DEVELOPING TEACHERS.COM Newsletter

Welcome to the May Newsletter

For those who are not subscribed to the Weekly Teaching Tip, we have been running a small competition to mark Tip 100 The prize is an e-mail address - yourname@developingteachers.com - nifty, eh? Impress colleagues, friends & family! All you have to do to get this is pen a few lines about one of the following classroom moments:

- the best moment
- the biggest blunder
- the most satisfying moment (!)
- the happiest moment
- the funniest moment
- the most interesting moment
- or any superlative you can think of......

Don't forget, they are classroom moments. A few lines will do. If you don't want to reveal yourself use a funky pseudonym. We will then pick three names out of a hat to award the redirected e-mail addresses to. This is the last week so send some ideas in.

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Have you got a web site? If you'd like it featured in this newsletter send us the url & a pithy 50-word description.

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The Newsletter this month:

The theme this month contains an article by Elizabeth Adams & Halima Brewer, titled 'Teaching Creatively: A symbiotic Process'. Teaching is an art & it's good to see someone saying it!

There is also another book review, this time looking at 'The Minimax Teacher' by Jon Taylor. And then there are the usual sections of teaching links, the jobs' section & the PS computer/internet links.

Happy teaching!

BTW, If you change your e-mail address we would appreciate it if you could let us know. We can then amend our lists. Thanks.

Please e-mail a friend the Developing Teachers Newsletter. Thanks.

See the note in the bit at the end about ReferWare.

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INDEX

1. ARTICLE - Teaching Creatively: A symbiotic Process by Elizabeth Adams & Halima Brewer

2. THE SITE - lesson plans & articles

3. WARMER

4. BOOKS

5. E-MAIL COURSES

6. TEACHING LINKS

7. JOBS

8. WEEKLY TEACHING TIPS

9. TRAINING COURSES - big discounts on Cambridge CELTA courses

10. PS - Internet/computer-related links

11. THE BIT AT THE END

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1. ARTICLE

Teaching Creatively: A symbiotic Process by Elizabeth Adams & Halima Brewer

Many thanks to Elizabeth & Halima.

The article can be seen...

Next month we'll be including an article about using literature in the English language classroom. Do you have a lesson plan that includes the use of literature? If so, do send it in & we'll put it on the site in conjunction with the article.

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2. THE SITE

There is a good mix of excellent new articles on the site this month. Thanks go to Marjorie Rosenberg, Costas Gabrielatos & Ramesh Krishnamurthy.

The first article is the first in a series of articles from Marjorie Rosenberg. Marjorie is an instructor of English at the Pädagogische Akademie des Bundes in der Steiermark. Marjorie also works as a free-lance language trainer for various companies and for the state government of Styria, Austria and a free-lance NLP trainer for both teachers and business people. Her book 'Communicative Business Activities' which uses an NLP approach to
teaching business English, came out in autumn 2001.

The title of her first article is: 'Teacher Development & Awareness of Learning Styles' 'Ever since joining the Teacher Development SIG of IATEFL, I have often found myself explaining to both colleagues as well as those outside the teaching profession what I understood under the rubric "Teacher Development." The term seems to crop up consistently in teacher training courses, in journals devoted to the teaching profession and at international conferences. Therefore I was fascinated by the opportunity to become personally involved with pre-service teacher development in an entirely new and exciting manner.'

To read the article..

Costas Gabrielatos' second contribution to the articles on the site is 'Teaching Communication & Interaction Strategies - An action research project with Greek teenagers at intermediate level'.

'The choice of this project was greatly determined by the fact that very little attention had been given to fluency and student interaction during the previous years of tuition of the group of students concerned. As a result, students had developed inhibitions towards using the target language which had a
negative impact on their oral performance. It would, therefore, be an opportunity and a challenge for me to examine the effectiveness of certain activities and techniques in helping students shed their inhibitions and become more fluent communicators.'

To read the article..

Ramesh Krishnamurthy from COBUILD contributes the article 'Learning and Teaching through Context - A Data-driven Approach'.

Ramesh has worked at Birmingham University on the COBUILD project since 1984, contributing to many dictionaries, grammars, and other publications, as well as developing corpora and software, and is now a consultant for COBUILD and the Bank of English Corpus.

'A word may have many potential meanings, but its actual meaning in any authentic written or spoken text is determined by its context: its collocations, structural patterns, and pragmatic functions. Large language corpora offer access to words in a wide range of natural contexts, which can improve and enrich both language learning and teaching.'

To read the article..

If you've given a course or seminar or have a lesson plan & would like to give it a public airing then do send it to:

articles@developingteachers.com

ADVERTISING - If you are interested in advertising on the site or the Weekly Teaching Tip & this Monthly Newsletter then please get in touch at:

advertising@developingteachers.com

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3. WARMER

My name is Marina Cantarutti, and I am a teacher of EFL in Argentina. I would like to share with you my favourite warmer, which serves also as an introduction game. It is based on a card game kids play here, which is called "The Pig". Each student will be given three cards to complete. On the first card, the student should write his name, surname and age. On the second, four adjectives describing his physical appearance; and on the third, his favourite TV programme and music band. All the students' cards are then shuffled and handed out to the students, who will be seated in a circle. Each student will have three different cards, from different students. One of the students will act as the director, and will tell the others to choose one,
two or three cards to give to the student sitting at the right or left of them. They will go on following the directions of this student to exchange the cards until any of them gets his/her three cards. When he/she does, he should say "Pig", and all the students should place both their hands in the middle of the
circle. The last one to do so gets a letter of the word "Pig" as penalization, while the student who got all his/her cards, should introduce himself/herself using the information written in the card ("My name is...". "I am...years old", "I am tall, thin.." etc.) and then stay as a spectator. The game goes on until all
the students have introduced themselves, and the one to get all the "PIG" letters should repeat the names and features of all the other students.
Hope you will all find it both useful and entertaining!
Best,

Marina

Thanks Marina. You must have a favourite warmer! Send it in & we'll publish it here & put it in the warmer list on the site.

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4. BOOKS

A new section in the newsletter & on the site. We will be occasionally recommending books & publishing reviews.

David Holden has another book review up this month - 'The Minimax Teacher' by Jon Taylor (Delta Publishing/English Teaching Professional) You can see the review ...

If you would like to review a book for us do get in touch.

bookreviews@developingteachers.com

Please don't forget to go through the books page when you want tobuy from Amazon - we get a little bit & you pay the same. Every little helps to keep the newsletters free. Thanks.

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5. E-MAIL COURSES

Maximise your time by getting started on a quality personalised teacher development course. There are a couple of sample pages to view.

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6. LINKS FOR TEACHING

Have you got any favourite teaching links? Please send them in & we'll give them a mention.

http://www.seal.org.uk/

The Society for Effective Affective Learning - 'SEAL is an international association of individual and institutional members who are passionate about learning. We are interested in how the brain works, how people learn and how we can help people learn better. We currently have over 675 paid-up members in 44 countries (50% UK, 28% rest of Europe, 22% rest of the world), who are mainly involved in teaching, training and personal development.'

http://www.banking-english.com

Banking English - An on-line resource centre for teachers and learners of business English. The site provides practical ideas and tips as well as business articles, business wordpower activities, business quotations, survival business, business idioms, business tests and more.

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk

This is an excellent site specifically for the primary teacher. Lots of material.

http://www.lexicool.com/

The directory currently has links to over 1000 translation dictionaries and glossaries.

http://webworst.about.com/library/weekly/aa062400a.htm

Dave's Ultimate Urban legend - & links to lots more - from About.com

This really happened to an acquaintance of a friend of my uncle's second cousin's neighbor. He was on his way to pick up the ticket to his free Caribbean Cruise, which he had won by forwarding an email to five other people which instructed them to forward it to five more people. After stopping for a beer at a karaoke bar along the way, he became very ill and nearly died as a result of not cleaning the top of the bottle thoroughly before taking a drink........

http://www.thegateway.org/

The Gateway comes from the United States Department of Education. The Gateway to Educational Materials is a free, meta-search engine that lets you search for lesson plans from over 24,480 different Internet resources.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/

The New York Times Learning Network. An excellent current affairs site for all with lots of news summaries. It is graded for the younger learner, although possibly more grading will be needed for our learners, & there are lesson plans & quizzes,. There's a neat click on a word for a dictionary definition which makes the language learner's task easier.

http://www.google.com

More on Google! If you're after an article about a specific topic get along to Google for their new News Search. From the Google home page go to the Advanced Search & you'll find it a few lines down. As they say:

'Google's News Search (BETA) service presents information culled from many of the world's news sources collected over the previous week. With continuous updates throughout the day, you'll keep up to date with what's happening now and learn about the stories that led to the most recent developments. What's different about Google's News Search is the unique grouping technology Google has developed to automatically put related stories together in the same search result. This makes it easy to quickly scan the headlines while providing the option of reading multiple accounts
of a story from different news sources.'

Also here, Google offers specialized searches on the following
topics:

Microsoft - Search Microsoft-related pages
Linux - Search all penguin-friendly pages
Google Catalog Search - Search and browse mail-order catalogs
online
Apple Macintosh - Search for all things
Mac BSD Unix - Search web pages about the BSD operating system
U.S. Government - Search all .gov and .mil sites
Universities: Stanford, Brown, BYU, & more

There's also a long page of news links at:

http://www.google.com/news/

http://www.iearn.org/'iEARN

International Education and Resource Network is a non-profit organization made up of over 4,000 schools in nearly 100 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online at very low cost using the Internet and other new technologies. Since 1988, iEARN has pioneered on-line school linkages to enable students to engage in meaningful educational
projects with peers in their countries and around the world.

iEARN is:

- an inclusive and culturally diverse community
- a safe and structured environment in which young can
communicate
- an opportunity to apply knowledge in service-learning projects
- a community of educators and learners making a difference as
part of the educational process '

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7. JOBS

Disclaimer - as with any job check it out carefully. We don't endorse the schools that advertise below. The ads are sent in & we mention them here & put them up on the site.

A note for advertisers - please keep them short & to the point - we're having to start editing them. If you already have an advert on the site please contact us to update it.

Sultanate of Oman
Regional Teacher Trainer - 1 September 2002 to 31 August 2005 Regional Teacher Trainers/Advisors will work as part of a team of in-service Teacher Trainers and pay advisory visits to teachers in government schools and provide some language support training. Package: Excellent tax free salary Omani Riyals 950 per month plus RO 90 which includes terminal benefits plus free annual air tickets, furnished accommodation, medical care and a suitable 4 wheel drive vehicle will be provided. Senior Inspector (2 posts) - 1 September 2002 to 31 August 2005
Senior Inspectors will be required to co-ordinate, monitor and be responsible for the work of the Inspectors in their region. Be responsible for the implementation of in-service English Teacher Training Programmes and pay regular visits to all seminars and workshops in order to monitor teacher training taking place. Package: Excellent tax free salary Omani Riyals 990 per month plus RO 90 which includes terminal benefits plus free annual air
tickets, furnished accommodation, medical care and a suitable 4 wheel drive vehicle will be provided. For both of the above jobs please send full CV to
admnoti@omantel.net.om for the attention of Ms D Travas

Trencín, Slovak Republic
Canadian Language School is a private language school based in Trencín, Slovak Republic and situated at the foot of this extraordinary 11th century castle. Our mission is to teach the English and French language as well as North American history and culture.We are the only language school in the Slovak Republic where Canadian and American teachers work permanently and full time.

We are presently looking for English and French teachers to start working for us in Summer or Fall 2002. For more information contact: canadianschool@stonline.sk

Dalian, Liaoning Province, China
We're looking for a kindergarten teacher for May, 2002. We're a private kindergarten in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China. It is a bilingual language kindergarten for five different ages classes. They are from 2-6 years old. The kindergarten is in a residential area with a swimming pool inside.

We want a native English speaker with at least BA. It is a job of 16-20hours each week. For more information contact: iososd@online.ln.cn

Beijing, China
This key university in Beijing (Beijing Mining and Technology Institute) is seeking a fulltime English Teacher (native speaker). This position will begin in the fall of 2002 and last for the entire school year. Housing, round trip airfare and a competitive salary are provided. Requirements include, ESL/TEFL
certified, minimum BA, prefer MA in English and prior teaching experience. For more information contact: whm@cumtb.edu.cn

China
EF is the world's largest international language organisation.We have many divisions which include study abroad programs and our English First schools where we have been teaching English as a foreign language for more than 35 years. We also have three web sites at www.ef.com, www.englishfirst.com and www.englishtown.com. China is the focus of current expansion for
our EF English First schools and we are presently opening all over this vast nation offering a wealth of exciting opportunities for EFL professionals.

Now we are looking for Academic Co-ordinator and Full time Teachers to EF China! Please contact: Mr Steven Hales (Academic Operations Manager) For AC Position steven.hales@englishfirst.com Ms. Lynn Xu (dealing with candidates from UK, Australian and New Zealand lynn.xu@englishfirst.com;) and Ms. Karen Zhou dealing with candidates from US, Canada and other countries karen.zhou@englishfirst.com) for Full Time Teacher Position.

Teachers can post CVs on the site & employers can post job adverts - both are free services at the moment.

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8. WEEKLY TEACHING TIPS

Free weekly practical teaching tips by e-mail. The Tips that we've had recently include:

- Elephants never forget. What about the younger learner? Sponsored spelling tests with proceeds going to the WWF.

- But don't you mean - a couple of activities to develop corrective stress awareness.

- If there's time ... on exploiting the activities rather than ploughing into another one.

- Mapping it out - ways of using a world map in class.

To see the Past Tips..

To sign up to receive them..

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ADVERTISEMENT

9. COURSES

Train in Spain - Courses running in the near future at the
British Language Centre in Madrid:

CAMBRIDGE CERTIFICATE IN ELT - CELTA
Full-time four-week courses, June, July, August, September '02

There is a Special Offer on CELTA course fees this summer - a 26%
saving on the June & July courses & an 18% discount on the August course. Places are limited so apply early to avoid disappointment.

CAMBRIDGE DIPLOMA IN ELT - DELTA
Two month full-time course: July & August '02

Reasonably priced accommodation can be arranged for the duration of all courses.

You can see brief descriptions of all of the current courses on the BLC web site http://www.cospa.es/blc/TED/ttframe.htm The postal address of Teacher Education at the British Language Centre is Calle Bravo Murillo 377, 2, 28020 Madrid, Spain. The phone number is (00 34) 733 07 39 & the fax number is (00 34) 91 314 5009. The e-mail address is ted.blc@cospa.es

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10. PS - Internet/computer-related links

http://www.refdesk.com/

A huge directory of Internet research and reference links.

http://www.viewhow2.com/gen.jsp?asn=rkxahpe&v=:vf:tkxwwsl:4:
harddrive_viewlet.html

Visual tips on cleaning out your hard drive.

'The internet brings people together' - the two sites below are what it's all about:

http://www.unusualmuseums.org/

Museums of all kinds - from the unusual to the bizarre.

&

http://totallyabsurd.com/absurd.htm

Totally absurd inventions - for example the 'Shoulder Saddle: Does your tiny tyke like to ride on your shoulders but you find it hard to hang on to fidgety feet? Have you recently discovered that your neck is starting to get a little diaper rash? Then you need the Shoulder Saddle! The saddle's plastic yoke fits over your head and the breastplate and back plate evenly distributes
the load. The breastplate also makes an effective kick guard. Now if you can just get your petite passenger to understand that slapping your ears repeatedly doesn't mean "go faster"!'

Or this one:

'Who doesn't like to eat? Whether it's a big juicy steak or tofu casserole, everyone likes to chow down. But American's can be a gluttonous lot and obesity abounds around our towns. Why? Because you people are eating too fast! Quit inhaling your food! Slow down, take a break and give your food some time to settle. Slower eating leads to feeling full before you've devoured an entire ten-course meal. Less food, less weight gain. And we're here to
help, with the amazing Alarm Fork. The rules: you can only eat when your fork gives you the green light. That's right, once you've shovelled some food into your mouth, the fork sensors cue the fork to emit a red light. And you know what that means, STOP! Now wait, tick, tick, tick, tick... ding! Green light, take a bite.' Think I might actually pick up half a dozen of those.

http://www.toshistation.com/funk/funk.htm

'Now is the time for your Silky Smoove Sensai to school you cats in some heavy-duty street-type knowledge. Servin' up the raw elements upon which a Players life doth evolve is just my way of givin' back to the community, baby (as in "doin' it for the kids").'

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11. THE BIT AT THE END

This newsletter is ReferWare. If you enjoy reading it and find useful information in this newsletter, you are asked to help spread the word about it. You can do this by forwarding a copy to your friends, telling them about it, and/or putting a link to http://www.developingteachers.com from your site. You cannot:

1.Post this newsletter in part or in whole on your site.
2.Forward this newsletter issue after issue to people - just send them a single issue and tell them to subscribe.

Has to be.

Disclaimer - all of the recommendations for computer-related software are personal recommendations. We take no responsibility for anything that might go wrong when downloading, installing or running them - not that anything should but you never know. It's your decision, your responsibility. The same applies to the jobs mentioned above. And anything else that you can think of that we might be responsible for as a result of this newsletter!

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