Míriam Sans Borch

The Centre de Formació d’Adults el Vendrell has been awarded with the 1st place of this English contest for schools in Catalonia. So proud of our students! You can watch the video here. We are going to Barcelona to participate into the final phase. The Fonix is a recognised contest and this year is the 12th edition.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nEK5FsPnn0&list=PL2w-W8Ny5yOrZsmyRmKvOiqit9wal0_Vg&index=4&t=0s[/youtube]

Do you want to learn a concept that will help you improve your students’ scores? It is called Blended Learning and in here you will find more information about it as well as some tools to create a more effective lesson. https://www.educatorstechnology.com/2018/08/blended-learning-explained-for-teachers.html

I have found a very interesting pdf about comics which is embedded in this link: Comics as a Storytelling Tool. It is a good article from Sean Banville where you can find several webpages devoted to comics to develop a comic strip with your students or for them.

Manga Maker is a good tool to create some tasks for the students or make them create new ones. Here you have one I have written to work with Indirect Speech.

-About Classroom games by Ryan O’Donnell, I have seen that I am a little bit outdated or not but I have found very interesting Quizizz, (I use to work with Kahoot) because you can set homework for your students and they will be engaged as it is a game and they can see the results in real time. I will use even more Quizizz rather than the «old» games.

-In Games for Sustainability I have found an outstanding source of games to get our students motivated at the same time they are learning English. There are plenty of games but they are special because they are also taking care about the planet and the people as its goals are “green” and “loving”.

For instance, Bury me, my love is a game in which there is a couple who has to live apart because they lived in Syria but she decides to move to Europe and they just can communicate through a chat. The player represents to be Nour, the boy, and he/she has to help Majd, the girl. So Majd will have some problems during her trip and the player will provide some support to Majd to achieve her goals about living in Europe. It is a perfect game to learn English but also to learn about real problems like the Syrian Civil War, problems refugees generally have and to work on empathic feelings. By the way, “bury me” is a Syrian expression and it means take care.

Unfortunately you need to pay for the game, but it is a cheap one.

-Sorry for being so naïve but looking at the infography I have realised games are much more important for our students than I expected. Games give people “freedom of effort, fail, fashion identities, interpretation and experiment”. I am going to work hard to find the best games for my students because they learn and are more engaged.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/the-peppa-effect-canadian-kids-adopting-english-accent-parents-report-1.4295152

I have read “Have a look at 22 ways to use social media in the classroom” and in the second paragraph Matthew Lynch writes this about Twitter “Tweet about homework, field trips, and share what’s going on in your classroom”. In order to go on with this I would like to talk about my experience. I do not use Twitter to set homework for my students but at the beginning of the course I make them to create a Whatsapp group in which just one of them, the class representative, writes about the homework I’ve set every day. And it really works. No one can say he/she didn’t know about the homework because everyone has the app and sees the messages.

For me, there has been a paragraph that stands out in Tom Hayton’s article. In “Using Social Media in the Classroom” he points out the importance of minors. And it has made me think about the legal problems I could have if the students under 18 (some of them) download some tools or use their personal data to create some account. Hayton is right saying “teachers must be aware” in his conclusion.

Astonishing. I have never been addicted to alcohol or smoking but I can hear many people trying to quit them and I can not believe that “tweeting is harder for people to resist than cigarettes and alcohol” due to dopamine. In “What Makes Us Addicted to Social Media: The Psychology Behind Dependence” Irfan Ahmad talks about how difficult is to give up being connected to social media. Now I can say I’m addicted to it too.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_-WILrj474#action=share[/youtube]

Welcome but it’s under construction.

My name is Míriam and I have been teaching English in language schools and in different primary, secondary and adult schools since 2005. My motto is a sentence from A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: “If you fail, never give up because F.A.I.L. means First Attempt in Learning”. Knowing a language is difficult but effort and decision are key.