HOW TO DEVELOP AN EPORTFOLIO OR WEBFOLIO?

WHAT IS A WEBQUEST?

Bringing new technologies into the classroom

TEACHER PROFILES IN EUROPE

Teachers En Europa Perfiles

View more documents from Gaby Zazpe.

GENERAL TEACHING RESOURCES, MOVIE SITES

http://www.daveeslcafe.com/ http://www.eslbase.com/ http://www.englishclub.com/ http://www.saberingles.com.ar/
http://www.lessonplanet.com/ Thousands of ideas to choose from http://www.sitesforteachers.com
http://www.onestopenglish.com/ http://www.historychannel.com/ Good to teach historical events http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ A well-known resource http://www.lyrics.com/ Thousands of song lyrics to browse http://www.biography.com/ Which biography are you looking for? www.instructenglish.com/Teaching-English-As-A-Foreign-Language.html http://www.efl.net/
www.insideout.net/e-lessons.htm Inside Out Series / Subscription required
www.linguistlist.org/sp/LangLearnESL.html
www.oup.com/elt/teachersclub Oxford Teachers Club
www.macmillanenglish.com/readers MacMillan Resource Site
www.insideout.net/webguide/intro.htm Inside Out Series / MacMillan
http://www.slideshare.net/eshare.net/ (create slideshows and add voice to them)
http://voicethread.com/ (voiced mini-projects)
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ (create worksheets and interactive exercises)
http://languagecenter.cla.umn.edu/index.php?page=makers ( interactive exercise makers)


http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/teachers/

MOVIE SITES

http://www.top100moviesites.com/
http://www.movies.warnerbros.com/
www.ovguide.com/tvfilm.html
www.worldbestwebsites.com/movies.htm
www.imdb.com/links
www.teachwithmovies.org
www.oscar.com (official web page)
http://www.oscars.org/

DIAGNOSTIC TESTS

www.oup.com/elt/global/products/practicegrammar/test/ OXFORD PLACEMENT TESt

http://www.world-english.org/

www.network.gr/networkdiagnostic/

www.prenhall.com/diagnostic_test/

BOOST YOUR SKILLS AND EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS

http://www.tefl.com/

http://www.etprofessional.com/

http://www.quia.com/

http://www.eslmag.com/

www.englishprograms.state.gov/forum
www.aitech.ac.jp/-iteslj/links
http://www.onlinemet.com/ ( Modern English Teacher)

LISTENING RESOURCES

http://www.real-english.com/new-lessons.asp

http://www.audioenglish.net/ a very good source of listening material

http://www.history.com/media.dowVideo Gallery / famous speeches

http://www.esl-lab.com

http://www.cla.univ-fcomte.fr/english/listen_index.htm

http://www.eslvideo.com/

www.englishenglish.com/listening_skills.htm

http://www.evgschool.org/

www.eslhome.com/esl/listen/

http://www.yappr.com/ Excellent source of short and updated videos, brand new webpage

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL LINKS

http://www.anep.edu.uy/ (Administración Nacional de Educación Pública)http://www.ces.edu.uy/ (Consejo de Educación Secundaria)http://www.uruguayeduca.edu.uy
http://www.ceibal.edu.uy
http://www.ascd.org/
http://cfe.edu.uy (Consejo de Formacion en Educacion)
http://www.tesol.org/
http://www.urutesol.org (links with affiliates worldwide)
http://www.cambridgeesol.org/
http://www.alte.org/
http://cie.org.uk/
http://unesco.org/
http://unicef.org/

THE IMPORTANCE OF SEQUENTIAL ART

Most all of us are familiar with one form or another of sequential art, a term coined by Will Eisner(1985) to name an art form that has come to include cartoons, comic strips,comic books, and graphic novels. It is an international art form and ranges from an innocent but witty girl called "Mafalda", loved by South Americans, especially "The Rioplatenses", to strong and historical comic characters such as the French Asterix.

Despite its popularity, sequential art has long been misunderstood. After widespread use throughout the first half of the 20th century, comic books in the United States came under attack in the 1950s when psychiatrist Frederic Wertham wrote, in his highly influential "Seduction of the Innocent", that they are a " reinforcing factor in children´s reading disorders" ( 1954).

Despite all this, research by Hanes and Ahrens(1988) highlights the fact that comic books contain a greater number of rare words than ordinary conversation and are thus and excellent stepping stone to more difficult reading. Cary points out that sequential art is rich in ellipses,blends,non-words (uh,huh,humph,sheesh!) and other common aspects of spoken language, exposing students to "the ambiguity, vagueness and downright sloppiness of spoken English". Sequential art is a window on the spoken vernacular, a variety of the target language that is commonly overlooked in efl classes in large part due to its absence in both educational material and in more formal authentic texts. The obvious absence of an informal register from a student´s linguistic repertoire is a key contributing factor to misunderstanding and confusion when students confront a native speaker of English or when they watch a film in English.


Sequential art also provides an up-to-date look at target language culture and society. As an art form that is kept current by active publishing houses, newspapers,and the Internet, it is a widely accesible source of popular topics, concerns, and fashions that can interest almost any age level. And as most comic involve a number of characters from different backgrounds interacting over a long period of time, they can serve as a tool for studying socio-cultural aspects of people,allowing a teacher to design a lesson based solely on cross-cultural differences and similarities between the target language culture and the students´native culture.


from English Teaching Forum, Number 3 ,2007

COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK FOR LANGUAGES

VERY IMPORTANT - CHECK OUT these links, PLEASE !!!
NOT-TO-MISS LINKS, COUNCIL OF EUROPE : http://www.coe.int/

COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR LANGUAGES www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/CADRE_EN.asp

ALSO FOR THE EUROPEAN LANGUAGE PORTFOLIO: http://www.alte.org/

INTERNATIONAL EXAMS- British and American

British Examinations
Important link: http://www.cambridgeesol.org/

Cambridge Assessment: www.alte.org/2008/

Cambridge International Examinations Website http://www.cie.org.uk/

FCE - Handbook for teachers, updated and ready to be downloaded

www.cambridgeesol.org/assets/pdf/resources/teacher/fce_hb_dec08.pdf

PET - same link path, click on PET ( CB computer-based or paper-based)
CAE - same link path, click on CAE ( updated as from December 2008)
CPE - same link path, click on CPE

American Examinations

TOEFL Exam www.ets.org/toefl/ (required to enter any University in USA)

Michigan Exam www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/testing/ecpe/register

These two exams are offered in Uruguay by Alianza Uruguay Estados Unidos, if you need further information click on http://www.alianza.edu.uy/

USING LITERATURE IN THE CLASSROOM

• www.teachingenglish.org.uk/download/britlit/britlit.shtml COUNCIL OF EUROPE

• www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?

INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION

• http://www.ncte.org/ NCTE - NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

CREATING A CULTURE OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
" A successful face-to-face team is more than just collectively intelligent.It makes everyone work harder, think smarter and reach better conclusions than they would have on their own".


- James Surowiecki

What are true learning communities?

• Teachers establish a common, concise set of essential curricular standards and teach to them on a roughly common schedule.



• They must meet regularly, the ideal is twice a month, for a minimun of 45 minutes, to help one another teach to these selected standards.



• Teachers must make frequent use of common assessments, these assessments are pivotal.



• With common assessments and results, teachers can conduct " active research" where a "culture of experimentation prevails".



• These fundamental concepts combine a " guaranteed and viable curriculum" with continual analysis of actual lessons and units, and improvement of instruction.

We have to be very clear about what true teamwork entails: a regular schedule of formal meetings where teachers focus on the details of their lessons and adjust them on the basis of assessment results. The use of common assessments is essential here. Without these, teams can´t discern or enjoy the impact of their efforts on an ongoing basis.Enjoying and celebrating these short-trm results is the very key to progress, to achieving "momentum" toward improvement.

Taken from " Results Now", How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and learning. Mike Schmoker , ASCD Publication

SHIFT HAPPENS - IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION

DON´T YOU SHARE THE SAME IDEAS?

The Real Goals of Education



When I watch kids walk into the building on their first day of school, I think about what I want them to be like when they walk out on their last day. I also think about what I want them to be like on the day I bump into them in the supermarket 10 or 20 years later. Over the course of three decades watching kids walk into my schools, I have decided that I want them to

• be lifelong learners


• be passionate


• be ready to take risks


• be able to problem-solve and think critically


• be able to look at things differently


• be able to work independently and with others


• be creative


• care and want to give back to their community


• persevere


• have integrity and self-respect


• have moral courage


• be able to use the world around them well


• speak well,write well,read well, and work well with numbers


• truly enjoy their life and their work

To me, these are the real goals of education.
Taken from " The Big Picture" Education is Everybody´s Business by Dennis Littky ,Published by ASCD , 2004

WRITING

When we encourage young children to think of themeselves as writers, their achievement soars.

"When we invite students to make something with writing instead of just asking them to write, they go about their work differently.As long as let students define what is achievable on their own terms, almost anything is possible.When we give young students an open-endd and ongoing invitation to make books, they build identities as writers around their daily work of composing texts".

A central goal of the writer is to create an effect in someone else's mind.
From Educational Leadership ASCD magazine, article by Katie Wood Ray " When kids make books".

Using multiple technologies to teach writing

New digital technologies play a major role in teaching writing for the 21st century. By Kathleen Blake Yancey ASCD , Educational leadership.

The process of writing and teaching writing is in the midst of a "tectonic change". The change is in the new technological tools writers use, and in how these tools affect composition and the relationship between writer and audience. As they have for hundreds of years, student writers still compose with pencil and paper. But in Addition, writers now compose through new media like e-mail, listservs, messenger and other creative software packages. Writers use digital technologies to write many new kinds of texts, such as web logs, hypertexts, and electronic portfolios.

Helping writers develop competence in a variety of technologies is a key part of teaching writing in this century.

Developing Dynamic Units for EFL

In foreign language situations, it can be challenging to find real-life communicative contexts in which to use the target language.When teaching English as a Foreign Language ( EFL) at any level, the classroom has to be a place in which language is not only taught but also used meaningfully. If language is being used meaningfully in the classroom, it is not taught only in isolated chunks or by breaking the language into its grammatical or semantic components. Instead, language is being used within a context that either mirrors real world discourse or possibly uses subject matter content, such as science, math,business,law,etc., depending on age of the learners and their purpose for studying English. Using theme-based language instruction, which is one type of content-based instruction, can be helpful for various age groups and proficiency levels. Brinton ( 2003) supports the use of this approach when the purpose for EFL students is language acquisition. According to Brinton " The thematic content stretches over several weeks of instruction, providing rich input for lessons that are either language-based or skills-based. In this environment, students can successfully acquire language." For EFL teachers, developing thematic units around their required curriculum can be a way to build a larger context in which to teach language that spans a group of lessons and can provide more opportunities for communicating in English.

By Joan Kang Shin (lecturer for the U.S Department of State), Forum Magazine Volume 45 Number 2, 2007