Category Archives: General

Writing a narrative

General, Writing, ,

This is a writing exercise for my PAU students and I thought you might find it useful. In this written exercise they’ll have to make good use of the vocabulary they have learnt about travelling and going places, the connectors they have studied and they’ll also have to put in practice some of the tips I have given them about the Writing Process, which if you are interested you’ll find published in this blog, here.

This is the idea:
Students, in pairs, are asked to write a narrative. They have to use words from both word clouds, i.e, they have to use connectors from the first word cloud and specific vocabulary from the second. Ask them to write their narrative in coloured  paper which you’ll later post on the walls of the classroom for student to vote for the one they like best.

 

Make sure that you:

♣ begin by describing when and where the story takes place

♣ describe the events in chronological order

♣ use the different forms of the past tense

You never know…

General

This post you are about to read is meant for my students at the EOI Avilés. I don’t really know how many of you are still reading this blog, but if you are, I want you to know firsthand that I won’t be teaching at the EOI this course. It’s been a personal decision and it’s a temporary one ‘cause I’ll be leaving  you only for a year.
The truth be told I don’t really know whether I’ve taken the right decision or I’ve made a poor one, only time will tell but I felt I needed to spend more time with my children because,as you well know ,my afternoons and evenings for 20 years now have been filled up with teaching while my children stayed at home being taken care of by domestic help.
So I’m going to try something new; I’m not exactly thrilled about it, the feeling could be more or less described as being on tenterhooks but I feel my children deserve ( if their mother is given the option) to have their mother while they are at home and you never know… I might even like teaching teenagers ‘cause this year I’ve decided to teach at a high school.

Anyway, although I’m moving physically , you can still find me virtually in this blog which will be maintained and updated as usual.

“Life is like a road. Just like any road, there are corners, detours, and crossroads in life .You do not really know where a road will lead you until you take it“. Adam Khoo

Word of the Day: Optimization

freeware, General, Resources,

To optimize is to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible,to make the best of anything.

And this is precisely what this little tool does for your computer to keep it in good shape. It’s called  CCleaner and it might be  one of the best cleaning systems you can find for free.

Its main purpose is to clean any unnecessary files from your hard-drive and on opening the program you can see the various aspects of Windows that you can search through and clear. CCleaner will also detect your installed applications that may hold on to files which are no longer any use, such as Google Earth histories or Flash Player configurations and it’ll allow Windows to run faster while freeing up valuable hard disk space.

There’s even a portable version you can carry around .

I’m going on holiday

General

The end of the course has finally come and it’s the beginning of ,what I think will be, a  nice summer.

This blog is also going on holiday but I hope you’ll come back and visit me again in September . I leave you with a  story with moral and trust me on this,  I’ll make sure I am  sitting really high

An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing. A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, Can I also sit like you and do nothing?
The eagle answered, Sure , why not?
So the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested.
All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.


Moral of the story: To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Are you going to be my teacher?

General,

When I first saw this video I thought: “Wow! Isn’t he cute?”

 At first, I could only see a cute little boy pulling faces and peering at the camera with inquisitive eyes but soon I realized that the message he wanted to send was crystal clear. Then, I got into the car and drove off to work but on my way to school, his words came back to me (as the echo in the video) Are you going to be my teacher? You can’t be my teacher! You can’t be my teacher if you don’t know how to use a computer or the Internet, if you don’t know how to teach me to be safe on the Internet, if you refuse to learn how to use technology.
And it dawned on me that he’s absolutely right. I’ve got two children and I realize now, more than ever, that what they need to learn is much more than I needed to because they have more opportunities and more easy access to the kind of information we could never get, and only at a click away.

Our children need teachers, and even parents who know how to teach them to get the best out  of new technologies, who know how to help their children in their never-ending quest for information, who know how to make them safe on the Internet because Internet is not a passing fad, it’s here to stay and our children, in every single school, everywhere in the world have to be ready for life, for the world they have to live in when they finally leave our classes. It’s our duty as educators to make an effort to keep up with the new technologies, to know how to help students use the Internet and the fact that our generation is not a digital native is a very lame excuse for, at least, not trying.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that the traditional way of teaching is no longer valid. I don’t believe textbooks are a thing of the past, not yet, at least. I believe in a combination of the old and the new, of trying to achieve the right balance between what is useful in both methods.
If we can’t, at least, make the effort, we should maybe consider, making room for someone who wants to try.

This is what  our children need and I want to conclude with the last words in the video
” Do you really think it’s possible to be an educator in the information age and not understand and use the Internet? Continue to pretend the internet is just a fad.”

Photo by Cristóbal Cobo Romaní