Stop lecturing!

We all have had lecture classes, and I am sure that most of us can say that most of our classes were lectures. However, it is very very BORING! Think about it. How many times have you sat through a booooring speech, and just wanted the speaker to finish talking? How do you think students, …

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Google Docs–How to Make a Quiz that Will Grade Itself

Google Docs–How to Make a Quiz that Will Grade Itself I talked about making quizzes using Google Docs in my last post. The quizzes have a wide variety of uses, but this time I am going to tell you how to create a quiz that will grade itself. One caveat, and it is a large …

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Making a Quiz in Google Docs–Easy, Simple, and Fast

Google Docs–How to Make a Quiz for your Students in Google Documents Using Google Docs, today, I am going to show you how to make a quiz.  First we will make a basic quiz.  Then, in my next post, I will show you how to set it up for grading, and finally, how to make …

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Writing by Hand Is Good for your Brain.

An article in Newsweek reported something that most teachers know. Writing by hand, not on a keyboard, is good for your brain. These are from two different articles.  This is the gist: Brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing. Bonus brain boost: it’s easier to remember something once you’ve …

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Stuck with an Awful Textbook? Tips for People Teaching in Japan

Are you stuck with an awful textbook in your English class? Here is what to do. First though, why do you have an awful textbook?  The university, high school or whatever wants you to use it simply because they are not sure that you know what you are doing.  In some cases, they also want …

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Stop lecturing!Google Docs–How to Make a Quiz that Will Grade ItselfMaking a Quiz in Google Docs–Easy, Simple, and FastWriting by Hand Is Good for your Brain.Stuck with an Awful Textbook? Tips for People Teaching in Japan

Jan 11

Great Free Software for Great Teachers–Ubuntu Linux

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching, online tools

by H.Albanese

If you are reading this, you are probably a teacher.  Most teachers’ salaries are pretty low, and they don’t go up very fast.  So, why waste money?  Why spend money when you don’t have to?

This post is being written on a 290 US$ Lenovo laptop.  I am running Ubuntu  a free OS.  I am writing this on Google Documents, a free word processor and I will put it on my blog with WordPress, a free blogging tool.

Are you still paying for software?  Why?  Join me in the 21st century, please.

Ubuntu is a free OS.  You can partition your hard drive and install it next to Windows very easily, just like installing any program.

It is faster than windows 7 and Mac OS Lion.  Viruses are almost unknown.  It is also easy to use if you are even fairly skilled with computers.

Almost all of the software on Ubuntu is free.  You just click on what you want, for example a game, word processor, a thesaurus, and the Ubuntu software installer will get it and install it for you.  How simple is that?

Why not try it out?  It runs on almost any computer.

Better, Linux has versions for old computers, and even has a version that can run on a computer, get this, that has no hard drive.  No kidding, Joe.

And, did I mention that it is free?

And, well, come on, you gotta love that penguin.
Next time… another great free tool, Google Docs.

 

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Jan 09

Tell the students or let them figure it out?

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

Should we tell our students every thing?  

Often, students make mistakes in following directions.  In projects, they sometimes go off the track, make mistakes, and end up doing something entirely different than we had intended.  The project ends up not achieving the goals given, disappointing teachers and students.

Students make mistakes.  We are happy to correct them.  After all, we are teachers.  Isn’t that our job, to tell them the right answers?

Or, should we let them figure it out?

If the students do not achieve the goal of the project, at the end of a project, when we talk about their grades, we can take this unique opportunity to tell them what they did wrong and why.  That way, they will learn from their mistakes.  Even if the project does not meet its goals, this is indeed a learning experience.  After all, don’t we learn more from failure than success?

When students make mistakes, perhaps we should just tell them they are wrong.  Tell them to go “look it up.”  That way, they must teach themselves, and have no choice but to learn.

Which is correct?  

Like most things that mean anything, the answer is, in my opinion, it depends.  It depends on your students, on your goals, and how much time you have.

Letting students figure things out is good, but they need a goal to aim for.  That goal has to be clear with clear deadlines set on the way to the goal.  You should be ready to guide students that need your help, but resist the urge to tell them what to do.  It is always best to ask questions, “What do you think you should do?”  and so on.

For mistakes, just telling them the answer does not work.  Asking questions works well.  Hints work well.  This way, the student is getting help (they came to you, so they probably need it) and they are learning also.

Choosing a path between the two, adjusted for your students, program, and time frame, is the best approach.

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Jan 04

Passion!!

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

Walk into class full of enthusiasm and passion.

Passion is a magnet.

Show the students that what you have to teach them is important.  You will not need to get their attention because they will be listening to you intently.  You will not need to worry that they are zoning out or dozing off because they will be focused, very much, on you.

Have passion and be overflowing with enthusiasm, even to the point of silliness.  Part of teaching is acting, and if you need to act to be enthusiastic, so be it.

If you are not enthusiastic about what you are teaching, why should the students listen?  Why should they care? I know I wouldn’t.

Wow them.  Every class.

There is no excuse for boring teachers or boring teaching.

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Jan 01

Teaching in Japan–What are your goals?

Categories:

Education, learning, and teaching in Japan, high school teaching

by H.Albanese

I am teaching in Japan now at a high school.  The classroom is each teachers temple, and teachers here are often left to their own devices.  This can be great, but if you want to more than that “funny foreign person,” you need to succeed.  To do that, you need to have goals and plans to achieve those goals.  I talked a little last time about goals, but the vital thing is to achieve your goals while achieving those of the school.

First, what are your goals?

Don’t just say, “I want them to have fun learning English.”  That is idiotic.

What do you want your students to be able to do?  Write down some ideas, and decide on a few goals.  Think of significant and challenging goals, for example, for first-year high school students you might say, “I want my students to be able to talk about their family,” or “I want my students to be able to talk about their hometowns.”

Continuing with that example, plan a unit around the topic of family or hometowns, with a final project that they could do at the end of the term to demonstrate their understanding.  (Don’t spend too much time on the teaching part because they will learn loads more from doing the project than they will from your teaching, trust me.)

Then, sit down, and lay it out on paper.  Eventually, you must have clear goals for your curriculum, each term, each class, each week.  In my case, I make goals for the whole curriculum, each unit and each project.  These goals all build on each other and link together, but that will take time.  However, for now, just get some ideas and put them together into a rough plan of topics that you can do each term for the grades you teach.

Now, let us assume that you have your goals down.  You have a few reasonable, useful, topics that the kids can learn as goals.  You have a basic idea of your goals and where you want to go.

Now it is time to look at the school’s goals.  You must meet, and exceed, these goals to succeed here.  In Japan, particularly in high schools, the school goals boil down to something very simple:  pass the entrance examinations for the university the student wants to attend.

Great.  How are you going to help them do that?  Well, it is much easier than it seems.  First, you need to know what is on the tests, which I will cover a little later.  However, start at the beginning.

Your first step to meeting your goal here is to look at the Center Test.  The Center Test is most widely-taken test in all of Japan, and is something similar to the SAT or ACT, though it is used differently.  It is a standard test that almost every student in Japan who is going to go to university must take, and if they do well on it, they can go to a good university.  All the high schools aim for this when they teach English classes, and most of the universities use it a as reference when they make their own tests.  It is the standard.

It is easy to find.  First, you can simply ask another English teacher.  Tell them you are interested in what was on the previous year’s Center Test (It’s Centa Testo in Japanese too).  They will be delighted.  You can also find it in the Red Books (Aka Hon in Japanese).  These are books that have past exams for colleges, usually kept somewhere in the school.  The Center Test is also published in the newspapers after it is given in January.  If you cannot find it, it is usually online somewhere.

Take a look at it.  Look over the types of questions that they have.  (There is also an easy listening section.)  Now, one of your goals is to prepare your students to pass this kind of test.  Pay attention to the areas they are aiming for here.  Look over the tests for the past three years to get a good idea.  This will give you a good idea of what the school wants, and it is simple to include similar English in your own curriculum without “teaching for the test.”  (If you end up teaching for the test, consider yourself a failure; there are too many misguided teachers wasting time with that as it is.)

Finally, one very important point.  No matter what the old school English teachers say, the English university tests in Japan are getting more realistic every year.  Universities want students that can actually use normal English.  They want students that can have a conversation.  They want students that can make paragraphs.  They want them to summarize and paraphrase.  However, most normal English classes in Japan’s high schools focus on yakudoku–reading and translation.  Be confident and believe in your goals; teach your students real English and they, as well as you, will succeed.

 

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Dec 29

Learning to Succeed

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

What do our students need to learn?

They need to learn how to learn, how to think, in short, how to succeed.  This will prepare them for their future.

However, not all of our goals are so simple.  We cannot meet these goals if we do not meet the immediate ones of the school, state, and country.  Students still need to do well standardized tests, get into college, and get good grades.  How can we do these things?

It is not easy, but most things that are worth a damn are not.  We have to design our classes and curriculum to meet all of these goals–we should teach how to succeed in a way that they do well on their tests, go to a good college, and get good grades.  This is hardly easy, and it takes lots of thinking, trial-and-error, adjustment, hard-work, and dedication.  It also takes caring teachers.

 

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Dec 26

The End of the Year and Big Stuff

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

It is the end of the year.  Normally, in other careers, it might be good chance to think about how you did the last year and add up your acomplishments.  However, since teachers’ years start in September, or if you are here in Japan in April, we do not usually do that.

Nevertheless, we should take a look at the ”Big Stuff.”  Are we happ about where we are in our teaching career?  Are you satisfied with the methods you are using?  And, for most of us, that answer may be “no.”  There are always ways to improve our methods, and it might be time to look around, think, and just stare out the window.  The answer is out there.

ZFRFBU5BR3PC 

ZFRFBU5BR3PC

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Dec 23

“What is a good education?” Is it learning innovation?

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

Teaching Innovation in traditional education

Back to my previous question, “What is a good education?”

In my last post, we looked at what many of those in business and political circles think is a good education–learning to innovate. We saw that some of these people think that this innovation will come only from long hours of studying math and science, and I showed that this is silly thinking.

 

So, I wonder, can we teach kids to be innovative? Is that possible in traditional education? We need to look at “innovation” in another way to get at this.

 

Continuing, let’s look at Mark Zuckerberg. We see that he learned computer programming from his father, then was tutored, and basically seems to have taught himself the rest. Obviously, traditional education did not harm or help him. No answer here.

 

What about Steve Jobs? If we do a little bit of research, we can see that he had an even more untraditional start. He was taught by his mother and father when young, then went to lectures at Hewlett Packard after school. He later started college then quit, but watched classes for no credit, that he himself chose. He worked at some computer companies, and took a journey to India in search of an Indian wise man, and experimented with LSD. Very untraditional.

 

Traditional education cannot teach kids to innovate. In fact, if either of these two innovators had followed the path of traditional education, I do not think they would have achieved a fraction of what they did.

 

What does this mean for education? This means that to see what a good education is, we need to look beyond the box of traditional education.  

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Dec 17

Can students learn innovation through memorization?

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

Do you remember when you were a student in high school?  How many hours did you spend in classes?  Do you know?

Certainly, hundreds, thousands perhaps.  Probably you don’t even remember what classes you took.

Did those classes help you become a creative innovator?  Did you learn the kind of imaginitive wizardry to conjure up an iphone or create a world-popular web phenomenon?

Probably not.  Yet, for some reason, politicians seem to think that having more classes will magically lead to better innovation.

This rather mind numbing lapse of logic is happening all over the world.

Example from BBC News:

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commissioner responsible for research, innovation and science says, that, “Emphasising that this [improving education] is about keeping up, rather than grandstanding, she talks about Europe facing an “innovation emergency”.  In China, you see children going into school at 6.30am and being there until 8 or 9pm, concentrating on science, technology and maths. And you have to ask yourself, would European children do that?”

My, oh my, do I have several problems with this:

Do all Chinese children spend 14 hours at school?

Do they all really concentrate on science and math?

Is China known as an innovative society?

Will spending hours studying science and math time really create innovation?

No, no, and very obviously, NO.

Do students even need math and science for innovation?  Americans’ math and science is dismal, yet that is where most innovations happen.

And, wait, it gets even better:

The challenge for Europe, she says, is to be able to commercialise ideas as successfully as the United States, in the manner of the iPhone or Facebook.

Great example.

Thanks.   Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg did not have a traditional education.

So, where does innovation come from?

I have some ideas about that, but that’s for later, but I know where it does not come from.  It does not come from traditional education, and most certainly, not from “more classes” or “going into school at 6.30am and being there until 8 or 9pm.”

 

 

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Dec 12

A “Good” Education

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

What is a good education?
That is a million-or shall we say billion-dollar question for every government in the world. Why?  How we educate our youth determines the future of our country more than any other factor.

Think about it.  A good education can triumph over almost any short-term problem.

Learning is something that you will always have. Money will come and go, as will arguments, love, and most of life’s problems. Your learning will not.  The bank can take your house away, credit card companies can blacklist you, but if you cannot pay back your student loan, no one is going to erase everything you learned in university from your brain.

 

What is a good education?  How do we give our kids good education?  Are we even getting close to doing that?  Volumes have been written about these questions, but sadly, most people think the answers are “Remembering lots of stuff,” “We have no idea,” and “no.”

They are correct about only the last question.

 

 

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Dec 06

Teachers talk too much!

Categories:

Education--learning and teaching

by H.Albanese

Are you a teacher that talks too much?

Most teachers talk too much.  They enjoy standing up there, in front of a largely captive audience, and talking about what they know.  It makes them feel important.

The teacher has knowledge.  The students need that knowledge.  The teacher will thus tell you their sacred facts, that you may be educated.  You remember the facts, analyze them perhaps, then regurgitate them on the next test.  Boooooring.

Is that learning?  Is that the best way to teach?  Are the students learning?

Nope.  Of course not.  Are you joking?

Teachers should not talk more than 10 minutes in each class.  The rest of the class time students should be doing something–practicing what they have learned, be engaged in finding answers to questions their teachers have asked, be at work on a learning project, doing group work, pair-work.  They should be learning actively.

It gets better–research has shown that students taught by active learning, on average, score a grade and a half higher than those who learn in traditional (boring) ways.

 

 

 

 

 

But, most teachers do not do use active learning.  Why?  I wish I knew.

Perhaps it is as Geoff Petty said so eloquently in his short explanation on active learning(doc file):

  • We tend to teach the way we were taught ourselves, rather than in the way that works best.
  • We know too much, and rather enjoy explaining.   

 

Unfortunately, anyone who is a teacher or who has taught probably knows all too many people who fit those two criteria.   Enough said.

 

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