Primary Wall

Mr Jeff Mak shared this idea of using Primary Wall as a brainstorming tool and ideas bank during one of our weekly meetings. 

Primary Wall is an informal and fun way for students to post their thoughts on a topic. Recently, I got students to decide on a stand for a topic and to post 1-2 reasons to support their stand. This was a pre-lesson activity to check their prior knowledge of the topic, which allowed me to decide on how to angle subsequent lessons. It is also a way for students to check if they have the same arguments as their peers or whether they have come up with a more unique line of reasoning.

Class: 3I6 - Majority agreed with the motion.

Class: 3I7 - Majority disagreed with the motion.

Teacherspayteacher

Here's a very useful and highly rated teaching resource website known as Teacherspayteachers
It's created by teachers for teachers and features a wide collection of both free and paid resources for all subjects and K-12 levels. Basically, it is an online marketplace for buying and selling of original downloadable educational materials.

I have personally purchased the Grammar Comics Parts of Speech series from David Rickert for USD8.99 in 2011. It presents parts of speech exercises in a fun and amusing way through comics. It is a great collection to add to my Grammar lessons. He also has a wide repertoire of Comics exercises on Poetry, Metaphors, Irony, and even Maths Fractions. You may also want to check his website at http://www.grammarmancomic.com/rickert.html

Here's a great free resource to affirm students positively - Happy Notes. It is a good take home resource to show parents positive behaviour of students. Rather than send parents reminders about lost and incomplete assignments, why not use this instead?

Useful English Resources

Here are some useful links on the teaching of English language.

Type: Grammar
Link 1
http://elt.oup.com/student/practicegrammar/?cc=global&selLanguage=en

The first link (Oxford Practice Grammar) was shared by Mrs Ho-Tan Chor Hong. It features a selection of grammar editing exercises categorised by level - Basic, Intermediate and Advanced. Some of us have tried it and it is a useful resource to teach the new grammar editing format. Learners are expected to identify and correct errors in given sentences.

Type: Oral Communication
Link 2
http://learningenglish.voanews.com/

The second link was shared by Mr Patrick Timothy. He came across a useful resource from Voices of America under English Central that allows following of text and recording of speech. After which, it will compare the recorded speech against the VOA videos and give feedback (limited) on the quality of the speech. It also assesses the words that were spoken incorrectly and allows playback.

Type: Listening and Viewing
Link 3
http://storycorps.org/

The third link was shared at the English Language Teaching Seminar which I attended in August of 2012. Storycorp is a national collection of stories from Americans. It was aimed at providing Americans with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 40,000 interviews from nearly 80,000 participants. 

I particularly love the section on Animated Shorts where they feature a collection of personal animated stories. The speaker at the seminar shared the short on No More Questions.
In the video, Kay Wang shares her personal stories with her son and granddaughter. Kay had stories to tell—from disobeying her mother and rebuffing suitors while growing up in China to late-life adventures as a detective for Bloomingdale’s department store. Kay passed away just weeks after that interview. Storycorp is an archival of personal stories.

Buyer beware, some stories may not be suitable for our audience as the Americans may reflect a set of values and beliefs that are different from ours. However, many of the audio and video tracks found on the website touch on the universal values of friendship, love and family. 

Edmodo

What is Edmodo? 

A social network for learning. Yes that's right, it looks and feels like Facebook. A place for teachers and students to learn.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/edmodo-wants-social-networking-learning-experience-163358730.html

You can use it to:
- discuss topics
- upload assignments
- grade assignments 
- online coaching
- quizzes

I joined the Edmodo community back in late 2010 as introduced by my NIE lecturer, Joyce Lee. I used it before the school switched back to AsknLearn. They were then on the Cybersphere platform which was very user-unfriendly. It was extremely difficult to use it to post quizzes. So Edmodo provided a better and more intuitive platform.

This is the Latest Post screen.
 

This is the 1EA(2011) class group.

AsknLearn e-learning

I created these exercises for February 2012's e-learning. Kudos to all those who managed to complete the exercises.