I got up at a quarter to eight, had some tea and fruit for breakfast and I headed for school. After a non-rainy twenty-minute walk I got at York Associates at aroun ten to nine. Once there I was received by some of the staff and was invited to join the rest and some others trainees at the coffee lounge. I got to know my trainer Mark and the other six female teachers enrolled in the same course as me: Making Use of Technology Tools. They were four teachers from Poland, one from Finland and one from Estonia.
They had prepared a buffet lunch at school so we did not need to go out in the rain to find a place to do so. As we had some spare thirty minutes after lunch we decided to go for a walk in spite of the rain. What a gorgeous, cosy, beautiful city centre! I definitely love this place despite the weather.
We finished lessons at three o'clock and spent one and a half more trying to work out how this thing, blogger, worked.
And this is the course programme for the whole week. It looks really interesting, doesn't it?
- Programme for Posting notes: linoit.com
- Use of Goole Docs
- Use of blogs (Blog stands for weB log, which can mean diary) and some good examples:
ETI Malta ICT blog
lifeinathens.edublogs.orgAt twenty to four we had a very interesting and to the point talk about the history of York. There we learned it has a Roman, Angle-saxon, Viking and Normand past, it has got around 130000 inhabitants, Guy Fawkes was born here, its cathedral is called the Minster and has the best stained glasses in Northern Europe, it is surrounded by a wall and it is very famous for its chocolate. Kit-Kat bars started here more than a hundred years ago!
If you want to know more about this city you can go to the York section above.
After that I came back home to have dinner with Anne, Paul and their daughter Helen. We had some tasty salmon with vegetables and cookies with dried apricots baked by Helen. Delicious!
Finally I spent some time talking to Anne about several topics: travelling, children, cooking, English..., had a shower and came to bed to write this entry for today:)
Tuesday, 28th July
Today Anne gave me a lift to York Associates as it was raining. I had planned to spend the whole day in the city centre and did not feel like being soaked during the lessons, lunch, walk in the city and dinner at the Indian Lounge.
Today we dealt mainly with audio and video production, download and edition, so it was great fun and filled me with ideas for my lessons. This is what we were doing:
. Download Audacity
. Download Lame: an mp3 encoder
. Podcasts:
. BBC: The English we speak, Six minute English, Six minute vocabulary, Six minute grammar
. Creating animated slideshows from videos and pictures:
. Windows Movie Maker
. Downloading and editing video clips
. Www.atube.me/video/: to download videos from youtube
. Windows movie maker: to edit them
. viewpure.com: videos without distractionsIn the lunch break Pille, Valma and me went to the Swan Pub, the oldest pub in York, which is really close to York Associates. There I had a Chicken, ham and cheese baguette for 6.95£ and a glass of water which was free.
After the lessons finished I decided to go for a walk by myself: I needed some fresh air. I walked around the city with no umbrella and did several things: I had a look in the Disney store, I checked where the restaurant for tonight was, I visited the Minster, the Dane gardens, and a part of the city walls. It is such a beautiful, historic city that I could not stop taking pictures and looking around. Then it started to rain and I decided to come back to school to work for a while before joining the rest for dinner.
As the school was closing at 6 I left to the city centre with an idea in mind: enter a supermarket and check for the names in English of some things I never know how to name... I did that at Marks&Spencer, as regular supermarkets close at 6.
As I still have some spare time before dinner I joined one of the York Fringe Festival shows. For more information about it, please go to the section on York.
Finally it was dinner time and I met the rest of the students at The Indian Lounge. It was just five students and a trainer, but we had a nice evening together. During dinner I learnt that Indian food is very popular in England today and that one of its dishes was voted the UKs most popular dish: chicken tikka masala. It is composed of grilled chunks of chicken enveloped in a creamy spiced tomato sauce.
Wed, 29th July
At last a sunny morning with no rain!!! I had a very enjoyable and quiet walk on my way to school and when I got here we started our lessons for today. This is pretty much what we were doing:
. Problem with plagiarism:
. To show students that Google translate does not work:
- Youtube: Fresh Prince of Bel Air Google Translate
- Translate using Google Translate from Spanish to English and back to Spanish
. Authoring tools: Creating on-line
. On-line programme to create exercises: hot potatoes=> http://hotpot.uvic.ca and tutorials at: hotpot.uvic.ca/tutorials6.php
. bitly: link shortener tool
. linoit.com: tool for posting notres
. answergarden.ch/app and LearningApps are applications students like
. Mind maps
. Mindomo
. Coggle
. Bubbl.us
. Wordcloud makers: wordsift.com, wordle.net
And this is one of my creations, which serves as a good summary of what we have been doing so far in the course:
For lunch today Pille, Valma and myself joined some of the other students from York Associates and went to a cafe called Below the Stairs, at the Treasurers House, where I had a delicious quiche with some salad.
After the lessons I went for a walk along the riverbanks and it was really, really nice. Afterwards, I went window shopping and at 5.15 I joined the Evensong at the Minster, a service where a choir from Virginia sang.
Th, 30th July
This is roughly what we were doing today in class:
. Using images online
. Google Images: click on SafeSearch for appropriate content for students, click on Search tools for size, colour, type, time, usage rights, more tools...
. Flickr: image searching tool: the same options as in Google Images are also available (any license and safeSearch), if you click on Creative commons: the person has allowed anyone to use the photo with or without restrictions. More information atcreativecommons.org. Flickr has also a section called 'eltpics' for English language teachers from English language teachers
. Mosaic Maker: options to create a grid of photographs either individually or using Flickr complete albums
. Mobile devices: tools
. BYOD: Bring your own device
. App: TED
. BBC Academy. School for journalists: Smartphone journalism: video
.Mobile devices: apps
. Record My Call App: application to record calls
. Writing: skype, whatsapp, talk
. MALL: Mobile Applications for Language Learning
. MALU: Mobile Applications for Language Usage
. Sounds app, by Macmillan (app on phonetics)
. LearnEnglish Podcast app, by the British Council
. DK Quiz, by Dorling Kindersley
. i cell, for CLIL Science
. Animoto, for image and video
. Mindomo and SimpleMind Free for mind maps
. Socrative and Kahoot for quizzing and polling
. DuoLingo
Computer apps:
. Glogster
. LearningApps
. Vocaroo
. Wordle
. Tagxedo
For lunch today, Valma, Pille and me went to Yorkvik Café, where I had Yorkshire pudding with sausages, mashed and gravy. It was fantastic!
After our last lesson I went for a walk in the walls, where I could enjoy good weather and really nice views from above.
And last in my day, I went to the Grand Opera House in York to see the musical entitled West Side Story, together with Valma and Pille. It was great! It was an amateur production with young performers but most of them really looked like professional: nice voices and dancing.
Friday, 31st July
Last day of the month, last day of the course. Today there were some wi-fi problems and we could not cover all the points in the programme. We were reviewing some of the programmes and applications from the week.
Today I had lasagne for lunch at the Last drop Inn, a really nice place close to our school.
It was time to say good-bye to the other teachers and our trainee Mike. Here you can find a photograph of all of us (btw, no idea about who the guy on the right is;) ):
After the course it was, al last, time for shopping!! I bought some presents for friends and family and at 5 I met Valma and Pille for a farewell ice-cream at Roberto's, a recent ice-cream parlour my host family had recommended me.
In a nutshell: a positive, motivating, engaging and fun experience, which Pille and Valma, great people, made it memorable I wish I can get that job shadowing for next year and meet them again :)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario