Word clouds to integrate reading and writing.
Increase in interest in game-based language learning and teaching. By grahamstanley This week, the ‘Teaching and Language Learning through Gamification‘ TESOL EVO session comes to an end.
It’s been an enjoyable 5 weeks, with some great live sessions from special guest speakers and lots of sharing of ideas and enthusiasm in the Moodle forums. The TLLG Moodle won’t be around for long, but the highlights of the course will be archived on a wiki, , which we also hope will be a place that people can share links to lesson plans for online games they have used. During the EVO session, there also seems to have been evidence of an increased interest in games for language learning and teaching. Apart from the fact that 304 people signed up to be members of the TLLG Moodle, a figure much higher than we thought we’d have, we’ve also spotted the following: Leo Selivan shared his experience using Spent with a group of upper-intermediate learners, who were enthusiastic about the game and found it useful. So, lots to read and think about there – and it’s only February. Understandingand Increasing Student Motivation I 1. Lesson Skeletons « languagemoments. What Do Emotions Have to Do with Learning?
Thinkstock When parents and teachers consider how children learn, it’s usually the intellectual aspects of the activity they have in mind.
Sidney D’Mello would like to change that. The University of Notre Dame psychologist has been studying the role of feelings in learning for close to a decade, and he has concluded that complex learning is almost inevitably “an emotionally charged experience,” as he wrote in a paper published in the journal Learning and Instruction earlier this year.
During the learning experiments described in his paper, he notes, the participating students reported being in a neutral state only about a quarter of the time. The rest of the time, they were were experiencing lots of feelings: surprise, delight, engagement, confusion, boredom, frustration. Another counter-intuitive contention made by D’Mello is that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning. Animated agents discussing scientific case studies. Related. Feedback for Learning:Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. Paper Rater: Free Online Grammar Checker, Proofreader, and More. (Almost) Infinite ELT Ideas.
Cow Clicker was developed by Ian Bogost as a satire on social network games like Farmville.
It ended on September 7, 2011 with the Cowpocalypse. There is now a variation on it called an interactive clicktion. Ela Wassell told me about the phenomenon of Cow Clicker, and sent me an article detailing its development. What would you do with this idea in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context it is used in. Click here to find out the idea behind this blog. Chris Wilson recommended an amazing tool called ‘The Scale of the Universe’.
What would you do with this tool in your classroom? Mother, Daughter and Doll is a series of 8 photos by Boushra Almutawakel. What would you do with these photos in your classroom? I’m posting this on the day of the first ever Image Conference. P.S. Zoe Spawton has been taking photos of Ali since August 2012. I found out about them via the Guardian Pictures of the week.
What would you do with this video/recipe in your classroom? By Jamie Keddie » Lying on the pavement. Why are you lying on the pavement?
Are you drunk? In this activity, students explore issues that are raised in the video before acting out the street scene with a script. Language level: Elementary – Intermediate (A1 – B1)Learner type: Young learners; Teens; AdultsTime: 60 – 90 minutesMain activity: Drama; Role playTopic: Psychology and behaviourLanguage: Negative auxiliaries; Modal auxiliaries; Perfect tenses; Adjectives; The verb Let; The adverb JustMaterials: Music video and worksheetsLying on the pavement [downloaded 3251 times] Lesson plan outline Before your students enter the classroom, draw the outline of a person on the floor. Critical Thinking On The Web. Top Ten Argument Mapping Tutorials.
Six online tutorials in argument mapping, a core requirement for advanced critical thinking.The Skeptic's Dictionary - over 400 definitions and essays. The Fallacy Files by Gary Curtis. Best website on fallacies. Butterflies and Wheels. What is critical thinking? Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.
A shorter version is the art of being right. More definitions...