why punctuation is important

Are you familiar with jigsaw reading?

Though this is a very famous and trendy technique, many teachers and student teachers may not know what this is exactly about.

Jigsaw is a cooperative learning strategy that enables each student of a "home" group to specialize in one aspect of a topic (for example, one group studies habitats of rainforest animals, another group studies predators of rainforest animals). Students meet with members from other groups who are assigned the same aspect, and after mastering the material, return to the "home" group and teach the material to their group members. With this strategy, each student in the "home" group serves as a piece of the topic's puzzle and when they work together as a whole, they create the complete jigsaw puzzle.

In the jigsaw form of instruction, the target material is divided, usually into four parts, and distributed to small groups to learn.

When these homogeneous groups have mastered their material, students regroup into heterogeneous groups to present material and complete a task.
Peer teaching and group problem solving are used to complete the jigsaw.

Initially, your classroom would look like this:

A A            B B            C C            D D    

A A            B B            C C            D D

Once students have mastered their material, your classroom would look like this:

A B            A B             A B            A B   

C D            C D            C D            C D

watch an example !

•  Advantages of this techniques

1. Students have the opportunity to teach themselves, instead of having material presented them. The technique fosters depth of understanding

2. Each student has practiced it in self-teaching, which is the most valuable of the entire skill teacher can help them learn.

3. Students have can practice in peer teaching, which requires that they understand the material at deeper level than student typically do when simply asked to produce an exam

4. Students become more fluent in use of English

5. Each student has a chance to contribute meaningfully to discussion, something that is difficult to achieve in large group discussion. Each student develops an expertise and has something important to contribute.

6. Asking each group to discuss a follow-up question after individual presentation fosters real discussion. (Tewkesburry (2008 : web.grcc.edu))

•  Disadvantages of this technique

1. It takes much time to organize the group

The teacher should make groups that combine the students who have different intelligences

2. If students don’t get into their group quickly enough or read their initial texts quickly enough, it will run out of time.

3. If one or two obstinate students don’t participate a whole group or two will lose out on a piece of the text.

4. The class situation become noisy, so the teacher needs to control the students

5. A teacher cannot monitor all groups at once.

-Sources-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtm5_w6JthA
http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/jigsaw/
http://www.k12academics.com/pedagogy/jigsaw-classroom

for teachers and learners

are you looking for some listening activities?
these two sites may be useful

• http://www.esl-lab.com/---> Randall's site. I love it because it has a variety of topics. The audios are levelled and they come with different activities. useful for both teachers and learners on their own

• http://www.listenaminute.com/  -----> A great site where you can find recordings related to a variety of topics. 

A really interesting site !

http://www.classtools.net/

Hi everybody ! This is a great site for teachers who want to innovate in their lessons. You can create fictional facebook profiles; there is an sms generator, timeline-makers, and more !
hope you find it useful

Can we change the world from the classroom?

It is not necessary to go deep in the subject to realize that the reality of the classroom is becoming harder. This is, of course , related to the fact that society is becoming harder. Nowadays in the classroom we find a variety of situations that hinder learning as we know it: teachers trying to teach a foreign language when students have difficulties even with manipulating their own mother tongue; teachers who are afraid of being robbed at the end of the lesson, cases of suicides, violence, poverty, and so on.

As educators, we have two alternatives; either to lie on the “there’s-nothing-I-can-do” side, and act as robots, repeating routines until our retirement; or take a more optimistic attitude and think that we can, at least, make a small contribution to our students.

Evidently, it is easier to take the first alternative. Keeping an optimistic perspective is a challenge and not all teachers are willing to respond to it. A challenge implies a potential risk:  teachers are likely to feel frustrated for not reaching the results they expect. But in order not to give up we must be aware that, more often than not, we won’t be able to see instant results. This shouldn’t demotivate us: we must be convinced that even the smallest action will have an effect on, at least, one of our students and that we can make the difference.

I also think we should set realistic goals. We cannot expect to change the world in the blink of an eye. Maybe instead of thinking of “Changing the World” we should think of “changing our students’ world”.  Being realistic also means that we should be happy to know that we could help at least one of our students. 

That’s how we can start making the difference

Here are some motivational quotes that I loved ! I hope you like them: