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Aim: to encourage read alouds

Create an audio book library, audio book reviews or Q&A discussions using mobile devices & QR codes.

Other ideas for recordings:

Introduce recordings with short texts like 'Jazz Chants', song lyrics or poems.

EAP students record short paragraphs from textbooks for other students to transcribe.

No tech? No worries!
Face-to-face storytelling or mutual dictations are just as valuable forms of output with ‘Near Peers’

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Step 1: Students choose a book to take home and read along with the teacher (via QR code to the audio). Audio by Fiona Wiebusch from Eric Carle's text, 'the Hungry Caterpillar'. http://bit.ly/TeacherReadAloud

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Step 2: Students generate their own recording, reading the text aloud, using the FREE Voice Record App installed on all phones. If YLs, email the recording to the Teacher to make a QR code for the back of the book. Other Ss can listen and respond. See a sample of audio recorded by Aisha, 8 yrs old, of Goldilocks & the Three Bears, Penguin Graded Reader (Level 1): http://bit.ly/GoldilocksReader
Q&A with Aisha & Malee, 6 yrs old: http://bit.ly/GoldilocksQandA

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How could you turn these texts into a mutual dictation?

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HO Read & Record - Text 1 (Goldilocks) Text 2 (Jazz Chant)

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Another idea for output using just a piece of paper and a pen.

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In a mutual dictation, the students are divided into pairs of student As and student Bs and then each given the relevant worksheet, either A or B.

This is also a good opportunity to move students around and get them working with other people in the class, not just the person sitting next to them. If you number the worksheets A1 to A16 for example and B1 to B16 (if you have 32 students) then the students have to find their partner and sit down together WITHOUT looking at their partner's worksheet. If I have an odd number in the class, then one group will work as a three (with 2 student As, for example).

The aim of the activity is to dictate their information to each other in order to get the complete text. In the example attached, you will find a description of a job. When students have got the complete text, they need to do something with it, such as solve a riddle or answer true/false questions. This is so that they read the text and try to understand it, rather than simply reading out isolated words. I also encourage my students to ask for extra help if they don't understand their partner, for example by saying 'Could you repeat that, please?' or 'How do you spell "________"?'

It's a great controlled activity as it is completely learner centred and provides lots of student-to-student interaction. It is great for encouraging learners to cooperate together and also has a fun puzzle element which keeps motivation up. It provides integrated skills practice as students are reading, speaking, listening and writing all in the one activity. The advantages for the teacher are that you can adapt the activity to any topic and any (short) text and with word processing packages it is quick and easy to make the worksheets.
Preparation
Print and copy the worksheet so that students have one for each pair.
Mutual dictation worksheet Procedure

Get the students into pairs (as described above).

Tell them they each have part of a text and that they must complete the text without looking at each other's worksheet.

Tell them they do this by taking it in turns to read part of their text. As one reads, the other partner fills in the gaps in the text, then they change around until the activity is complete.

They must then answer the question; "What's the job?"

At the end you can get the students to compare their two halves of the text and correct any mistakes.

I first saw this activity being used at the British Council in Bogotá.

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In a mutual dictation, the students are divided into pairs of student As and student Bs and then each given the relevant worksheet, either A or B. This is also a good opportunity to move students around and get them working with other people in the class, not just the person sitting next to them.

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Global Literacy and Girls Education

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× By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies. Find out more.

Cambodia is rebuilding its educational system from the ground up after years of upheaval. To aid in this effort, Room to Read Cambodia has led in the field of literacy and girls' education and works as one of the national government's primary partners improving Cambodia's quality of education.

Support Our Work

After years of warfare, strife, and the 1970s reign of the Khmer Rouge, which killed over 1.8 million Cambodians, the country is still clearing thousands of land mines, creating commerce, and reviving their culture. Although the nation has improved its condition and the poverty rate has fallen, many who reside in rural, plateau and mountainous areas remain especially at risk.

Room to Read is committed to helping the country rebuild its educational system from the ground up. We operate in government schools within Banteay Meanchey, Kampong Cham, Kampong Thom, Prey Veng, Tbong Khmum and Siem Reap.

Cambodia's young readers lack affordable Khmer-language books. With that in mind, we have prioritized publishing local language children's books since the early days of our operations in Cambodia. Our Literacy Program also establishes school libraries, constructs or renovates school rooms, and trains teachers on a phonics-based approach to literacy instruction. Another large part of our collaboration with Cambodia's Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport includes influencing and drafting literacy textbooks, library standards and reading activity guidelines for all primary school children across Cambodia.

We have also had great success with our Girls' Education Program in Cambodia, which has received international attention. In March of 2015, the First Lady of the United States and the First Lady of Cambodia visited one of our Girls' Education Program sites in Siem Reap where they met with 10 of our program participants. These students shared their stories of overcoming obstacles to stay in school, and discussed how they have benefited from community-led programs, including our Girls' Education Program.

Support Our Work

Nearly all educated Cambodians were executed during the Khmer Rouge's brutal regime in the 1970s. By 1978, there were almost no surviving teachers, writers or scientists in the country-an entire generation of literate role models eliminated.

The Cambodian government has improved the quality of the education system, and in 2014 it increased the annual education budget by 19 percent. Since 2000 the net enrollment rate in primary school has jumped from 83 percent to 95 percent, and gender disparity has decreased across all education levels. Despite the improvements in primary school enrollment, only 53 percent of students continue on to secondary school. Partially, this is due to widespread child labor including farming, scavenging, garment manufacturing, sexual exploitation, fishing, and construction. Cambodia's schools also lack basic classroom provisions and many classroom teachers aren't properly trained.

For girls, additional educational barriers exist. Many families continue to see no value in educating their daughters. Instead, girls are expected to help in the home, contribute to the family income, or marry early.

Support Our Work

In 2010, Room to Read Cambodia launched a literacy instruction pilot to improve the way Khmer language literacy skills are taught in early grade classrooms. It was a huge success, and the Cambodian government invited us to help rewrite their grade 1 literacy textbook, so all children in Cambodia could benefit from our program's best practices. We have since been invited to help revise government grades 2 and 3 literacy textbooks, the new versions of which are now used in public school classrooms nationwide. We have also partnered with local nonprofits to help improve school library management. Thanks to our efforts, the Cambodian government created national minimum standards for school libraries in 2011. They also doubled the salaries of primary school librarians in 2013, after we demonstrated that having a school library is crucial for literacy development.

One of the key components of our Girls' Education Program is our life skills curriculum. Our social mobilizers teach life skills education outside of the normal school day, but we have integrated our lessons into standard school curriculum. After training teachers in Prey Veng and Kampong Cham secondary schools on life skills education, officials in Kampong Cham allowed those teachers to conduct life skills sessions for girls during the school day with minimal support from our social mobilizers. We now advocate for additional integration of life skills education into the national secondary school curriculum.

Join Our Team

#111 Street 566
Boeung Kak 2
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Phone: +855-23-881161

More local information coming soon!

Join the Conversation: Cambodia

Michelle Obama called them "role models to the world."

Become a Monthly Investor

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× By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies. Find out more. Cambodia is rebuilding its educational system from the ground up after years of upheaval. To aid in this effort, Room to Read Cambodia has led in the field of literacy and girls' education and works as one of the national government's primary partners improving Cambodia's quality of education.

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Other ideas that use 'technology in your pocket' to encourage student output by Cult of Pedagogy.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Listenwise and NewseumED

Every January, I launch a brand-new edition of my Teacher's Guide to Tech. As challenging and time-consuming as it is to put this guide together every year, it's also pretty magical. I find myself sitting at my keyboard with a million browser tabs open and it happens-that moment when I come across some idea that someone has brought into the world and I think Holy cow, this is good. The thought that someone saw a problem or a need in the world, and they used code to create something brand new to meet that need-that process, that realization of human creativity, is just incredible to me. I watch as these tools come and go and change over time and I marvel at the people behind them, the risks they take, their willingness to try new stuff and push their ideas out into the world.

I don't think technology is the end-all be-all, and of course it brings new problems into our lives, but just watching the creativity behind these tools makes me so excited to live in a time when so many ordinary people can actually bring their ideas to life and watch those ideas impact the world.

So every year, I choose six of these tools that I think are worth a little extra attention. Before we get to the six-plus the two "honorable mentions" I squeezed in at the end-let's take a quick look at the 2019 guide:

The Tools

1. Equity Maps
equitymaps.com
Figuring out which students participate in a class discussion-and how often-can be a huge challenge. Equity Maps is an iPad app for keeping track of that.

You start by creating a seating chart that shows where students are sitting for a discussion. When the discussion starts, you just tap each student's icon as that student contributes to the conversation. Equity Maps keeps track of how long each student talks so that when you're done, you can get a summary of how often each class member participated, how many were active participants, and whether there was equal gender distribution among those who actively engaged.

Other features add more functionality: There are buttons to record periods of silence, pair-shares and small groups, and even a "chaos" button to keep track of times when the formal discussion dissolved into many smaller conversations. An audio recorder even lets you record the whole discussion so that you can review it later with the map, helping you and your students reflect on the quality of their participation.

Equity Maps would be a useful tool for most grade levels and subject areas-in any class where you want students to actively participate.

2. ProWritingAid*
prowritingaid.com
We have a lot of good writing tools out there, but this is one of the most comprehensive I've seen. ProWritingAid does a really deep dive into the quality of your writing, looking at everything from passive voice to overused words, from the use of clichés to sentence variety. Just compose in the tool itself, copy and paste, or upload a document and you'll get a summary report with all kinds of statistics about the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, plus suggestions for changes when you hover over highlighted places in the text itself.

Here are just a few of the things your summary report will tell you: the readability of your piece based on four different reading scales, the number of times you used certain words, the most unique words in your piece, your average sentence length (along with a graph that actually shows you where sentences of different lengths are placed), how often you used adverbs (which can weaken your writing), and how often you used weak or passive wording. It has a free and a paid version, but you can get a lot of mileage out of the free version.

If you're an English teacher you really need to take a look at this tool-it will reinforce a lot of what you're trying to teach your students, and will draw their attention to individual strengths and weaknesses, which will make it much easier to personalize instruction.

3. Google Tour Creator
vr.google.com/tourcreator
A lot of teachers are already familiar with Google Expeditions, a virtual reality platform that lets users experience hundreds of places in the world in 3D. But what you might not know is that you can now create your own tours using Tour Creator. This tool enables us to create our own tours, using imagery from Google Street View or our own 360 photos, then publish them right into Poly, Google's library of free VR and AR objects.

Students can create tours as part of a research project, use them as a way to reflect after a field trip, or even as a supplement to a creative writing project. They can be used to create tours of your school, your classroom, or your town. If your school doesn't currently have much VR technology, start with an affordable Google Cardboard -just pop a smartphone into one of these and you now have one VR headset that can be used by a small group of students.

4. Great Big Story
greatbigstory.com
Great Big Story's mission statement reads as follows: "We believe there is magic in the world and it's our mission in life to help you discover it. We search for stories showing a sense of optimism for the world...because goodness can grow through the smallest cracks in the sidewalk."

How they help us discover the world's magic is through video: short, professionally produced videos about people and phenomena all over the world, stories that will pique your curiosity and give you the sense of wonder about the world. Videos can be browsed by themes like Human Condition, Planet Earth, and Flavors (yep, all about food), or in curated playlists. There's one on America's oldest female BMX racer, one about a 12-year-old scientist who took on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and one on the accidental invention of the best snack food ever.

Video is becoming a well-respected form of "text" that can be consumed and analyzed as deeply as any print text, so collections like these should become a part of your school's library of options for classroom materials. One word of warning: Although the content on the site has been rated safe for all audiences on YouTube and Facebook, the videos on Great Big Story were not made specifically for a student audience, and some material will not be appropriate for younger viewers. Teachers should preview videos before sharing them with students.

5. GeoGuessr
geoguessr.com
This one is my absolute favorite.

This addictive game plunks you down somewhere in the world using Google Street view. You literally start on some country road and the whole point of the game is to figure out where in the world you are. You can navigate down the road in the app, and you can turn around and zoom in to look more closely at things, but because the game often chooses the most remote locations, you often find yourself traveling for quite a while before you see any clues. Once you do see something-a road sign, ideally, or something at least with language on it-you can start figuring it out.

I don't even know if this is following the rules, but the times I've played this, I've been amazed at the number of resources I ended up pulling together to figure things out: I do Google image matches, use Google Translate to figure out what a language even is, and even look things up on Wikipedia to figure out if I'm on the right track. I've had four or five different tabs open to try and narrow down a precise location, and all the while, I'm learning stuff. I had no idea, for example, that there was an island called Gotland off the coast of Sweden! Or that there's an animal called a springhare in South Africa that looks an awful lot like a kangaroo.

Whenever you think you know where you are, you choose a location on a map, then you're rewarded with a certain number of points based on how close you got. When you get close, it's just thrilling. This would be a fantastic option for early finishers, lame duck days, or even as a reward for good behavior. It's that fun.

6. Webjets
webjets.io
When you first look at Webjets, you might think, "Oh, it's like Padlet." And in some ways, you'd be right: In Webjets, users create boards where they gather items on cards, placing these on a desktop that feels like a bulletin board.

But with Webjets, these cards work even harder than they do on Padlet, and they come in a variety of formats: A card can contain an image, an embedded video, a live Google Doc, an attached file, or a table containing a variety of elements organized into columns. Probably the best feature is that cards can be collected into folders, where the items are listed along the left, and the selected item appears in a larger window on the right. You can keep multiple folders on one board, and all cards can be collapsed or expanded, making it easy to neatly collect large amounts of resources all in one place.

Webjets would be an excellent, flexible tool for any kind of group project or curation task, whether it's done by you or your students.

Honorable Mention

YoTeach!
yoteachapp.com
If, like me, you were completely devastated when the backchannel tool TodaysMeet shut down last year, you'll be happy to know that you can have almost the same experience on YoTeach! Just set up a free room, give your students the URL, and everyone can come on in and chat just like they did on TodaysMeet. What's even better is that you can password protect your room, participants can add pictures and drawings in the chat, and rooms don't appear to ever expire.

ClassroomQ
classroomq.com
This simple website solves a problem that so many teachers have: students waiting for the teacher's attention. Rather than have them wait with their hands up or get off-task, they can add their name to a digital queue, adding a note about what they need if they like. The teacher sees the names in the order they were submitted, and once the student has met with the teacher, their name can be checked off with a single click.

Where to Get the Teacher's Guide to Tech

Single-User Licenses:If you just want a copy for yourself, you can get a copy at Teachers Pay Teachers or on Teachable.

Multi-User Licenses: To get the guide for your team, school, or even district, you can save a lot by getting multi-user licenses. I offer the deepest discounts for these on Teachable.

Purchase on Teachable
Purchase on TpT
*Since the publication of this post, I have become an affiliate for ProWritingAid, which means Cult of Pedagogy receives a percentage of any subscription that comes through my links. This relationship was not established until after I wrote the post, and my decision to choose ProWritingAid as one of these six tools was not financially motivated in any way.

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Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Listenwise and NewseumED Every January, I launch a brand-new edition of my Teacher's Guide to Tech. As challenging and time-consuming as it is to put this guide together every year, it's also pretty magical.

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Aim: to activate English

How does the song make you feel? Are the spots verbs or syllables? Before the bell rings for class, we like to leave short activities on desks for students to get started straight away as they enter the room. 'Song Spots' is an adaption of a 'gap fill' activity except the spots represent syllables, not just words. Below is a printed handout but the lyrics can simply be written on the WB or chalkboard instead. Song: http://bit.ly/HappyCambodia What are your favourite activators?

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Aim: to check understanding

After students have completed an activity, the teacher asks 'YES' 'NO' questions and students respond showing thumbs up (yes) or thumbs down (no).

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L-R: Laura, Fiona, Jessica, & Tanja from the University of Queensland's Institute of Continuing & TESOL Education: https://icte.uq.edu.au/

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Aim: to elicit vocabulary

If you are using powerpoint, use animation to 'flash' images that represent vocabulary you wish to elicit from students. If you have a printed photo to share with students or a book cover, simply hold it with two hands, upside down facing you (the teacher), then 'roll' the image quickly so that students can see it. Ask them to 'tell you two things' they can see. Have another (confident) student be the 'scribe' and write the words on the board as the class shout them out.

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Aim: to generate/consolidate ideas

The terms "Log on/Log off" typically refer to the actions required when you open and close your computer. In the classroom, we use these terms to refer to short discussion or free writing activities held at the beginning of a lesson (to elicit prior learning) and the end (to consolidate new learning).

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Aim: to reflect on learner progress

After an activity, ask students to indicate the degree of challenge for them by showing you in gestures. For example, hands on shoulders = 'easy', hands on head = 'medium',  hands in the air = 'difficult'. Other categories could be: feelings (average, good, great), or frequency (sometimes, often, always), etc.... How many activities from our workshop will you use? None = hands on shoulders, some = hands on heads, many = hands in the air.

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f.wiebusch@uq.edu.au (Fiona) or t.hafenstein@uq.edu.au (Tanja) at the University of Queensland, Aust.

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Workshop Inspired by UNICEF

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UNICEF | Children's Rights & Emergency Relief Organization

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School-in-a-Box

The School-in-a-Box has become part of the UNICEF standard response in emergencies, used in many back-to-school operations around the world. The kit contains supplies and materials for a teacher and up to 40 students. The purpose of the kit is to ensure the continuation of children's education by the first 72 hours of an emergency.

In addition to the basic school supplies, such as exercise books, pencils, erasers and scissors, the kit also includes a wooden teaching clock, wooden cubes for counting, a wind-op/solar radio and a set of three laminated posters (alphabet, multiplication and number tables). The kit is supplied in a locked aluminium box, the lid of which can double as a blackboard when coated with the special paint included in the kit. Using a locally developed teaching guide and curriculum, teachers can establish makeshift classrooms almost anywhere.

The contents of the kit are culturally neutral, can be used anywhere in the world, and are often supplemented by locally purchased products, such as books in local languages, toys, games and musical instruments. Exercise books are printed without margins, so that children who write from left to right or from right to left can use them. Another version of the kit, without the lockable metal box, the School-in-a-Carton, is also available, as is a replenishment kit.

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The School-in-a-Box has become part of the UNICEF standard response in emergencies, used in many back-to-school operations around the world. The kit contains supplies and materials for a teacher and up to 40 students. The purpose of the kit is to ensure the continuation of children's education by the first 72 hours of an emergency.

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Aim: to review vocabulary

1. Choose 3 categories you want to review (e.g. food, animals, kitchen)
2. Category 1 is Game 1 - food.
3. Say a ‘food’ word and throw the ball to your partner (Tip: the ball is scrunched up paper).

4.  Your partner says another ‘food’ word and returns the ball
5.  Play game one until your friend runs out of ideas or repeats a word
6.  Repeat for games 2 and 3

Other ideas:
Collocations: (e.g. go/do/have)
Pronunciation: (e.g. /i:/, /e/, /ɪ/)
Verbs: (infinitives, past simple, etc.)

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Aim: to display answers

Mini-whiteboards are an engaging way to display answers, elicit language, brainstorm ideas, do quizzes, error corrections and gap-fills to practice grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Your limit is your imagination!

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Aim: to garner feedback/reflections

'Exit Tickets' are a formative assessment tool that can be used as a reflection tool or to provide useful feedback to the teacher. In the last 5-10 minutes of the day, the teacher asks students to complete 1 or 2 sentence stems on a slip of paper / post-it note in response to the day's lesson. For example, One activity I enjoyed today was... / I would like to know more about....

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A piece of paper and marker pen works equally well.

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A comprehensive list of other formative assessment activities.

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Aim: to get students' attention

In a large class environment, it's helpful to employ a range of strategies to get all students' attention before giving instructions. The two examples used in our workshop were: "Hands up" - when the teacher raises their hand, all students must stop as quickly as possible and also raise their hand. The "Clap it Back" activity is useful for really noisy classrooms as the teacher gently claps a pattern (x3 beats) and students must begin to follow until the teacher stops. If you have lights in your classroom, flicking them on/off also works! What do you do to get Ss attention?

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Aim: To present new vocabulary

Using a printed image or a book cover, the teacher uses two hands to hold and quickly "roll" the image to show students. Give them the task to 'tell me two things' they see in the image and have other students be the scribe at the WB.

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Feel free to leave comments, feedback, questions or your own ideas in the comment box below or click the '+' symbol to add a new box. We'd love to hear from you!

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Another idea for output using just a piece of paper and a pen.

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There's probably nothing more fun than a snowball fight, particularly at school. This paper snowball fight doesn't send icy shivers down the neck of your jacket or sting your face. It's just an effective icebreaker designed to let students get to know each other or help you review a particular lesson or specific content.

This game works with a group of at least a dozen people. It can also work well with a very large group, such as a lecture class or club meeting. You can use the icebreaker with students individually or divide into them into groups.

General Steps

Gather paper from your recycle bin, so long as one side is blank, then follow these steps. Have students:

1. Write one sentence or question-the content depends upon the context-on a piece of paper.

2. Ball up their paper.

3. Throw their "snowballs."

4. Pick up someone else's snowball and read the sentence aloud or answer the question.

Using the Activity as a Mixer

If you use the paper snowball fight to help students become acquainted, give them one piece of paper each and ask them to write their name and three fun things about themselves, such as, "Jane Smith has six cats." Alternatively, write questions to be answered by the reader, for example, "Do you have pets?" Have them crumple the paper into a snowball. Divide the group into two teams on opposite sides of the room and let the snowball fight begin.

You can have players write appropriate questions, or write the questions yourself to avoid any embarrassment and speed the process. The second alternative is particularly effective with younger students.

When you say, "Stop," each student should pick up the nearest snowball and find the person whose name is inside. Once everyone has found their snowman or snowwoman, have them introduce him to the rest of the group.

For Academic Review

To use the icebreaker to review content of a previous lesson or for test preparation, ask students to write a fact or question regarding the topic you want to review. Provide each student with several pieces of paper so there is abundant "snow." If you want to ensure that students cover certain issues, add some snowballs of your own.

Use this icebreaker in a wide range of contexts and for many different purposes. For example:

Write review facts on snowballs and have students read them aloud, such as, "Mark Twain was the author of 'Huckleberry Finn.' "

Write review questions on snowballs and have students answer them, for example, "Who wrote 'Huckleberry Finn?' "

Write conceptual questions for students to answer, such as, "What is the role of the character of Jim in "Huckleberry Finn?' "

When the snowball fight is over, each student will pick up a snowball and answer the question in it. If your room can accommodate this, have students remain standing during this exercise since they'll be picking up snowballs throughout the activity. Moving around also helps people retain learning, and it's a great way to energize a classroom.

Post-Activity Debriefing

Debriefing is necessary only if you're recapping or prepping for a test. Ask questions such as:

Were all the topics covered?

Which questions were the hardest to answer?

Were there any that were too easy? Why is that?

Does everybody have a thorough understanding of the subject?

If you've reviewed a lesson on the book, "Huckleberry Finn," for example, you might ask students who the author of the book was, who were the main characters, what was their role in the story, and how students themselves felt about the book.

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Review for Tests With a Paper Snowball Fight

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There's probably nothing more fun than a snowball fight, particularly at school. This paper snowball fight doesn't send icy shivers down the neck of your jacket or sting your face. It's just an effective icebreaker designed to let students get to know each other or help you review a particular lesson or specific content.

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A wonderful free e-book with "practical activities which can help to nurture, develop and motivate."

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Creativity in the English language classroom

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The activities will help teachers to explore the role of creativity in the classroom both in the sense of helping students to express their unique creative identity and also by helping them to thin

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Strategies for starter teachers in minimal resource environments.

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Starter Teachers: A methodology course for the classroom

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This publication is free to download in pdf format.

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A list of other minimal-resource teaching strategies and activities from OneStopEnglish.com

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56 ways to assess learning. Quick, minimal resource tasks.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Focus on meaning before continuing. Allow Ss to discuss.

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Aim: to present a short reading text

This activity is a variation of a standard dictation. It combines listening, note-taking and speaking to reconstruct a text with a partner. First, you need a short text (taken directly from your textbook; about 2-3 short sentences works best). Pair students and ask them to decide if they are A or B (check). Assign roles: A= writer, B = listener. The Teacher = Speaker. Check: Only one person will have a pen. Is it A or B? As the teacher dictates the text, A students must copy it down exactly. B students simply listen. When the teacher finishes speaking, A+B can help each other to reconstruct the text accurately.  T dictates (x2). Continue the next part of the text but swap the roles (A = listener, etc.). Tip: Use this to introduce the first paragraph of a reading text, then have students predict the topic.

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Our framework for our activities; successful language learners need: Meaningful Input, Interaction, Output, Motivation, and Feedback.

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#AusELT is privileged and delighted to be able to welcome Scott Thornbury as our first Twitter chat guest of the Year of the Horse. One of Scott's current research interests is the "ed tech" phenomenon that has dominated ELT in recent years, and exploring what this means in practical terms. He will be joining us on Thurs 6th Feb at 8.30pm Sydney time [click here to check the time elsewhere in the world] to discuss some of the questions he raises below - we'll see you there for what promises to be a very thought-provoking discussion.
As long ago as 1966, Pit Corder warned that 'the use of mechanical aids in the classroom is justified only if they can do something which the teacher unaided cannot do, or can do less effectively' (1966, p. 69). Nevertheless, the craze for newer, better gadgetry has continued unabated, creating what one writer called 'the caravan effect': 'a metaphor in which the travellers (technology enthusiasts) stop for a while to drink from the waterhole (the latest technology) until they have had their fill; then they move on to the next waterhole to drink again' (Levy 2009, p. 779). Moreover, each innovation arrives garlanded with claims that are seldom if ever realised, such that the history of educational technology in the 20 th century has been characterised as a continuous cycle of 'hype, hope, and disappointment' (Selwyn 2011, p. 59). Why is this? One reason (adduced by Selwyn) is that the power of technology is often enlisted in order to solve problems that are non-technological in nature, language learning being a prime example. If we accept the ecological view that language is a complex dynamic system, subject to multiple and interconnected influences, social, psychological and environmental, the idea that change can be effected by a quick technological fix is ingenuous, to say the least. The history of the social sciences is littered with the unintended consequences of such interventions. Beware of geeks bearing gifts!

In order to guard against the hype, any recommendation for integrating a learning technology into our current practice should be countered with Neil Postman's oft-cited riposte: What is the problem for which this technology is the solution? To which might be added a second question, based on Pit Corder's aforementioned warning: Can the technology do it better/more effectively than the teacher unaided?

What, then, are the problems that technology might solve? To answer this question, it's useful to draw on the current state of research to remind ourselves as to the necessary conditions for learning a second language, which, for the purposes of the argument, I'll frame as problems:

1. The input problem, i.e. how does the learner obtain sufficient (comprehensible) input?

2. The output problem, i.e. how is the learner provided with opportunities for (pushed) output?

3. The interaction problem, i.e. how does the learner engage in (scaffolded) interaction?

4. The feedback problem, i.e. how does the learner get optimal feedback at the point of need?

5. The motivation problem, i.e. what motivates the learner to make best use of these input, output, interaction and feedback opportunities?

To which might be added (because it's debatable as to whether it's necessary)

6. The data problem, i.e. how does the learner readily access useable information about the target language?

It's my contention that technology (meaning here 'digital technology', and especially that which is available online) has made significant advances in terms of helping solve at least some of these problems, such as the input problem and especially the data problem, where it easily outperforms the unaided teacher. But it has some way to go in terms of the output, interaction and feedback problems, while the evidence with regard to motivation is inconclusive.

I would go further, though, and add that one of the unintended consequences of an uncritical commitment to educational technology might be the effective disempowering of teachers in the interests of servicing the neoliberal 'knowledge economy'. As Lin (2013) warns: 'Language teaching is increasingly prepackaged and delivered as if it were a standardised, marketable product [...] This commodifying ideology of language teaching and learning has gradually penetrated into school practices, turning teachers into 'service providers.' The invisible consequence is that language learning and teaching has become a transaction of teachers passing on a marketable set of standardised knowledge items and skills to students.' This commodification process is, of course, massively expedited by digital technologies.
References:
In the early 19 th century a group of English textile artisans aggressively resisted the threat to their jobs and lifestyles posed by the development of new technologies. They were known as Luddites. Ever since, the term has been used to disparage anyone who questions the assumption that technological innovation is always beneficial. But were the Luddites so wrong?

Levy, M. 2009. Technologies in use for second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, Focus Issue: Technology in the Service of Language Learning.

Lin, A. 2013. Toward paradigmatic change in TESOL methodologies: Building plurilingual pedagogies from the ground up. TESOL Quarte rly, 47, 3.

Pit Corder, S. 1966. The Visual Element in Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Selwyn, N. 2011, Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates. London: Continuum.

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Ed Tech: The Mouse that Roared? by Scott Thornbury

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AusELT is privileged and delighted to be able to welcome Scott Thornbury as our first Twitter chat guest of the Year of the Horse. One of Scott's current research interests is the "ed tech" phenomenon that has dominated ELT in recent years, and exploring what this means in practical terms. He will be joining us...

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Free e-book with lots of ideas for making the most of images.

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Thanks so much for sharing. The suggested activities are easily implemented and very handy.

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Resources for English Language Learners and Teachers | Pearson English

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Storytelling is one of the oldest and most powerful ways of sharing ideas and transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. It brings people together as they sit and listen to the storyteller, hanging on their every word and enjoying the events as they unfold.

Most importantly, storytelling helps young people develop their ideas about life, culture and their understanding of the world. For learners, storytelling is a memorable experience, often associated with a sense of belonging. I'm sure most of us can recall at least one story from their childhood that left a long-lasting impression.

The benefits of storytelling

Stories are a vehicle for language learning in the young learner classroom. They help students develop an ear for the English language and its rhythm and sounds. They are also a great springboard for young learners' overall growth and the development of cognitive skills, thinking, and reasoning.

What's more, storytelling in the classroom can foster a love for reading and provide opportunities to develop young learners' social and emotional skills through vicarious learning. The characters and situations stories present help young learners to better understand others.

Wells (1986), who investigated the links between storytelling and performance, found that consistent exposure to storytelling and narrative discourse in both the home and classroom environment also has a positive effect on children's literacy development.

Above all, the enjoyable experience of storytelling can help our learners develop a positive attitude towards learning English.

How to use storytelling in the classroom
Choose your stories wisely
If you want your classes to be memorable, you must engage your learners on an emotional level. Do this by selecting topics that not only interest your students but which are also developmentally appropriate and meet (or slightly challenge) your students' language level.

Storytelling can also be a great way to introduce differences and diversity. You can decide to use a story that shows a different way of living - for example, what life is like in a country where it snows heavily in winter. Try to gauge what your learners will find most interesting.
Enable your students
It's key that you find out about your learners' prior knowledge and understanding and build on it. Read the story yourself first, with your learners in mind and decide if you need to pre-teach any language before reading. You can create flashcards to pre-teach essential words of the story.

Equally, learners might need to learn more about a key concept before reading, so that they can fully enjoy the story. You could use realia or a short video to introduce any new concepts you touch upon.
Bonus Tip: Engage your students Move a piece of paper with a shape cut out over a flashcard to show your learners part of the image of a keyword in the story. See if they can guess the image, then teach the English word.
One of the biggest challenges is to hold your learners' interest and attention. Using a variety of techniques and activities during storytelling can keep them involved and turn them into active participants.
Tips for engaging your students:
Before you start a story, create a special 'story atmosphere'. Then when learners are ready, engage them with images or sounds from the story. You can go to soundbible.com to download free sound clips and learners can listen to predict the setting of the story.
Give your students ownership over the story

Make storytelling a special time. Introduce each session with the same chant or song ("Are you ready for a story? Clap your hands! Are you ready for a story? Clap your hands! Are you ready for a story? Clap your hands! Now sit down!)

Use realia, images, sounds and/or movement, gestures, body language and facial expressions to get the meaning of the story across and get learners to join in.

Select rhyming language or a key chunk of language and get them to repeat it after you. However, instead of simply saying it, chant it or sing it with your learners to make it more memorable.

Asking questions is an effective way to check students' understanding of the story and to develop their prediction skills and it also enhances engagement. Vary your questioning, ask factual as well as more challenging evaluative and inferencing questions.

Once you have finished the story, return to the text to explore the language or the theme. Make sure you give your learners an opportunity to respond to the story with their own ideas in the follow-up stage. There are various ways of doing this, they can:
Bonus Tip: Finally, enjoy the experience to include some variety you can integrate technology. For example, learners can use voice thread to record themselves retelling the story or use storyboard.com to recreate the story.

Draw a story path with the same or a different ending

Act out the story

Create their own story booklet

Retell the story

Imagine what happens next

Educating young learners involves teaching much more than just English; you are guiding them through the world around them. Doing this with enthusiasm and passion can have a huge impact on their attitude toward learning.

Our role is to trigger their curiosity and foster their interest in learning . By providing our learners with an engaging, positive learning experience we can sow the seeds for a life-long love of learning.

Now even though some of us are natural storytellers, most of us are not. But we can all become good storytellers through practice and by becoming aware of techniques we can use to bring a story to life and engage our learners.

Above all, storytelling is an art. This means there is no one way to do it. Find your own style, one that works with your group and enjoy the experience together with your learners.

Happy storytelling!

-

Looking for stories to read with your young learners? Check out our range of Pearson English Graded Story Readers.

If you liked this post you should also read our 7 reading strategies for primary and secondary learners.

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The art of storytelling with Anna Hasper

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Storytelling is one of the oldest and most powerful ways of sharing ideas and transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. It brings people together as they sit and listen to the storyteller, hanging on their every word and enjoying the events as they unfold.

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A pen, paper and a million uses.

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Today's paper craft activity is based on the classic paper fortune teller - but with a very educational twist! You may have used a paper fortune teller in the past to tell the fortunes of your friends or even as a way of tricking them into doing silly things! The purpose of my fortune teller is not to tell fortunes but to help you write stories. This 'paper story idea generator' is the perfect tool to use if you are ever stuck on ideas or inspiration for your stories!

Also this is the perfect time to apologise for the dark pictures in today's post - It was miserable, rainy day outside when I made my paper story idea generator. Now let's begin with the tutorial:
What you will need:

A4 piece of paper

Scissors

Pencil/Pen/writing material

1. First get a piece of A4 paper and fold a triangle into it - Cut the remaining rectangle off using scissors, so it becomes a square.

2. Next, fold the square as shown in image - So there are two folded diagonal lines on the paper.

3. Then start folding smaller triangles inwards to create a smaller square, as shown:

4. Then turn the paper over and fold some further smaller triangles inwards - to create an even smaller square:

5. One final time turn the page over again and make further triangles - making an even smaller square.

6. Open up the bottom of the paper fortune teller by pushing out the flaps as shown in the image. This is where you will put your fingers.

7. Now your story idea generator (a.k.a paper fortune teller) is almost done! The final steps is to add the content or the text.

8. On the side that you put your hand in write the setting of your story. In my example the settings include, desert, woods, city and seaside.

9. On the opposite side write down different types of characters, such as Zombie, Witch, little boy, wizard etc.

10. On this same side open up to the triangles and write down a couple of simple storyline plots (see image). For example "who can't dance" or "who is afraid of public speaking" etc. Now you're ready to play the game.

How to play the story idea generator game:

1. First you choose the setting for your story and count the letters in that location name. For example if I choose "city", that means I count 4 times because there are 4 letters in the word 'city'.

2. I then get the choice of 4 characters, which based on my previous example are "little girl", "zombie", "little boy" and "witch" (these may be different for you). These four characters should feature in my story.

3. Next, I select the main character of my story. From my example I chose "zombie". Now unravel the folds to reveal the main plot of my story, which in this case is a 'zombie who can't dance'.

4. Finally I can begin writing my story based on the idea of a zombie who can't dance and features a little girl, little boy and witch.

Hope this tool is as fun and as useful for you, as it was for me! What crazy stories were you able to generate using the paper story idea generator? Tell me what you think in the comments below... Happy story-telling and see you next time!

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Make Your Own Paper Story Idea Generator! - Imagine Forest

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Today's paper craft activity is based on the classic paper fortune teller - but with a very educational twist! You may have used a paper fortune teller in the past to tell the fortunes of your friends or even as a way of tricking them into doing silly things!

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Welcome to our fifth post in this series. We hope you have enjoyed experimenting with the activities described so far! In this post, we are going to look in more detail at using flashcards, or picture cards as some call them, in the young learner classroom. If you are a very young learner or young learner teacher you know that flashcards are invaluable in the classroom. They are often used to present language, and they might be "flashed" or flipped (that's why they are called flashcards after all!) but there are so many other activities you can do with them, the opportunities are endless. In this post, we will explore a few ways to use flashcards more creatively in our lessons.

Where to find flashcards?

If you use a National Geographic Learning series with your young learners, such as the Our World Series, most of the series come with flashcards. If you don't use a course book that provides flashcards, you could draw images yourself, cut out images from magazines or download images from royalty free sites like pixabay.com, pexels.com or flickr-elt. Another way is to get learners to draw them as revision activity and laminate these for future lessons! You'll be impressed by how creative some of your students are. Tablets also prove to be a great way to bring images into the classroom, either through a live stream from the internet or download your chosen images in advance and load them into an App like pic-collage.

Why use flashcards?

Flashcards can be used to preview, present, practice and review lexical items. They are often visually stimulating, bright and colorful and when the image they present is relevant to our learners they are an effective way to support students' learning in a developmentally appropriate way. We've spoken about the myth of learning styles in a previous post, but young learners tend to respond much better to 'seeing' vocabulary rather than just hearing it being described.

Flashcards can often be used in an active, kinesthetic way, which also meets the characteristics of young learners. They can easily be used in playful ways which are highly effective with young learners as they lack the intrinsic motivation which adults might bring to the learning journey. And as we all know, activities that are enjoyable and engaging help make the new language stickier. Another advantage of flashcards is that they can be pulled out at any time during the course to revisit previously studied items, which means you can apply the principle of spaced repetition in your classroom in an effective and easy way.

How to use flashcards creatively?

1 - Categorizing

I love using activities where students can use their own thinking and logic to explain their choices, so one of my favorite activities with flashcards is 'categorizing.' Give learners a variety of flashcards they have studied before, for example, a variety of animal cards. Now, if you use Welcome to Our World or printing out mini-flashcards means that learners can work in smaller groups. For our example, print out a set of different animal flashcards.

To make it more interesting you can put two hula hoops on the floor for learners, that slightly overlap so you can make a visible Venn Diagram. If you do not have hula hoops, use some rope to make circle shapes on the floor or draw circles on a piece of paper for each group. Give out the flashcards and get learners to place them face down, get learners to turn over the flashcards one by one and name the animal (good recall practice of vocabulary and pronunciation) then learners need to share and decide in their team how they want to categorize the cards into two groups. This is a lovely differentiated activity as some learners might only be at a level to talk about big or small animals, whereas others might think of pets vs farm animals, legs vs no legs, fins or wings etc.

2 - Pass the card!

This must be one of my favorite production activities for my young learners. I actually love to use story cards here if you have access to cards that are part of a story. If not, try to find some flashcards that are richer than just 'it's an apple.'

Before you start, select a song that you can play while learners pass their flashcards around. Ideally, each group gets the same set of four or five flashcards but if you only have one set of flashcards, get learners to decide on an item to pass around. Group learners into small groups of three or four. Tell them you will hand out a flashcard top-down for learners to pass around as long as the music play (or use a pen, book or bottle per group to pass around). Once you stop the music the student that holds the flashcard (or pen, book or bottle) in each group, turns the flashcard over and must make a sentence about it. If their level is too low, they can just point and give a word. If you use a pen, book or bottle then stop the music and get all learners to look to the front where you show the flashcard or project it on the board. Then the game continues; play the music, pass along the item and when the music stops the learner holding the card makes a sentence about the next flashcard. etc. When students have seen all four or five flashcards, show them all and get them in teams to recall orally what sentences they made. If they are already writing, you can follow this up by getting each of them to write the sentences. You can extend this by getting learners to put the sentences into a short paragraph, whilst they are writing you can feed-in more ideas e.g. by prompting " what color is it? How do you think she feels?" so learners can work on extending their sentences. This is a great preparation activity for learners who are planning to take the YLE test and need to write about pictures.

I hope we have given you some creative ideas to exploit your flashcards. If you have any other engaging activities or ideas for your young learners with flashcards the please share in the comments box below!

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Flashcard Activities for the Young Learner Classroom

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Welcome to our fifth post in this series. We hope you have enjoyed experimenting with the activities described so far! In this post, we are going to look in more detail at using flashcards, or picture cards as some call them, in the young learner classroom.