsky, Cummins and Krashen) should help us understand the role played by the teacher in promoting  intellectually demanding work.
When this happens .. the teacher is creating a genuine need for learners to acquire the appropriate language 

Most of the research carried out in clil classroom has shown  that the oral interaction is still exceedingly low.

There is therefore a need to foster speaking activities which can engage students  within clil classrooms

Participants are  invited to try out in their classrooms some of those speaking activities presented: ie Balloon Debate, Prove it, Rubric Jigsaw for Prentations 

Next session on 6th May they will be asked to share their feedback with the rest of the class

CLIL principlese_3

Here is your 3rd lesson's presentation 


The roles of Language: focus on classrom interaction 

Methodology Clil 2

This session gave us the opportunity to look at the language demands of subject content in texts at sentence and word levels so as to explore the benefits of promoting a genre-based teaching approach.

Language demands: focus on disciplinary knowledge

Workshop: teachers were asked to analyse their subject area and to share their findings with their peers.