My ELT Bubble

Padlet has become an endless teaching tool. I discovered it in a workshop I did around 2 years ago. Since then, I’ve been using it with different purposes: To do an initial diagnosis of what students know about a topic. To monitor students’ interests and motivations. To collect students’ questions and/or contributions about a topic. To present the written result of a learning process. During the lockdown, I realized I could also use it to record students voice among many other options such as uploading a file from the computer, including a direct link, google search, take a photo or a film from the device, record the screen, draw, add a location, or add a link to another Padlet. Encouraging speaking when teaching a foreign language is always a challenge and we are always looking for activities that motivate students to speak. I started a radio programme at school (it was not in English) and we have to stop it because of the lockdown. Then, a couple of weeks at home it occ...

During the lockdown, I learned about gamification, so I decided to create an educative escape room of my own called “Back to dinosaurs’ world”. The idea is to crack some passwords to reach the next level. The challenge was to find some young dinosaurs lost in the woods and bring them back to their families before the Cretaceous Period end with the extinction of the dinosaurs. The topic was not in my social sciences syllabus but as some students were quite motivated about those creatures, I managed to include it in my English class by emphasizing the reading comprehension activities, and the searching of information. Students had to move through the Mesozoic era: the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous period by entering the correct password. The tools I used to create it were: Google sites:                 I created the main page with the introduction to the game. Then, I duplicated it with the Mesozoic era, the Triassic, the Jura...

Last school year I planned to cover the contents about history with 10-12-year-old kids. Despite I find it rather fascinating as I studied humanities in my pre-college studies, I am aware the topic might not seem so captivating for students unless I made them feel involved in it.  As teachers, we are also responsible for ensuring our students will contribute to making a fairer world in many aspects. When regarding the History topic I thought about including the GENDER PERSPECTIVE and GENDER EQUALITY as part of the project considering the following definitions in order to avoid gender stereotypes and break the classical gender barriers: ·          Gender equality  implies to  correct gender discrimination  and value the rich differences                between genders. ·          Gender perspective  refers to the analysis of the  feminine presence  in cer...

Writing stories is usually a great deal for students, not only when they are writing in their L2 but also in their L1. Two aspects I take in consideration when preparing writing lessons are:             1. To ensure that students know all the parts for a consistent and organized                     writing.              2 . To promote creativity in class though ideas generation. This article focuses on the second idea in order to avoid students saying “I don’t have any idea to write”. I created these templates to help students develop creativity when dealing with narrative. Students work as a group to contribute with their ideas in a board or poster created with the templates. There is a template for general ideas, one for the beginning, middle and end part of stories.   Students can write or draw ideas and stick them in the poster using a...

  Three years ago, I was teaching English as a foreign language to 7-year-old kids. For me, teaching this age is a great challenge as I find these young ones extremely demanding in a challenging way. Once I pass through the door, I know I need to have a set of activities prepared, all following a logical order and with multiple options just in case they don't find an activity enough motivating. However, there is a classic learning experience that always works no matter how old it is, Winnie the Witch's stories. Going back to when I was studying my teaching degree, we analysed some children’s books. One of them was “Winnie the Witch”. I actually sounded very familiar, so I assumed Winnie was one of this famous British characters such as Wallace & Gromit and I thought I had probably read it when I was a kid myself as a children’s classic. The day came when talking to my school language assistant I mentioned using some of Winnie’s books. My assistant was British, and she w...

Hello teacher, if you are reading this article it means every time you hear the word grading you try to run as far as you can scared of facing the endless and tedious task of writing the report cards of your students. However, you know (and I know it too) that the further we can go is our office laptop and finish the reports. If you are still reading is because you probably have that feeling that there is something more behind this final grading and you might ask yourself “How did my students got those marks?”, “Are they fair?”, “Do my students understand what they really mean?”. To sum up “WHY DO I LOVE ASSESSMENT ALTHOUGH I FIND GRADING A BORING TASK?” My key to find assessment so interesting is to ensure it to be part of my everyday lessons, not only as a way to collect information (to use it for boring grading) but also, and more important, to ensure my students become aware of what they are learning , why they are learning , where they are in the learning process , and what they n...