Miss Henstra's Classroom

While browsing the eTwinning projects and related ICT tools I felt a little overwhelmed. There are so many tools and they all look great, so for now it feels like I am collecting ideas at a really high speed without a practical idea of how to use them. I will talk about the tools more in upcoming posts, after I have had some time to try them out ans assess their usefulness. The projects I saw were also interesting, but many of them were very impractical for my teaching situation. I am a secondary school teacher and my subject is English - doing a project together with other subjects such as geography or the sciences is not yet possible in our school situation, so I need to make or find a project that focuses mostly on language skills and also, very importantly, will help my students along to reach their goals for this year - it can't just be fun to do! One such project that really spoke to me was the "Hotel rules" project which you can find here: https://twinspace.et...

I am unstoppable. Or crazy. Or a bit of both, I guess... Today I joined another MOOC, on Futurelearn, from the British Film Institute and Into Film. It's on how to use film to improve literacy in the English classroom. You can find it here:  https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-literacy-through-film I'm excited about how this course will provide tools for me to use in the classroom. I've always used film with assignments to motivate my pupils more and to create enjoyable lessons, but this course brings theory and practice together. Please check out the great resources on Into Film as wel!  https://www.intofilm.org/resources

I found a great link today that I want to share with you! On this website you can find stories to practice all twelve tenses of English. http://www.really-learn-english.com/english-grammar-tenses.html I'll be sure to use these with my students next year, looks like a great way to get them to practice the tenses in a different way. Have you used these? What are your experiences?

In week 2 of the Open eTwinning MOOC we were challenged to analyse our own teaching practice. What would we like to improve? What new things do we want to try? What is not going well? The brainstorming was collected on this padlet board: Created with Padlet My addition was: 1. What can I improve? I would like to make my lessons more engaging and be able to let go of the set textbooks more often and use my own material instead or as supplement. I would like to use more collaborative learning and more learner autonomy. 2. What would I like to try? I would like to try to design and participate in an etwinning project, focusing on oral fluency and intercultural competency.  3. What am I not happy with? I'm not happy with the way my students are turning into consumers. They expect me to do the learning for them and are not motivated to learn. Many of them don't have a growth mindset. 4. Is there anything which is not working? When browsing the projects I saw many projects ...

This is another list of tools and projects that are interesting for eTwinning and teaching in general. Again, it belongs to the eTwinning MOOC, but I would like to keep it on here as well, for reference. I'm going to add Screencastify as a tool myself, it's a tool that helps you create flipped lessons, for instance. Enjoy the list, lots of interesting things there and it's still growing! Open eTwinning View more lists from sna-etwinning-esp

This list of multimedia tools was provided for the MOOC on eTwinning, but is useful for teachers and students alike in other context. That's why I have decided to create a separate blogpost about it. I have only tried a few of these services, Storybird for instance. Have you tried any? Do you have links to add that I should try out? Please leave suggestions and reviews in the comments. Presentaciones 3, 2, 1 ... Nos conocemos mejor. View more lists from M Jesús García San Martín

One of the first assignments was to create a multimedia presentation about ourselves, and share it online on Facebook, Twitter and our blog. Assignment: Tell us 3 aspects you want us to know about you. 2 activities that you could not stop doing for anything in the world. 1 dream job you would do if you were not a teacher. You can find my presentation here: Storybird presentation

This week I joined a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) about eTwinning. In this course we will collaborate with teachers from all over Europe and the rest of the world to get to know the eTwinning platform, and design projects as well as get to know ICT tools to use in eTwinning. If you want to know more about eTwinning, read up about it on this page: www.etwinning.net As you can see from the map with all of our locations, we're from all over the place! I'm really excited to have joined such an international community of teachers, and I'm looking forward to engaging with them on my blog as well as on Twitter (#twinmooc) and Facebook! You can follow the twitterfeed in my sidebar. During the next couple of weeks I will be posting on all of the assignments, the first of which was pinning a marker to the map above, and...starting a blog!

Miss Henstra's classroom is the place where I... ... post interesting teaching news, information on TEFL, lesson plans, links to other teaching blogs and anything relevant I find online or make myself for other teachers to use as inspiration. ... write blogs about language and teaching in general. ... host my own Professional Learning Environment, in which I share my learning journey with my readers. Please use the labels in the sidebar to guide you to relevant posts! Sharing knowledge is exciting and important. I hope you will join the discussions on this page and share your ideas and journeys with me!