Easter Monday 22 April

23 April 2019

This morning we walked the city walls again which was very nice. Bendix was wearing his "Roman" helmet and his sword and he kept telling people that he was watching out for enemies. Most people found it highly amusing.

Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

Now in class we are working on our blogs ... I'll try to drag a picture in here, so sit back, relax, and enoy!

It worked!!

(Gosh, I'm clever. Thanks, Rick!)

Now we are asked to write about yesterday's class. Here is a short summary of what we did yesterday:

As an ice breaker, we worked in pairs and showed each other pictures on our phones. The other person then gave a short introduction to the whole group.  Then we loked at Google Forms and set up quizzes.

Thursday, 18 April 2019
This morning, we went on the walking tour Adriana recommendend, and it was very good. The tour guides are volunteers, and you can feel that they really enjoy showing people their city. We still want to walk the whole city walls one of these days.

In class today, we again had ample opportunity to try out various interesting sites and apps. We used coggle to create a mindmap, thereby doing a review of topics covered so far. We had a closer look at ted.com resp. ed.ted.com and talked about ways to integrate those into our teaching. We then had a longer session trying out video editing, using MovieMaker or Shortcut.  Then we had another go at kahoot, quizlet and quizizz, creating quizzes and trying them out. While writing this, Adriana and Rick are discussing quizizz at which I will have a look right now.

Wednesday, 17 April

Yesterday after class Martin led a tour through the "snickets", the little alleyways throughout the old city centre. Bendix was getting tired by then, so I took him home. This morning, the two of us went to the "Jorvik Viking Centre" which was very cool. Bendix and Dietrich went there yesterday morning, but Bendix wanted to go back. It is a fascinating museum which shows how people in Viking York lived and worked. Visitors travel in a little "time capsule", and not only can you look at alarmingly real-seeming dolls (they move, they talk, they sing, they seem to follow you with their eyes), but you get to see how streets might have looked like, how people did their work as potters, weavers, butchers...it was very impressive.

Class was very good again, Rick had posted a video on Edmodo about new technology ("A helpdesk in the Middle Ages") which was very funny. We had a lot of hands-on activities like creating tests, setting up exercises using images from the internet, searching for appropriate photos and creating a comic strip using Storyboardthat. I'll post my comic strip here:

https://www.storyboardthat.com/de/storyboards/siwi77/lost-comic/copy

Let's see if that works - I am very proud of this because I cannot really draw and yet this is a full-fledged cartoon ...

Tuesday, April 16

What I particularly like about this course ist that there are so many opportunities to try things out for which there never seems to be time in normal life. We all know that there are a myriad of  cool things on the internet, but I for one never get around to sitting down on a weekend to sort through the 50 or so most interesting apps for language teaching. So I really enjoy getting an assortment of various apps - and what is important, Rick always makes us think about what we would really use them for, what kind of exercices they enable, how our students would see them. That really is great.
Here is a short summary of what we did today:

• We started with Google maps and StreetView and looked at various ways to use maps or pictures when designing exercises
• „Close ups“: We then took pictures of everyday things in close up and made a quiz out of the pictures: Where were they taken? What is it?
• We looked at various apps (youtube, Twitter, TED...) and signed up for Edmodo 
• We then tried out Spreaker and in pairs created a short podcast
• Had a look at Socrative which can be used to create quite a competitive atmosphere in a class and is simply fun

Day One

April 14, 2019

Arrived in York by train yesterday afternoon and found our holiday flat in a wonderful location very close to the city centre. We walked around town for two hours, did some shopping, went to see where the school was, and went back to have dinner in an Indian restaurant where Bendix  had a large bowl of plain rice and two large poppadums, but nothing else. The kid seems to be in need of carbohydrates...
After four days in North Wales, York seems crowded by comparison. (NB: We don't believe this thing about the bad weather in Wales: we had beautiful sunny weather and virtually no wind for three days in a row. We suspect it's a trick to keep the tourists out...). It was great to see Gabi, Dylan and their kids, and we are still very impressed by their multilingual daily life. Bendix loved playing with Eigra and Gwern, and he was sad we had to leave. He also misses the two dogs, Pero and Vic.



April 15, 2019

Classes started today - 9 am for Dietrich, who was able to take a few lessons  on short notice. My ICT course started at 1 pm, it's a small group and we will be able to try out lots of things. So far, we discussed some tools which will come in handy: we started with menti.com which enables teachers to set-up interactive poll-taking activities. After that, we looked at different Google apps and their uses, and now the task is to create a blog on blogspot. I still have to figure out how to get the pictures from my phone into the blog, so here goes...