DRIVING QUESTIONS
Shared by Mariela Rodríguez:
I have chosen
the second task because asking questions that urge the students to reflection
is a good way to start a lesson. Also, it engages them into their own learning
process.
I think it is
important to start with a general question. An example of it could be:
What is the role of music in our society?
Going from
there, we can ask different driving questions about music and society:
·
How music can create an impact in our lives?
·
Can music be a driving force for social change?
·
What type of music has a value for you? Why?
·
Could be music a reflection of a time or a society?
·
Does music have a therapeutic effect?
These are some
of the questions that can be asked in class. Moreover, it could be useful for
introduce a topic or an unit, to guide a project about music and society, and
also to discuss articles and short documentaries related with this questions.
Shared by Almudena Arranz:
- Can music practice improve bad behavior?
- Does the music that we listen define ourselves?
- What are the benefits of playing an instrument in the brain
development?
- How was music shared before the creation of recording systems?
- Why does music affect our mood?
Shared by Eva Mª Tudela:
1.- What do you Know about classical music?
2.- Do you Know the meaning of classic in this topic? Why is it called classical music?
3.- Why do you think young people don’t like classical music? Why do most teenagers seem to not like classical music?
4.- Do you Know any composer of this era? Who are Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven?
5.- Have you ever been to a concert of Classical Music? Where the New Year’s concert is celebrated?
Shared by Almudena Arranz:
This way of organise the knowledge is productive, as it breaks with the unilateral way of learning, establishing a bidirectional learning flow (teacher » students; students » teacher). Due the posibility of setting KWL in a graphic organiser, it becomes something very attractive for the students, and versatile.
Thinking of a way to implement this tool in an interactive way, I suggest Lino (https://en.linoit.com/). It's a web where we can make a digital collaborative panel with post-its, and it can be used on different platforms (PC, Android, iOS...). It sure would be very useful to start using KWL in my classes. An analogical collaborative panel also could be done.
In cooperative learning, there are many tools, designed also as graphic organisers, similar to KWL. For example: before I knew, now I know. This kind of tools make posible the activation of prior knowledge, one of 4 steps in the process of learning (the other 3 are: presentation of the contents, processing the information, and recapitulation).
ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING
Miriam Hernando shares about online teaching: two helpful and meaningful
infographics.
https://www.educarex.es/pub/cont/com/0064/documentos/10_consejos_clasesencasa.pdf
I strongly recommend David Ruiz's blog http://www.elblogdelsrruiz.com/ with many tools organized according to your needs and briefly and wonderfully explained:
VOICE (teachers') ASSISSTANTS ? ...let's talk about Alexia, for instance.
Good morning, I have made a selection of some articles and opinions about the use of Voice Assistants for learning purposes: If you want to go deeper, click on the webgraphy used. Would you use a voice assisstant in class? How?
Amazon recently introduced Skill Blueprints, a feature which allows instructors to create Alexa skills without having to know how to code. You can create an interactive story that students can use to explore classroom materials. You can also create a simple question and answer skill that allows you to ask customized questions in class.
Another way is by adopting the Book Reader skill. The skill allows the instructor to create any text content as a readable page, then ask Alexa to read it at an appropriate time.
This reading can be a section of the syllabus, or another text, that is useful in the classroom. Sure, calling on a student to read a portion of text has its benefits. And yet having a third party read specific instructions or the chapter introduction may provide a storytelling moment.
Another Alexa feature useful in the classroom is the Flash Briefing. By selecting specific news sources, the instructor can utilize radio-like updates on global, local news, or topic feeds. These are often spoken by the news anchors instead of being read by Alexa. This creates a classic radio feeling. The Flash Briefing can be adopted into a custom skill with instructors posting chapter or vocabulary reviews as news items.
Alexa can remind you during class of an event you planned. Ahead of time, or during class, you would ask Alexa to remind you about the pop quiz you intended to deploy at 3:30pm. During class, Alexa will politely remind you of that.
If you have a few minutes before class, you can also play welcoming music. A musical intro could be a great way to set student minds on something positive and start shaping their experience for the upcoming class. You can play an Amazon Music playlist called Student Favorites, or another playlist that you prefer. Alexa does very well in providing this breather period before it is time to start. The music background can also be used during group discussions or other activities, where students are not willing to break the quiet environment and only start collaborating in their usual, lauder manner, if background noise is present.
It doesn’t stop there, Alexa can toss a coin for you to determine if the exam should be on Wednesday or Friday, convert units of measure, provide a timer for group activities. It can provide definitions for facts, it can translate expressions and speak them in a foreign language. Also, it can play a portion of your Audible book read by a professional lecturer.
Extracted from:
Know the limitations: No technology can take the place of a relationship. Teachers should use voice technology to enhance the learning experience they direct. As with any educational technology tool, teachers should set rules about voice device use in the classroom. Make it clear to students when they are allowed to access the device and the expectations for use. The technology should not be an earned reward but rather a tool for learning.
Don’t share personal information: Make sure that students are not sharing specific personal information with the device. Their name, address, and age should not be part of any response to questions. Our students use numbers instead of their names. Anytime the device asks for a student’s name, they share their number or occasionally make up a nickname. Do not associate a device to a person, but instead create a new account with no associated browsing history.
Timers, routines, and schedules: Create efficiencies for yourself and your students by setting up reminders throughout the day. One teacher at my school created a routine for her class so that when a substitute teacher fills in, the class is reminded when it is time to transition to the next lesson or event of the day. Increase face time with students by creating efficiencies in your own schedule using voice commands. Add meetings to Google Calendar directly through a voice user interface. Some educational platforms, such as the learning management system Canvas, allow voice technology for tools like hearing a to-do list inside the platform.
Stories and books: One of the most obvious ways to use voice devices is to ask them to read to students. The Echo Dot will access materials directly from Audible. But beyond typical reading, devices have the capability to make stories interactive. Capstone Publishing created a series called “You Choose,” which provides readers with choices along the way that allow them to determine how the book will progress.
Drills and memorization: Devices can be used to help students memorize information such as their multiplication facts, spelling words, or foreign language vocabulary. The quiz format is engaging and fun.
Music and white noise: The use of sound to set the tone of the classroom is not new, but the ability to access sound quickly with a voice command is. Teachers don’t have to stop what they’re doing to add sound or white noise to the room. With one sentence, they can stay fully involved in their work while making an adjustment to the classroom environment.
Don’t share personal information: Make sure that students are not sharing specific personal information with the device. Their name, address, and age should not be part of any response to questions. Our students use numbers instead of their names. Anytime the device asks for a student’s name, they share their number or occasionally make up a nickname. Do not associate a device to a person, but instead create a new account with no associated browsing history.
Basic Classroom Management
Amazon Alexa will save you time and simply your classroom management routines. By simply saying, “Alexa,” you get the device’s attention. For example, you can say, “Alexa, set a ten-minute timer,” and the device will start timing your activity right away. When it comes to randomly pairing or grouping students, Alexa has several different random generating options. If you must make quick decisions, you can ask Alexa to play “Heads or Tails.”
Icebreakers, speaking games, warm-ups, small-talk... choose your pick adn enjoy.
Juan José Cruz provides this source for midi or kar files of musical bases.
One of my favourite resurces for my lessons is surfing this web which has short videos about opera, very useful to approach some topics related to it like voice types, opera arias even brief virtual visit to the backstage of the building.
Marta Gómez provides this resource:
If you want to find a good track and modify the instruments you want to listen to or even modify the pitch or beat of the song, you will find it in this page.
You have to pay for some of them but the quality is worthy, at least from my experience in other webpages.
TEACHER WELLBEING
Comparto estos recursos de teachitenglish.co.uk en estos últimos días de curso.
Nuestro bienestar como profesores es fundamental para una escuela saludable y para la salud mental de los alumnos.
This is a summary and a sample, but you have the whote document uploaded:
10 golden rules of mental health wellbeing
Andy Sammons, Head of Department and author of 'The Compassionate Teacher' @compassionteach, shares 10 rules you should follow to help you handle the demands of teacher workload and limit your chances of reaching burnout.Paying attention to your mental health
By the time I worked it out, it was too late. It took about six months, but by the time depression descended on me, there was no going back. Even now, feeling better about life, I look back on that time in horror – horror at the place I went to mentally, and horror at what I put my family through.
Two things are clear to me now. Firstly, although humans are remarkable, our brains are faulty in the sense that unless we pay attention to them, there will be payback in terms of mental health. Secondly, notwithstanding this, our current educational context makes teachers extremely vulnerable to mental health issues.
The way I see it, anxiety and depression are two sides of the same coin – one fuels the other. Once you get your head around that relationship, you can begin to understand and be wary about the warning signs. Anxiety is an evolutionary mechanism designed to help us stay out of danger; the only problem is that problems we now perceive in the modern day are of a different nature to those we evolved to survive.
The physiological consequences for too much anxiety and stress are long term. Over a long period of time, too much of it leads us to feel differently about the world, and there is an evolutionary basis for depression too.
During the six months I allude to above, on reflection, there were some fairly recognisable symptoms. And when I map it onto the types of things one might do to keep going and survive, I did something foolish: I turned from a human being into a human doing. In other words, I chased the tick-list. I chased the completion of tasks. I chased getting to the end of a workload that was an impossibility.
How I became a human doing
How did this manifest at home? Anything related to being a human became an inconvenience. I stopped watching my nutrition. I stopped talking with my wife. And I stopped spending time with my family. When my little boy cried in the night, my stomach would lurch and send me into a panic because I’d be terrified of not getting my work done the next day. The thought of spending time with my family became terrifying, not an escape or a welcome distraction. There was simply no escape from my newly crafted mental hell.
All the while, I ramped up the pressure on myself to keep on top of the fight I’d never win. My sleep deteriorated – I’d wake up during the night five or six times to check my ‘to do’ list. Slowly, cracks appeared at work, and I couldn’t keep up. An email could send my heart racing, or a student falling behind would induce me to a breathless panic. Effectively, my brain lost the ability to truly distinguish between credible threats and the things less worth panicking about.
The key? Sweat the small stuff. Notice your emotions, their triggers, and what you can put in place to alleviate the strains.
The resource below includes ten actions you can put in place right now. This resource accompanies Andy's article: 'Anxiety and depression, the terrible twins: what they are and how to spot them'.
Example golden rule
5. Be you. Remember, you are you, and not just a teacher. Give yourself the time and space to be that person outside of the building – the key is to create the space to ‘decompress’ and experience life outside of the cauldron. Having experienced it myself, staying in the cauldron only makes things worse.
Take care of yourselves.
When teaching a subject in English, we are sometimes stressed because we are not really sure if the students have understood a certain topic or exercise.
I want to stress that students also have difficulties with the subjects taught in Spanish, and teachers worry about it too. Rephrasing and asking for clarification using simple sentences are good tools.
Perhaps we could share come of the expressions and vocabulary we use in the classroom. Le me begin with it with a couple of resources:
I. Poster.
Very useful for the students if you place some copies on the classroom walls or you hand out a copy to each of them.
Source: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6f/bb/eb/6fbbeb7830bc35702f143666fcf499c2.jpg
II.
Checking for Understanding:
Do you understand?
Are you following me?
Do you understand what I mean?
Do you understand what I’m saying?
Any questions?
Got it?
Expressing lack of understanding:
I don’t get it.
Sorry, I didn’t get your point.
What do you mean?
I’m not sure I got your point.
I beg your pardon, but I don’t quite understand.
I don’t quite follow you.
I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you mean.
Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you said.
Asking for clarification:
Could you clarify that, please?
Could you explain that, please?
What do you mean by that?
Could you say that again, please?
Could you repeat, please?
Could you put it differently, please?
Sorry, let me explain…
Let me clarify it for you…
To put it differently…
Let me put it in another way…
I see.
I understand.
I got it.
Ok, I got what you mean.
I understand what you mean.
If you want to practice pronuntiation, listen from this is the source: https://basicenglishspeaking.com/checking-understanding-english/
Google Doodle Bach tribute is its first ever AI experience
Source: Slaghgear:com
Ever dreamed of creating a musical masterpiece that would be remembered for centuries but don’t even know how to play an instrument? While not everyone can be like the famed Johann Sebastian Bach, we thankfully now have technology that can turn even the most random of notes into a melody that may be worthy of an orchestra performance. At least if you use Google’s upcoming Doodle tribute to Bach, which not only marks the musician’s 334th birthday but is also its first ever AI-powered interactive experience.
What the Google Doodle will offer tomorrow is almost magical in its simplicity. You put down a few notes, whether randomly or inspired by your muse, click a button and wait for the Doodle to “harmonize” those and transform it into a four-voice piece that bears the hallmarks of Bach’s musical signature. Of course, nothing happens by magic but the technology behind might as well be to most folks.
Powering the doodle is machine learning which, in a nutshell, tries to learn rules on its own by analyzing hundreds if not thousands of data samples. Bach’s music is almost a perfect match for this kind of learning because they follow some concise rules and structures. Most of his work involves four voices, each with its own melody, that together creates a harmonic progression.
For this particular project, the Doodle team created the art style and the interface but also sought help from other Google teams for the brains of the experience. The Google Magenta team, which focuses on applying AI and machine learning to music and art, created a machine learning model that was fed 306 Bach chorale harmonizations. Google PAIR (People + AI Research) then used Google’s TensorFlow.js to allow the AI to run on web browsers directly rather than offloading it to a remote server.
Bach’s music was even “revived” recently and given an 80s rock flair, which you can also try out with an Easter egg hiding somewhere in the screen.Resources provided by: Beatriz de la Calle
If you need to find out what CLIL is, I found some blogs like the intef's:
An internet article:
Resources provided by: Carolina Lázaro
My favourite resource for making music is WIX, because the accompaniments transform any melody into something great:
We also work the rhythm through musicgrams:
For presentations we use genially. It is visually very attractive, and the contents sequence is very clear.
8th May: Women's Day
How important is language in our roles bilingual teachers?
This article reflects on the importance of methodology.
Teachers of English use "instructions" activities quite often.
I used to ask the Language Assistant - or I did it myself- to perform a task without speaking -for instance getting a coke from a vending machine- and then I asked the students to ask her to do the same following their instructions.
The trick was that I asked the language assistant to perform the task following their instructions to the letter ,which resulted in many funny performances. They need to rephrase the instructions many times and as accurately as possible to get the desired action. Very good drilling practice.
Students take turns uttering the instructions, and when they finally get it right, they get in groups of three and write them down. Afterwards, you can ask them to write their own and/or repeat the activity in plenary following each group instructions.
It is always a lively, fun activity and they use to enjoy it a lot.
Quite often, while we are looking for resources in the web or browsing through bibliography we can get confused by the names given to different stages/years/ courses in different countries: k3, year 11, seventh grade...
This is a chart which can help you with it. It shows the equivalence of the USA, British and Spanish educational systems showing the student's age.
EQUIVALENCE OF EDUCATION SYSTEMS.
ESPAÑA
|
AGE on
|
UK
|
AGE
on
|
USA
| ||||||
Escuela Instituto
|
Etapa Educativa
|
Cursos
|
1 Jan
|
Year
|
Curriculum stage
|
Schools
|
1 Jan
|
Grade
|
Curriculum stage
|
Schools
|
31 Aug
|
31 Aug
| |||||||||
CEIP:
Centro
de
Educación
Infantil
y
Primaria
|
Educación
Infantil
|
1º Infantil
|
3
|
3
|
Kindergarten
|
Kindergarten
|
Kindergarten
Pre-School
| |||
2º Infantil
|
4
|
4
| ||||||||
3º Infantil
|
5
|
5
| ||||||||
Enseñanza
Primaria
|
1º Primaria
|
6
|
6
|
First Grade
|
Elementary
|
Lower Elementary School
| ||||
2º
|
7
|
7
|
Second Grade
| |||||||
3º
|
8
|
8
|
Third Grade
| |||||||
4º
|
9
|
9
|
Fourth Grade
| |||||||
5º
|
10
|
10
|
Fifth Grade
| |||||||
6º
|
11
|
11
|
Six Grade
|
Secondary
|
Junior/High
Middle School
| |||||
IES
Instituto
de
Enseñanza
Secundaria
|
Enseñanza
Secundaria
|
1º ESO
|
12
|
12
|
Seventh Grade
| |||||
2º ESO
|
13
|
13
|
Eight Grade
| |||||||
3º ESO
|
14
|
14
|
Nineth Grade
|
High School
| ||||||
4º ESO
|
15
|
15
|
Tenth Grade
| |||||||
Bachillerato
17-18
|
1º BACH
|
16-17
|
(Lower Sixth)
|
16-17
|
Eleventh Grade
|
Senior High/
High School
| ||||
2º BACH
|
17-18
|
(Upper Sixth)
|
17-18
|
Twelveth Grade
| ||||||
ESPAÑA
|
AGE on
|
UK
|
AGE
on
|
USA
| ||||
Escuela Instituto
|
Etapa Educativa
|
Cursos
|
1 Jan
|
Year
|
Curriculum stage
|
Schools
|
1 Jan
| |
31 Aug
|
31 Aug
| |||||||
CEIP:
Centro
de
Educación
Infantil
y
Primaria
|
Educación
Infantil
|
1º Infantil
|
3
|
3
| ||||
2º Infantil
|
4
|
4
| ||||||
3º Infantil
|
5
|
5
| ||||||
Enseñanza
Primaria
|
1º Primaria
|
6
|
6
| |||||
2º
|
7
|
7
| ||||||
3º
|
8
|
8
| ||||||
4º
|
9
|
9
| ||||||
5º
|
10
|
10
| ||||||
6º
|
11
|
11
| ||||||
IES
Instituto
de
Enseñanza
Secundaria
|
Enseñanza
Secundaria
|
1º ESO
|
12
|
12
| ||||
2º ESO
|
13
|
13
| ||||||
3º ESO
|
14
|
14
| ||||||
4º ESO
|
15
|
15
| ||||||
Bachillerato
17-18
|
1º BACH
|
16-17
|
(Lower Sixth)
|
16-17
| ||||
2º BACH
|
17-18
|
(Upper Sixth)
|
17-18
| |||||
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