012 : vouch for visuals!

little boy reaching for a big star, originally uploaded by ajpscs.

Education is sometimes linked to learning either boring/serious facts with few eye-catching attributes in them in the form of worksheets, presentations and handouts. I must admit, adding pictures isn't the main way to get the point across, but it sure does help to gain students' attention and prolong their attention span in a lesson, regardless of what subject you're teaching. Science, languages, social subjects, art (obviously), even maths, there's always the added fun factor when several senses (ie. visual, kinaesthetic and auditory) are used during teaching.

Using images to assist your teaching will also make it more interesting for those who learn through pictures, colors and shapes instead of texts and numbers due to their left/right brain orientation. This is because these 'image-related' activities activates the right side of the brain. Using both sides of the brain helps students to have a better understanding of what they are learning, and at the same time exercises both brain hemispheres instead of focusing on only one.

All that aside, this entry will focus on means to find appropriate AND interesting pictures that I always go to whenever I'm in need of photos. Please not however, that these are user-content sites, so there are copyright issues, so do check where appropriate, and inform/credit where due.

[ link : flickr.com ]

tonnes of amazing photos by amazing photographers, some are personal, some are professional works (no need for signup). The picture in this entry (of the boy reaching up to colorful mobiles) is taken by a flickr user, ajpscs, who takes amazing photos of Japanese culture, among other things.

[ link : sxc.hu ]

Most are royalty-free, high-quality images (requires signup). The top header of the blog, featuring the board and duster, is by a sxc.hu user, ywell. :)

[ link @ jamiekeddie.com ]

He offers 6 links to really interesting sites on the internet.

[ link @catswhocode.com ]

This particular page offers 50 links of free stock image sites of various kind! A few links are no longer working, however.

Of course, you can always Google-imagesearch to find more resources, but remember to use high-resolution images. Resizing images affects the quality of the image, especially so if they are made bigger (making them smaller doesn't reduce the quality as much).

Extra stuff!

When you have images, sometimes it requires a little bit of editing like resizing, sharpenning, blurring etc. To edit images, I use Macromedia Fireworks (or sometimes Adobe Photoshop), but most of the time I only use Irfanview.

[ link : irfanview.com ]

Irfanview is a very simple and compact tool to edit your images. It's extremely lightweight so you can keep it in your computer, laptop, flashdrive, and have it virtually anywhere with you (pun intended ;P). I've used this for years, it's really useful and highly recommended!

Have fun with your visual wanderings on the net and hope this helps!

010 : safe & sound - social responsibility

image by carf

The teaching course I am taking requires me to form a small group and give a small talk/microteaching skit on one of several given topics. To make a long story short, in the end we chose Social Responsibility as our topic.

Social Responsibility, in the most basic sense, makes the students the governor of their own behavior, and reminding them of it. The teachers and school admin are basically the models, 'reminders' and advocators of good behavior, and are also a huge chunk of Social Responsibility as well.

An episode of implementation of this is like thus:

1. Class rules are negotiated between T & Ss within a certain boundary (eg. school rules, legal laws etc are practised), and rules must include both T & Ss (eg. T & Ss must both be professional and respectful at all times).
   
   
2. It is important for Ts & school admin to explain WHY the rules are such. In essense, the focus of social responsibility is that everyone has rights, and if one person misbehaves (eg. steal, insult, bully), they are infringing on someone else's right. This refers to the Human Rights Act section 12 (I think?) where it says that children have the right to learn in a safe & comfortable learning environment.
   
   
3. When T/S fails to obey a rule, it means that they have willingly chosen to break it. Consequence will follow (if they continue) in a gradual state (reminded, moved to a different seat/position, detention/counselling, see the principal, call the parents/salary reduction, etc).

With this, Social Responsibility aims to make students know & feel that living in a society means independence AND interdependence. It also aims to ensure students to be more open-minded & mature when making decisions, because they will understand that decisions equal to implications (towards the self & others).

I think this is a crucial thing to teach & practise, particularly in the Malaysian classroom. Usually Ss are forced to follow the rules without being given the explanation of the rules and why they should be followed. Plus, as far as my education in the past has led to me to believe, the punishment system is only a consequence of rule-breaking rather than that of choice.

Please visit these for more info (and better clarification!):

[ link : esrnational.org ]
[ link : @bced.gov.bc.ca ]
[ link : @sfu.ca ]

May we all be socially responsible and respectful beings. Amin.

009 : funny education-related poetry

If you want to have a 'light' lesson, you may want a 'text' for an activity that can keep the students awake AND interested. A site worth checking is Poetry Teachers. They have a nice assortment of poetry that are quirky, fun and exploitable (in the sense that you can try to create lessons around them, eg. grammar), like this.

It's a cute site worth looking at, even if you don't have teaching intentions in mind :)

[ link : poetryteachers.com ]

008 : parts of speech, simplified

Need to refresh your mind on what nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, etc are? Or just wanting to find worksheets useful to focus on lessons on these topics? This Enchantedlearning sub-site offers some nice material catering this, and they're also handy because they are explained in a simple way so that if your students are having problems with parts of speech, they can do it in their own time.

[ link : @enchantedlearning.com ]

007 : more resources for teaching!

Edhelper has puzzlemakers, worksheets, and other convenient stuff for your teaching needs. For the topical worksheets, they are graded according to the level of learners, so it makes it easier for you to suit/adapt the lessons to the needs and abilities of your students.

The site is catered for younger learners and offers stuff for English, Maths and a few other subjects. Their language resources in particular can also be good for ESL learners, regardless of their age.

Note : not all of their resources are free (like most teaching resources), but the ones that are available are worth checking out.

[ link : edhelper.com ]

006 : adjectives - think you know?

Until a few years ago, I never knew that multiple adjectives (English, at least) had a certain order when combined. This realisation came to me when I was tested for a job interview. I'm not sure how well I did on that test, but I did get the job, and I did learn that there was a proper order for adjectives, so all was good I guess. Haha.

Anyway, for the language teaching course I'm currently studying, we have to do a microteaching session as one of our course requirements. I think adjectives would be a good thing to focus on for this because it's easily underestimated but very much exploitable.

Here's a few links I found particularly useful to know about adjectives and their word orders:

[ link : @enchantedlearning.com ]
[ link : @learn4good.com ]
[ link : @grammar-quizzes.com ]

If you want to try more questions to check your understanding, go here:

[ link : @web2.uvcs.uvic.ca ]
[ link : @johnsesl.com ]
[ link : @edhelper.com ]

005 : some cool teaching resources for younger kids

This site offers (many, albeit limited) free resources for teaching. It has a lot of worksheets on many topics and subjects, so it is suitable for virtually any teacher whose students are in their teens and below.

[ link : abcteach.com ]

001 : so what's this all about?

Salam, hi and thanks for dropping by.

Current blog objectives:

1. to record teaching-related ideas, plans, methods, etc for myself and the interested reader, either for self-improvement, i.e. to widen our options for teacherly decisions :P
2. to promote interesting articles (online or offline) about, or related to, teaching.
3. as a platform to share teaching-related thoughts and discuss on matters related to teaching.

Note:
This blog focuses on language-teaching beyond primary-level in Malaysia, but not exclusively. Anyone can comment and add anything here, but constructive thoughts are encouraged.

Let's make education affective, effective, and fun.

Please share your thoughts. :)

Cheers.