Inspiration to improve as a teacher

I'm totally sure all of us are such good as a teachers. But I think we could be better everyday if we think about everything we're making in the classroom and we could improve to help our pupils. At last, this will make us better and better at all.

To achieve this, we need only spend a little time on how we can do it. I recognize it isn't an easy task. However it must be a challenge for us and we have to do a big effort if we want to get better, of course!

Obviously I can't give you a magical formula but I can show you an amazing video called Every kid needs a champion where Rita F. Pearson sure will inspire you. I hope you enjoy it very much.

Do really parents help to transmit values through sport?

In most cases, of course not! I've been teaching basketball for many years and unfortunately I've seen awful behaviors of parents who are supposed to encourage their children. Instead of that, their favorite hobbies are shouting, insulting referees or criticizing coaches like me or even their own children. It's truly disgusting indeed.

Are they frustrated people who have wanted to be well known athletes as Nadal, Gasol or Iniesta? Maybe yes. But this shouldn't be an excuse for such a pathetic behavior. They should cheer them up all the time and let them enjoy their favorite sport. Not only winning is important but also to learn and have fun playing any sport.

You're going to see two significant files I found interesting. One of them where there are rules for parents on football matches. I thought it was a joke but I also found a video in which almost all of these standards are met. It was a science fiction short film? It's very idealistic but someday I would love to see this healthy environment in any field. Is it possible?

Which is the best linguistic program in Valencia ?

Nowadays it's very important to learn a foreign language like English but I think most of young people who left Primary School or High School don't speak fluently their mother tongue!! Even in case of Valencian children, both Valencian and Spanish languages. That's terrible!

Are they really prepared to learn rightly another language? I believe it's possible but we must work so hard. It's a tough task for us as a teachers that our children have the greatest interest in learning every language. Unfortunately, in my short experience as a teacher I've seen Valencian language isn't important for them, even they don't speak it in class. How sad is this!

I'm totally convinced our pupils have to learn all the three languages because they're very important to communicate each other. In case of Valencian language, this one belongs to our culture and I think we must never lose our place of origin like Spanish one. English is a universal language which allow travel around the world or meet new people and cultures everywhere.

However, the most important thing is our children are very motivated to learn them. This is not only the most important but the most difficult to achieve it. We certainly need time for this task but we mustn't waste it and start right now.

I've thought it would be an interesting idea to talk about the increasing importance of ICT at school. So I asked my friend and a Primary School teacher, Marc Torres, to tell us why it is necessary to introduce ICT. 

I hope you enjoy it a lot.

The use of ICT in English Lessons

The 21^st century has supposed a big change in our way of understanding the society. The ICT industry has developed lots of changes in our life like the mobile phones, tablets, computers or digital television.

All these changes cannot be separated from school. I conceived the education as the way of introducing children in the society. Because of this, we cannot introduce children in the society of the 21^st century using methodologies of the last century.

More over, the Information and Communication Technologies have good points to help the education to be more attractive to children.

Motivation is a psychological factor that makes children to be interested in the contents of the school. This factor can be intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on the interests of children. Thank to the ICT children will be more motivated to work, just because they are doing different things at school as well as they are working with technologies that they manage outside the school.

Motivation is even more important if we talk about the learning process of a new language. When children do not understand what they are doing they need an extrinsic motivation, and as I have said the ICT can assume this challenge.

Education has to bet for the ICT and it is important to train teachers to use these technologies in an education context.

In this way, there exist a lot of applications that can be used in an English lesson, some of them are free and some of them need to be paid. So it is not an excuse not to use them because they are expensive.

I have investigated some of these applications and I propose some of them in the way I consider them very useful in English lessons.

·         Blog: It is very useful to write all the things you are doing in class, so parents can know all the activities their children are doing. If you achieve your blog to be interactive, it will be much more useful. With the blog you can work the writing and the comprehension.

·         Google Earth: There is not better way of teaching a language that contextualizes it on its culture. A travel around the UK can be an exceptional way of teaching English based on a project.

·         Issuu: This application helps you to have your own magazine. This is very important to improve your children’s writing.

·         E-twinning: This is a platform created by the European Commission that includes all the schools of the EU that wants to take part on. More over, you can work in a project with other schools using the English as the vehicular language.

In conclusion, the ICT offer a huge fan of possibilities to teach a new language in the 21^st century. To include them in the school is not easy, but we have to make the effort of trying it and the results will be very positive.

 

Culinary Arts Integration

After reading this article, CulinaryArts Integration: 12 PBL Activities Students Can Sink Their Teeth Into, I've imagined a lot of possibilities I could work as a teacher with my pupils. We live in a country with such a wide and rich gastronomy that it would be a sin if we throw away it. The fact we live in the best place you can eat better indeed.

However, this culinary culture is not used at schools as an Arts Culinary subject. I think this is a big trouble because we don't maximize performance our cooking resources. That's should be an incentive to improve our knowledge about food and how to use them effectively and cross-curricular way in the classroom.

It probably is very difficult to integrate Arts Culinary in the daily lives of children at school but we must do an effort to do it because they will learn more and better. For instance, they can make some typical Valencian meals, like Paella or Fideua. Before that, they have to buy all the ingredients to make them so they will work with money, they have to calculate the right measures if they are going to prepare that meal for over forty people...

As you can see, Arts Culinary could be an interesting and amazing way to learn a lot. Maybe because I'm a cookery fan, I believe this may work perfectly at any school.

So if you want more information about this, if you click on the article link, you can read  this article with a few ideas that can help you.