About Me

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Portugal
I am from Coimbra, Portugal, and am currently teaching in a school in Soure, about 30 km away from Coimbra. I have been a teacher of English for over 20 years and have already taught different levels and age groups. After all this time I can say I love working with adult groups because there are no coursebooks and I can create my own resources. I am an avid reader, a blogger and very curious about free tools and their implementation in the classroom.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Read, Think and... Write!

Read Write Think has an awesome array of free classroom resources  which are really cool for ESL teachers. Today I'm sharing what I've created for The Great Gatsby (book) and its author, Scott Fitzgerald,  but I have used these resources before and one of them very recently to write poetry. If you missed it then, please check this and the results here.
Taking advantage of the new film adaptation (therefore my new interest to reread Fitzgerald's masterpiece - check it here) I tried out some other resources by Read Write Think.
I chose Cube Creator to display info on the book itself. Here's a screenshot of how it looks like:



My option was Story Cube where I could "map out the key elements of a story", in other words, I entered the required information according to the six distinctive parts / topics. When all is complete, we can print it and fold it to have a cube as you can see below; we can also save or email it.



Then, using a different interactive resource, the Trading Card, I filled it in with Scott Fitzgerald's biodata.
Here's how it looks like when you begin:
Again, after filling it in with all the required data, we can print it, cut it and even laminate to have a card, and download it as a pdf document and / or email it. Here's the final product:
I must say I found these two interactive tools simply great for organising and summarising data.
In this case, I used these two free resources to prepare materials for classes and though I did it for a book and an author, we can use them on movies, environmentalists, singers, actors - you name it! However, just like I've done with the acrostic poems resource I've already mentioned, why not ask our students to do them themselves??? These are free web tools which they can use either in the classroom or for homework tasks. They can do it individually or in pairs and then email us for correction. Something also great about these Read Write Think resources is that one can save the draft and change / add whenever we wish to. With the final cubes and / or cards, sts can always review stuff, ask questions to classmates, play a guessing game,...
Asking students to do this will surely be funnier, engaging and memorable once they will have to scan and skim loads of info before being able to write and go straight to the point - oh yes, because there's always a word limit!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Making images interactive

thinglink.com
Thinglink is definitely one of my favourite tools at the moment. I've already used it in my classes and in teacher training courses and here are some of the reasons why I'm so excited about it:
- it's a neat tool for creating interactive and collaborative images in our classroom or as a homework task;
- we / collaborators can tag images with any content (including videos, sounds and music from different sources) and then we can also share it (by email, in Facebook, Twitter, blog...);
- the chosen images come alive not only with what you can tag but also by adding colourful pins.
This school year I'm teaching a Tourism and Hospitality class and as far as possible I've been trying to develop materials that can somehow be useful to them or even to the community. I took pics in Soure and produced this video and, in class, I shared this Thinglink  (below) - a  map of Soure and its twelve civil parishes - so that learners could tag with relevant content. Here is the result - simple but effective!


Now, how is it done? Again, simple!
1st register at http://www.thinglink.com/
2nd click "Create" and choose an image - upload from hard-drive, import from Facebook or public Flickr images, or enter a link to an image on the web;
3rd In Edit give your image a title and set permissions
4th Share the image - you'll get a link to share with sts and / or get the embed code and paste it into a blog post.
Here is another one I've just created - this time to practise the Present Continuous - and open for all to add tags - so feel free to tag if you wish to do so.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Thank you MOM

In Portugal, Mother's Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of May - today! - which means Mums should be pampered and spoilt no matter how old they / we are : =))

To My Mother, Christina Rossetti (1842)


To-day's your natal day,
Sweet flowers I bring;
Mother, accept, I pray, 
My offering.

And may you happy live,
And long us bless;
Receiving as you give
Great happiness.

(Note: this is C. Rossetti's first poem, written when she was just 11 years old)

made on Wondersay - Animate text with style
Happy Mother's Day to all Mothers. Thank you, Mom, and thank you to my two wonderful boys who made me a MOM!!!
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