"A Journey in TEFL"
For the past two weeks I Have been reading and commenting on Eva Buyuksimkesyan’s blog “A Journey in TEFL”. In her post, Ms. Buyuksimkesyan tells of activities that she uses with her students in hope that her viewers can use them with their students. In the first post I read on her blog, she shared some activities that she used when teaching her students how to describe. Out of the five activities that Ms. Buyuksimkesyan shared, I like her “Ideal Holiday Destination” activity the best. During this activity, 10 postcards of holiday destinations are displayed. The teacher will have the students walk around and choose a postcard and then have them go back to their seat and write a letter to a friend telling them about them why they should choose the destination for their next holiday. In my comment to Ms. Buyuksimkesyan, I told her that I really enjoyed reading her post and that I thought the activities that she mentioned were very fun and creative. I also told her that I really liked her activity “Ideal Holiday Destination”, and that I would definitely be using with my future students. A few days after I commented on her post, Ms. Buyuksimkesyan wrote me back telling me that she had checked out my EDM blog and that she was really glad that I chose to comment on her blog.
In the second post I read, Ms. Buyuksimkesyan tells about how her students were having problems understanding the meaning of sentences. She talks about an exercise that she gives the students to helps them practice understanding the meaning of things. Ms. Buyuksimkesyan states that, at the end of the exercise, she put a quote which she then turned into another exercise. In the exercise, she omitted the modal verbs to have the students fill in the gap to give them practice. In her post, she includes many ideas of exercises that would be great for teachers to practice with their students. I really liked Ms. Buyuksimkesyan’s wordle exercise idea. In this exercise, she took a quote and turned it into a wordle, much like the wordle we did at the beginning of the semester, and had the students try to guess the quote. In my comment, I told Ms. Buyuksimkesyan thank you for sharing her great ideas. I told her that I really liked her Wordle activity idea, and that I would definitely be using it with my future students. I really enjoyed reading Ms. Buyuksimkesyan’s blog, she shares so many fun and creative ideas. I will definitely continue to keep up with her blog.
I think one of my favorite things about this class is commenting with teachers on their blogs. You can see teachers really using technology in their classrooms to help them teach. You can also get so many great ideas. I really love the Worldle activity that you described.
ReplyDeleteI blogged with a teacher who was playing a math game (Guess our number) over Skype with another class. They asked each other questions about their number and the first class to guess the other classes number was the winner! You could see how excited the students were and that they loved working with their new virtual friends.
I also love looking at some of the teachers favorite sites and groups. You can get some good ideas of sites to follow when you are a teacher. Teachers always love sharing ideas and with todays technology it is now so much easier to do!