Category Archives: Webinars

Motivating young teenagers – a webinar for OUP Croatia

This evening’s OUP webinar for teachers in Croatia was particularly memorable – and enjoyable. It started off with an unwitting Elvis Presley impression, gathered momentum with a serendipitous mug of tea and peaked with a fun activity involving smartphones. A big thanks to all the teachers in Croatia who took part.

My unfortunate Las Vegas moment

Twenty minutes or so before the recording started I thought I would turn on my mic and camera to check the video and audio. Guess what? My younger daughter had been skypeing on my laptop earlier in the day. When I switched my video camera on the people already in the room (mercifully, there were not many of them) were confronted by this:

elvis wigWhat do you think? I’ve been known to do Elvis impressions during karaoke – but in a professional webinar? Luckily, everyone saw the funny side, and I banished the King back to Graceland.

Lucky (tea) break

Other things turned out perfectly. After our embarrassing Elvis moment, my daughter was sweet enough to bring me a cup of tea. Only after the webinar had started did I notice she had made it in our summer holiday souvenir mug from the Dalmatian coast – complete with the chequered red-and-white motif of the Croatian flag. All the participating teachers were from Croatia, so there were plenty of appreciative thumbs up. That was nice 🙂

Smartphone activity

The focus of the webinar was motivating young teenagers and there was quite a bit of discussion about  the best way to make lessons engaging for young digital natives. One of the most popular ideas uses the technology that all our students carry around with them in their pockets: mobile phones.

For these activities based on describing photographs, all you need is a mobile phone.
using smartphones pictures in class

The point of the activity is to get students interested in describing pictures. If we ask them to bring in a picture of themselves and their family from home, they often forget. These days, however, most of them carry about entire galleries of photos of friends and family in their pockets.

Here are four simple activities using the photographs stored on students’ phones.

Ask five questions: Work in pairs. Look at the photo on your partner’s phone and ask five questions about it.

Listen and draw: Select a photo. Describe what is in the picture. Students draw. This picture dictation activity can also be done in pairs.

Guess what is happening: Look at your partner’s photo and guess where it was taken, when it was taken, who the people in the photo are, and what they are doing. Your partner will tell you what you were right about.

Tell a story using everyone’s pictures: Work in a group of three  or four. Everyone selects a photo on their phone and places it on the desk where the others can see it. Together, construct a short story that includes and combines what is in each of the pictures.

 

Webinar – Good to go: Engaging one-off lessons with teenagers

Thanks to those who took part in this webinar. Being called on at short notice to go in and cover for a colleague is one of the “known unknowns” of teaching – we know it is bound to happen at some point, but it always manages to take us by surprise. It was enjoyable for me to have this opportunity to share some of the ideas for coping with these situations that I have managed to scrape together over the years.

Here is a link to a recording of the webinar for those that missed it.