Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

Another weekend, another workshop. This time, I’m in Mumbai, India, for training in the Primary Years Program, which is the elementary school component of the International Baccalaureate. So far, it’s mostly stuff I had already learned when a trainer visited our school earlier this year, but I think tomorrow’s sessions will get a little more [...]

At the Tech Train 2010 workshop last weekend, we played around with a variety of exciting online teaching tools. One was PhotoPeach. In a very short time, Colleen, Amy and I made this little video. It’s so easy! Even our young students could use it to create digital stories.

When I was in high school, our technology lessons involved writing binary code to create an animation of a launching rocket. Not very practical stuff. Today’s youth are digital natives who could probably launch a real rocket if they had the tools. They surf, tweet, post, click, e-mail, IM, SMS, download, upload, google, install, search, [...]

In the weeks leading up to the long winter break, children at school start getting excited. Their eyes glaze over during lessons, and when you toss a board marker at their heads to snap them back to reality, they often comment, “I was just thinking about our Christmas vacation!” Some will make the long journey [...]

As a teacher of English to kids who don’t speak English, I spend much of my time waving around flashcards, overenunciating vocabulary words, leading youngsters through silly songs with repetitive lyrics and actions, and contorting my face and body in ways that help communicate the mysterious language. I can’t say the word “book” without automatically [...]

At a school where … • one second-grade class comprises 12 nationalities, • many kids speak a different language with Dad than they do with Mom, • the elementary teaching staff represents 5 continents, • even the native English speakers get confused by each other’s accents, and • an impromptu lesson about an insect in [...]

Highlight of my week so far: I was on supervision duty in the open-air cafeteria, and I noticed quite a ruckus at the first-grade table. Several little boys were standing up and howling with laughter. When they saw me approach, they all sat down quickly and resumed eating their lunches. “What’s going on here?” I [...]

When Tony and I were preparing for the job fair last winter, he delegated the research to me. Not one to embrace change, he didn’t really want to leave China, but he understood that this “Third Culture Kid” needed to move on. I spent hours on the internet, schizophrenically obsessing about one school or another. [...]