call week 4 - yay

Hello dear people from all kinds and ages! 

I would like to apologize for the delay of last week's post, I will try to confiscate you with some interesting and practical stuff, taken from Mr. Ross's 'call - technology in education course'. 

Using pictures in education -
A picture can really be helpful for learning in general, and particularly for learning language.
A simple example is teaching vocabulary where a picture can help increase neurological connections in the brain and boost memory results (as based by Gardner's 8 kinds of intelligence - spacial intelligence in this case). You would like to teach the different names of animals? flash cards with animal pictures would of course be great for that.
Another interesting idea for using pictures in a classroom, is showing a picture of something (place, person, situation etc.) on the board and making students talk about it in pairs, groups and so forth.
Just to note that there are many more ways of using visual experience in the classroom..

Here are some links for you (and thank actually Mr Ross for providing them):

sets of pictures -
http://ddeubel.edublogs.org/2011/03/22/picture-sets/

good for EFL pictures -

http://www.scribd.com/collections/2311934/Picture-Sets

The known 'quizlet' has an option of uploading pictures as well, making it easy to create flashcards.

I personally was very impressed by http://pixabay.com/  -  though not necessarily for learning English.. it's just a great sight with many many beautiful pictures.



 

 
       
Here is an idea for a lesson based on what is called 'linguistic landscape':

linguistic landscape means all the the different written signs outside of our homes, from commercial signs to street signs, names of schools shops and so forth.
This landscape can be used to learn some English, given the fact that most countries (including Israel of course) have English pretty dominant in their linguistic landscape.
Ask your students to take pictures of their linguistic landscape (making them more aware of the amount of English around them). and later focus on them in class. you can ask them all or part of these questions (taken from Scott Thornbury's blog):

1. Where was this photo taken?
2. How many languages can you see?
3. What is the relative status of the languages? How can you tell?
4. Who wrote the text? For whom?
5. Why is (some of it) in English?
6. Is there a translation? Why/why not?
7. Is it correct?
8. Is there anything you don’t understand?
9. Is there anything you would like to remember?

     

            good luck!