Say What We Do and Do What We Said

Chapter Outline ·          Word games ·          Quiz time ·          Being sociable ·          Give them their head Every teacher hopes that children will enjoy English lessons and each of us realizes that we need at times to take on take on the role of entertainer. For many students the varied activities of English enjoyable, with discussions and debates, stories, language games and plenty of social interaction. There are, however, times when we must admit we’re all in need of entertainment, whether so sweeten some repetitive task or brighten the end of the day. If even Plato said, ‘ Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play, we can feel justified in using ICT along with other methods to make learning more fun. The accounts of activities in earlier chapter have, we hope, demonstrated a variety of ways in which ICT can engage students, often for periods of intense concentration, in ways that will be enjoyable as well as educational. In this chapt

.                Blogging to boost writing In many respects, communication and collaboration are the culmination ofactivities described in earlier chapters. Many of those, of course, work best as collaborative activities, whether working on a presentation or making a short video. The opportunities for communication and collaboration include: ·           Mass access to information, both in school and outside school. ·           Communal participation in the construction and editing of text. ·           Publication and sharing of creative work, instantly, to a worldwide audience. ·           Flexible and dynamic forms of interaction and discussion across a range of distances. ·           A variety of ways of sharing problems, solutions and ideas. A collaborative activity can make finding a piece of information vital. As has been made clear earlier, students also need to be able to assess the accuracy of anything they find on the internet and detect any signs of bias.

In a traditional classroom we would expect to experience presentation in the form of the class talk or the finding of some research augmented by visual aids, flip charts or posters. Performances would take the form of drama, poetry reading and so on. The modern classroom still includes these elements but it also offers a greater range of possibilities. The key piece of equipment in this is the digital or data-projector, now a common if not standard piece of equipment and one which has in many schools revolutionized the teaching of English. Other ingredients in the form of equipment are the interactive whiteboard and the visualizer. 2.1     Re-presenting written work English teacher have always been suspicious of the use of word processors to type up fair copies of handwritten work, sometimes which many pupils quite like as it gives the outward appearance og productive work while using a minimum brainpower. On occasions this can be a necessary of mindless chore, perhaps when