Content and Language Integrating Learning Seminar

Learning to use google forms to create listening activities

2012-02-27T21:31:00.004+01:00

Here we are this video from you tube on Climate and Weather and an activity to help students understand it:

Cargando...

Lesson plans by Jamie Keddie

2012-02-27T20:00:00.001+01:00

Jamie Keddie is a European-based teacher, teacher trainer, writer and presenter. He is the founder of Lessonstream, the site that was formerly known as TEFLclips, winner of a British Council ELTons award.

Lessonstream was launched in 2011: It is a place where Jamie Keddie shares his lesson plans and teaching ideas. Most activities that are posted make use of visual material, especially online video. Content is published with a creative commons license which means that teachers are free to remix and republish the materials for non-profit purposes.

Have a look at some examples:

1) "The blue whale"

(Elementary - Upper-Intermediate. Topic: Science)

Are you interested in developing this topic with your students? See Jamie Keddie's engaging lesson plan:

Would you like your students to reconstruct the text in an entertaining way? Click here to get your Blue-whale-word-clouds.

How about generating word clouds yourself? Create the ones that you need for your purposes in an easy way with Wordle

2) "The Venus of Willendorf"

(Elementary and Pre-Intermediate. Topic: Art)

This is the lesson plan Jamie keddie suggests.

3) "Say that gramatically"

(Intermediate level. Language related to insurance and compensation. Grammatical variation. Dialects)

Interesting, isn't it? Click here to see the lesson plan.

An interview with David Marsh

2012-02-23T16:50:00.000+01:00

"CLIL (Content and LanguageIntegrated Learning)" (Cambridge University Press, 2010) was wrritten by Do Coyle, Philip Hood and David Marsh. Drawing ontheir experience of CLIL in Secondary schools, Primary schools and English languageschools across Europe, this book gives a comprehensive overview of CLIL. Itsummarises the theory which underpins the teaching of a content subject throughanother language and discusses its practical application, outlining the keydirections for the development of research and practice. This book acknowledgesthe uncertainty many teachers feel about CLIL, because of the requirement forboth language and subject knowledge, while providing theoretical and practicalroutes towards successful practice for all. Listen to this interview with David Marsh and you will get a clear insight into CLIL.

CALP in the classroom. Academic vocabulary

2012-02-10T13:51:00.001+01:00

Enhancing students’ Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency is a fascinating task though not an easy one. Although it is supposed that students at Secondary Education have been exposed to this type of language for many years, it comes as a surprise that they return written assignments using poor and basic vocabulary. It is time to expand their vocabulary and help them build up appropriate discourse.

This site will help you to expand your students' academic vocabulary using the Academic Word List (AWL). All students need to learn general academic vocabulary, words such as: feature, illustrate, regulate, strategy. By learning this core academic vocabulary, they will improve their comprehension of academic texts. It will also help them to write assignments in an academic style.

Current issues for teenagers on CNN Student News

2012-02-08T19:23:00.001+01:00

CNNStudentNews.com is a ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program for middle and high school students produced by the journalists and educators at CNN. This award-winning show and its companion website are available free of charge throughout the school year.

At CNNStudentNews.com, you'll find a wealth of teacher materials presented free of charge, including Daily Transcripts for each show, Daily Discussion questions, the Media Literacy Question of the Day, downloadable Maps and additional support materials to help students understand the news.

Some suggested teaching strategies:

- After viewing CNN Student News, use the Daily Discussion to help students discuss and understand the stories covered in the program. The questions are designed to promote critical thinking and are written for middle and high school students

- Distribute copies of the Daily Transcript and have students read the stories. Then, have students write their individual responses to that day's Daily Discussion questions or the weekly Newsquiz. This approach can be used to promote reading comprehension as well as in ELL classes.

January Seminar contents

2012-01-26T09:08:00.010+01:00

Just a few words to review main issues we dealt with last seminar:
Useful sites:

wordia: a powefful search engine tying together words, games and videos.
gooru: you can click on the Classplan Library to find a comlete taxonmy of lessons by clicking the link. The areas you will find are Math and Science.

Remember to register. Those sites are free and that way you may access to everything.

Strategies and techinques:

Dictoglos: Learners work in cooperative groups to recreate a text that has either been read aloud to the class by the teacher or presented as an audio recording. More info on it:

ICT skills:

Geo-location: learning how to use google maps to map up students' projects.

CLIL resources from our colleagues

2012-01-24T09:46:00.003+01:00

Here you are two wikis where you may get information, resources and ideas for Music and European Culture for DBH Students:

From here I would like to thank the teachers at Uribarri High School who have created these sites for sharing their work with all of us. They are using these wikis with their students following a CLIL methodology so their experience may be very very useful for all of us interested in CLIL.

Using geolocation in CLIL

2012-01-21T11:40:00.000+01:00

Geolocation, also called geotagging, is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location.
The Earth's surface has been mapped using a longitude and latitude coordinate for every location and technologies such as Google Maps allow for quick access to a geolocation.

Educational Applications

Alternative way of accessing geolocation data rather than textbook pictures
Opportunities for cross curricular activities to build knowledge beyond subject specific area
Address K-12 curricular outcomes in Science, Math, Social and Physical Education, Languages...
...

We think that developing geolocation tasks with Google Maps may be very useful in CLIL learning-teaching processes as students will have the opportunity to carry out tasks for different purposes while linking them to the real world. In addition to that, these activities may be very engaging for learners.

Here is a simple Google Maps tutorial:

and another sample map:

Ver Meñaka en un mapa más grande

New Year and soon a new seminar!

2012-01-16T09:32:00.001+01:00

Here you have a wonderful site, Interactive Websites for Student Engagement .
I hope you'll be able to find something interesting to match your students' needs.

Warmers and a comprehension strategy

2011-12-20T12:38:00.000+01:00

A warmer is an activity at the start of the class to warm up the learners. They tend to be short, dynamic activities. They also work as anticipatory strategies to create a learning atmosphere and foster eagerness to learn more on the topic. Here are just a few examples that may be very easily prepared and put into practice like games:

By the way, in case we don't know how to pronounce an English word, particularly a proper name, we may listen to the pronunciation of that word with this pronunciation dictionary.
In addition to that here is a so called "canned" strategy from SIOP that may be very useful to analyse different types of questions students must learn to ask in order to learn a given topic.

CLIL at IES Frederic Mompou de Sant Vicenç del Horts

2011-12-14T18:27:00.000+01:00

This High School has been implementing Science and Music in English for several years. Their lesson plans include the teaching objectives as well as the outcomes they expect from students. For each of the units they have developed a variety of tasks accompanied by timing, necessary resources and assessment clues.

Samples of Rubrics and Checklists for Assessment

2011-12-06T10:02:00.000+01:00

Here is Sheila Toth's oral presentation rubric. I think it is clear and simple so that students can also use it to assess their peers. This collaboration rubric may be very useful to assess the projectwork process: at the beginning: how far students are participating, sharing responsabilities; and while they are working on their projects: having conversations, reviewing each other's work, etc. Finally, this is a sample of power point presentation assessment sheet that you may find useful too.

Music in English

2011-12-05T17:19:00.000+01:00

Here you have Mª Jesús Camino Rentería's blog. There you'll be able to get activities and good ideas to help students improve their musical skills in English.

CIREL'S ready-to-use CLIL materials

2011-11-25T15:45:00.001+01:00

The CIREL website, an agency of the Education Department of the Catalan Government, offers a large bank of ready-to-use CLIL didactic units covering a wide range of topics of various subject areas for both Primary and Secondary school..

These materials have been designed by Catalan teachers during a paid-study leave in the UK and are displayed in two different blocks: one collects materials which cover 35 teaching hours; the other lists 6-10 teaching hours materials. Although Catalan is the vehicular language of the site, all worksheets, teacher’s guidelines, activities descriptions and further materials are written in English. It is really worth taking a look at them.

We would like to congratulate the teachers who have designed these materials for their great job and thank them for sharing it.

CLIL in Andalucia

2011-11-25T15:31:00.001+01:00

TheAndalusian regional ministry of education has published a bank of content materialsfor bilingual education.

They were designed foruse in CLIL classes (Social and Natural Science; Mathematics; Music; Sport; Technology and Art) at Primary and Secondary level in three L2s: English, French and German. Each unit isorganized around a specific content topic and covers 6-10 classroom sessions.The units open with an outline of content, linguistic andcompetence goals and each is accompanied by a teacher guide.

The units weredesigned by experienced CLIL teachers with methodological andlinguistic support from a team led by Francisco Lorenzo andincluding Pat Moore, both CLIL ReN members and researchers at the UniversidadPablo de Olavide´s Learning Research Centre Icárea.

These materials are available on-line (and free)at:

http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/educacion/webportal/web/aicle/

A webquest on Christmas

2011-11-23T09:53:00.003+01:00

Planning Christmas is a webquest created with google sites for students in their last level of primary education or DBH 1st level/ 1st cycle.

Task 6 shows a checklist for students to prepare their oral presentation to the class. The rubric for the whole webquest is in the assessment section.

As you may see, it proposes tasks for students to work on their own in pairs while the teacher moves around helping here and there. Students have to use web resources as well as the attachments uploaded by the teacher. Feel free to use it as it is or use anything you like about it!

Blogging around

2011-11-21T13:18:00.003+01:00

Just in case we decide to learn a bit on blogging, here is Felipe Zayas' concept map on blogs. He offers a general view on how blogs may be used for different purposes in the school context.

Here are some samples on how different English teachers are using blogs with their students and this is a document on blogging, just some basic general things.

Last but not least here are some tutorials in Basque created by Irene Gonzalez (B06 Berritzeguneko Aholkularia).

Films as an educational tool

2011-11-04T22:55:00.000+01:00

www.filmeducation.org provides award-winning teaching resources, teacher training and cinema based events which support the use of film within the curriculum. You can find some interesting resources on recent films both for Primary and Secondary level. (You won't be able to see the films but only some extracts from them)

University of Missouri: Content-rich online resources

2011-11-04T20:51:00.014+01:00

eThemes is a very powerful source for content-rich online resources that will help enhance your teaching and save you time. eThemes provides free, fast access to over 2,500 collections of websites, on a wide variety of topics.

You can either use keywords to search the database

or browse the entire list of topics which you will find listed alphabetically or by grade level.

Music: the unspoken word

2011-11-04T20:11:00.019+01:00

No matter what your age, nationality or social status are, music reaches deep inside all of us. It evokes feelings, memories and emotions. Therefore, no one wants to miss the experience and students are not the exception. So, why don't you make the most of the highly motivating power of music in your classes?

The site we propose will help your students to develop a higher understanding of music. It contains video interviews with worldwide known musicians, a research assistant, competitive quizzes and a wide range of content.

Click here to check it out.

Educational videos on different subjects

2011-11-04T13:57:00.010+01:00

www.neok12.com is a web site where you can find a great deal of educational videos, lessons and games on different areas.

For instance, you will find some of them on oceans with the corresponding activities and quizzes to check students' understanding.

Have a look at this one as a sample:

http://www.neok12.com/Oceans.htm

Science in English and other languages

2011-11-03T21:09:00.004+01:00

Here you have a web site which focuses on Science teaching and research. What makes it really valuable is the fact that it is written in many different languages so it can be very useful for your multicultural classes: www.scienceinschool.org

Project Based Learning

2011-11-02T18:25:00.000+01:00

This is site called Learning Reviews. Here are lots of websites with free Project Based Learning examples, guidance, rubrics, and templates

Learning to learn

2011-10-28T10:14:00.001+02:00

Here you've got B06 Jardunaldien bloga. so that you may get some info about the talks and good practice presentations that have taken place.

Education Scotland also offer interesting ideas and resources in his Approaches to Learning site.

In addition to that, this Resource Guide for Secondary Foreign Language Educators may be downloaded clicking on the link! It is really interesting and practical!

Visiting museums on line: The Art Project

2011-10-28T08:42:00.000+02:00

Do you know the Art Project? It is a wonderful tool for students to explore different museums from around the world and discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels:

Arts Alive

2011-10-28T08:26:00.002+02:00

Click on the picture to visit this Canadian site where lots of ideas and resources may be found to work on drama, music and dance.

More on CLIL

2011-10-20T12:47:00.001+02:00

Here you are this Criteria for Producing CLIL Learning Materials website. There are a lot of ideas to think over!

Learning about CLIL

2011-10-10T13:26:00.004+02:00

Welcome to the seminar

2011-10-09T15:14:00.001+02:00

This blog has particularly been created to be used as a meeting point for teachers involved in our Learning in a CLIL context seminar , so that we may exchange views, worries, all types of ideas and resources. It will be up to us how useful it becomes and I think it will be a success!
Please, feel free to comment anything you wish/ ask about something you need, so that we all may help each other!