Ok, January starts and we're back into the swing of things.....
Term started with my induction and a couple of training days... To be honest there wasn't a huge amount of new stuff - we've still not managed to reach a decent point on ILPs. Though we are now going to try to get Students to stick them in the front of their folders so that they are at least a bit more prominent in their minds. I'm going to produce a nice clear targets document for my class file - that should help me give my planning a bit of direction.
You may be asking what's brought on all of this - well, there is a distinct possibility that OFSTED are going to come and inspect us this year, so we need to be able to scare them off with wads of paperwork.... Hmmm here goes.
It should have some value in terms of teaching and it should make my planning a bit more coherent, so I'm up for giving it a try.
We're also going to try and introduce some collaborative curriculum design with our students. I'm not sure how well it'll work with my E1s, but it should help give them some kind of ownership of the process.
We're going to try and link these procedures by taking our targets from the tasks suggested by the Ss - so the process should be a whole lot more coherent.
This also fitted well with the session that I had at Tower Hamlets - we were looking at designing schemes of work. The reality is that a scheme of work is much more useful if it is designed after you know the students reasonably well - thus taking into account their needs. Of course we don't do that at work, which makes my assignment a bit harder.... Hmmm. I have talked about this with my boss - but he pointed out that if classes all had different schemes of work then that would make it a bit more difficult to fit in with the rest of the institution.
We also looked at intonation, word stress and their importance for meaning - I need to get more of this into my teaching - I hate teaching pronuciation, I really hate it - just beacuse I can never do it naturally when I'm trying to say it... it just gets all unnatural. I guess I just need to practise this more before the lesson and then drill it. A useful technique would probably be drawing attention to differences in meaning caused buy changes in intonation - I'll try that a bit more.
Linked into a few of these things is my latest idea is to record my students more. I've resisted the idea for a while just because it gets so messy - you get loads of tapes whic you have to keep, edit, wrestle with the technology. I just haven't been bothered to deal with all that stuff. However now technology has offered some other solutions - from the Teaching English website from the BBC and the British Council I read about one teacher who recorded her Students on to MP3s and then emailed these back to them. It can all be done online very easily - it is far more convienient to access and store and it can very easily be copied giving the teacher and the student a permanent record of their ability at a particular point in time. I think it would probably fit very well into the diagnostic/ILP/tutorial cycle and help to motivate Ss as they hear the difference in their work.
Now the big question? What do I need to do this....? The software doesn't seem to be an issue - there are things that you can download as freeware, can't remember the name - but I'll add in a link as soon as I find it... It's just a question of hardware at work we've got these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Q1) which are great but they seem to be 'technical overkill' if that's a word. They've got loads of bells and whistles and cost over £600. On the other hand most of our classrooms have a PC in them and we could use them with a microphone - there's a bit less flexibility there unless we get a long microphone cable, which certainly wouldn't be impossible. However my favourite idea at the moment is to get hold of a small personal MP3 player that can record. They start at about £20 - I just have no idea of the quality. I've got a nice shiny iPod, but mics are expensive, and I'm not sure how generally compatible they are with the simple software programs that I want to use.... Anyway I might start my experiments this week - then I'll put some of the results up here.
OK, I'll leave it here for now - that's plenty of writing for now........
