The Talkin' Teachin' Show!

I listen to A LOT of podcasts, so the idea of using them to teach was very intriguing to me, but the podcasts I listen to are mostly based around comedy and wouldn't really be appropriate for a classroom. So, I looked at the podcasts I listen to that aren't comedy based and tried to think if any of them could be used to teach, and the one I think could be most useful is called Stuff You Missed in History Class, and I think it could be used in many ways to help ESL students. 

The podcast is about lesser known stories from world history, and while I think in general it would be good practice for upper intermediate or higher students that were interested in it to listen to it for practice. If I were going to design a lesson, I think a good idea would be to use an episode like a recent one called, "The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable." For the lesson I would take the podcast and divide the audio into four pieces, and have the students listen to only their section in groups. Then after the group had listen and summarized their segment of the audio they would have to talk with the other groups to put the segments in the right order to tell the story. 
This exercise would be good for helping student to improve their listening skills when listening to and summarizing the audio, as well as their speaking and cooperation skills when ordering the audio pieces. Of course this could be done with other episodes of this podcast or even with other podcasts that have some sort of a narrative form to them. I do realize that you would have to do this with upper level students, but I think the exposure to authentic language would be good for them.

Teachin' and Tweetin' and Whatnot...

Twitter can be a very polarizing subject these days, for every example of how it is bringing people together and forming global connections there are opposite examples of harassment or hate speech also being spread over the platform.  As someone who has been using twitter for over seven years now I've seen both sides of this argument many times, and I think what it boils down to, is that twitter is what you make of it for yourself.
Like I said I have been using twitter for a long time but it has been more to share thoughts or jokes with my friends and not necessarily for me "productive" purposes.  It was interesting to both look through the Twitterchat and read these articles about twitter to see on other side of it after all this time and to see how it can be used to help in my teaching. 

The first article I found entitled The Teacher's Guide to Twitter is a fantastic source of both guidance and information four educators getting started on twitter, plus  also had this great guide to education hashtags on Twitter. An other article I found from the National  Education Association, was called Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching?  While the first article was more of a guide this one was interesting because it offered some real life examples of how were using twitter in their teaching.  Both of these articles offered a lot of good information but the one thing I took away from them was the idea of being able to stay connected with other teachers.  Currently, I teach about 30 hours a week online from home, this gives me great flexibility with my schedule that in person classes wouldn't be able to give me.  However, the main drawback is that I have little to no connection with other teachers in my same position.  That is why I really liked what these articles had to say about staying connected, they showed me that it's a great way to talk to and share ideas waive other teachers on a regular basis and that is something that I'm not afforded the opportunity to do in my current position.  I am looking forward to doing this in the future and I hope that it will add a lot to what I can offer my students.
Like I said at the beginning there are definitely some drawbacks to twitter and I might be hesitant to let students use it unless they were very highly supervised but it is definitely a tool that can be used and as teachers we have to be willing to use any tool that is offered to us.

Chat Twitter Chat

Regretfully I was not able to attend a Twitter chat live in person in time for me to write this post. Since I still wanted to find out more about the chats I decided to check out the hashtag #ELTChat anyways to see what people were talking about. I realize it's not the same as participating live, but I still got a good feel for how the discussion worked.
This weeks discussion for #ELTChat on Twitter was pronunciation and how to make teachers comfortable teaching it.  Looking through the tweets I could see that there was a lot of people participating and it was a little bit difficult to parse through it all, however I think I was still able to find some good advice and interesting resources.One resource that I found was an interesting website that offered an array of warm-up activities that may help with pronunciation.
Of course I think the most helpful thing was just seeing the short but useful pieces of advice people would give about teaching pronunciation.  For example one user had three short tweets that talked about teaching how we stress words when speaking which was an aspect of pronunciation that I really hadn't considered much.
The only aspect of this Twitter chat that I wasn't particularly fond of was that it seemed to be made up mostly of British English language teachers so they were talking a lot about certifications and tests that I had no reference for.  That being said I can see how this would be a very useful tool and I hope that I have the chance to actually participate in one in the future.