For the Past Two Weeks

3/2/2012

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These past two weeks have been very similar. They have both included Italki and video creations.

Italki has been going great. Every week, our teachers have corrected people's posts. This has proven successful so far and we would like to continue.

Our video's have also been successful. We have two new ones that have been posted on our website. We have a third on the way and we are working on making more!

We have not been teaching as much. Student-teacher connections have been breaking from both sides. We are looking for more opportunities, but we are struggling. We hope to fix this problem before the end of the year, so next year has less problems.

We shall see what happens.

Chandler
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Where are we headed? - Website Profiles

12/9/2011

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Today we had a class "therapy" session by talking about all the problems we had personally experienced. It was good to understand what everyone felt about the group's productiveness.

After getting everything out on the table, we asked the question: "Where are we headed?" We were wondering: "Are we actually productive?" The answer seemed to be: "Yes, we are productive." We have had, still have, and probably will always have bumps in the road, but we have really been doing a decent job in accomplishing our goal: Teach English.

We also talked about other student possibilities that we plan to continue looking into.

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At the end of class, we worked on the website. Everyone's' picture was taken and everyone wrote a profile for the website. I am planning on posting the pictures and profiles in the teachers' profiles section soon (or as soon as people turn them in).

That was our day and it was very productive. I can't wait to see where we go by the end of this year.

Chandler Hoffmann
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Lesson Plan Competition!

11/28/2011

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Recently, LingoOnline had a lesson plan competition. Hoping to win chips and a nice, icy beverage, every teacher created a fun, interactive, and productive lesson plan to show to the class. We voted for our favorites and Madison Sparber emerged victorious with this wonderful lesson plan:

Hana's major weakness: Speaking
** sometimes simply asking her to read articles isn’t enough to help her learn how to speak, especially when she has to learn how to speak on the spot

To get my student to speak more often, my creative plan is to...
  1. Ask her to find a few pictures on Google based on the lesson’s content (e.g the environment) → cannot be simple images like a flower
  2. She will describe one of the pictures to the best of her ability as I draw her description of the image on a piece of paper. I can ask her questions about the image which will help her to describe every possible detail she can.
  3. After I finish my drawing, she will proceed to show me the picture that she found on the Internet. Then we can discuss if she needs to improve on describing certain things.
Why would this help her learn English?
1) This will force Hana how to think quick on her feet → help her think of prior vocabulary words
2) Learning how to describe certain objects and images will build up her vocabulary (e.g I showed a picture of a house with another student last year and asked her what a certain object in a room is. In the laundry room, she learned how to say things like “washing machine”, “towel”, and “soap”
3) She will learn how to speak more rapid, fluid English

We held this competition to push the teachers to be creative in the creation of their lesson plans. Our goal is to teach English in a fun and productive way, so this competition helped create many new ideas that we hope to use in the future!

Chandler Hoffmann
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