Organize your teaching: 8 tips for using browser bookmarks to keep track of web-based resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach.

Overview, with tips and global solutions: here.

Solution for keeping track of websites: learn to use bookmarks well. Here are 8 tips and tricks.

Homework in Foreign Language Teaching: what kind of homework are language teachers assigning, and why?

In preparing for an inset on homework in my school, I began looking for advice on best practices for homework in the foreign language classroom. This sort of literature is pretty hard to find. I also realised I don't really know all that much about the homework my colleagues in the Foreign Languages department of my school are assigning, so I decided to ask them. Here is the survey I sent. The results will help us as a department to share tips, reflect on our own practice, and align our homework with the philosophy of the school.

Organize your teaching: computer tips for teachers looking to keep track of their resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach. What do I mean by resources? 

Ideally, being a teacher makes you smarter, to include with technology (no matter what you teach) -- but there are no guarantees.

There's this extraordinary blogger in England named Marc Scott who teaches computing and technology in schools. My brother, also a teacher (of math), referred me in 2013 to an article he wrote that persuaded me once and for all of a few things:

• Using a computer is like driving a car: the technology of the interface allows you near total ignorance of how things work. 
• I adore driving, and am still afraid to open the hood. Even now, if you want to teach me car part terms beyond "bumper", "steering wheel" and "rearview mirror", I would probably put my fingers in my ears and sing the Star Spangled Banner. I was like this with other things too, for most of my life.
• It reminded me of when I used to see people who could figure things out that I couldn't (like the kid during a school video project who could set up a VCR to record sound correctly even when the cables made it less than obvious). Here's the worst thing about me: I would peevishly make them help me, and tell myself meanwhile that I was better than them for not needing to know such things. Is this what it's like to be very, very wealthy?
• Being a good troubleshooter is the result of all kinds of intellectual successes working together: being patient, thinking logically, the dull-flush of trial and error, refusing to personify the problem, cultivating intuition. 

Of note here is that I used to be the sort of person who liked to get frustrated. Imagine what that is like, to prefer to get upset when it is more strenuous to do so than to relax. To perform one's frustration, via tantrums, even in adulthood, concomitant swearing and all. Imagine too the intellectual stuntedness of someone who has taught himself that growing angry, that throwing remote controls when you hit the wrong button and can't exit the menu without accidentally changing settings, is the normal way to deal with a problem; that the indignity of having to sort something out is far more grievous and pressing than the indignity of being a whining idiot.

From impulsive and in many ways stubbornly anti-learning, to a teacher. That's me.

Notes on using the MYP Phase system of Language Acquisition in the IB

This post is for anyone who teaches foreign languages in an MYP school (Middle Years Programme, the curricular framework for Grades 6 through 10 for the International Baccalaureate). 

Building an MYP curriculum from scratch is a gargantuan task. I sympathise with anyone who is trying to get their professional practice to fit with the MYP, given that it is a framework more than a curriculum itself and given the beautiful openness, but frustrating vagueness, that this can entail. The application of the Phases and their criteria is a constant topic in an MYP school, given that …

•          A school may inherit students from the PYP from three different language levels. There is an argument to be very conservative with placement in Grade 6 if the MYP curriculum of your school is built around a grammar-based scope and sequence. Many Grade 6 students are studying grammar in ways that are new to them if they came from the PYP, and they have a weaker systematic knowledge of the language as a set of rules and patterns than their language level would initially indicate. You could start your most advanced new Grade 6 students in an “Advanced Phase 2” class, even though there is an argument to be made for starting them in Phase 4 or 5, even.
•        The advantages of a conservative use of the Phases – e.g. using the Phase 3 criteria for two years of study, not just one – are that:

o   students’ marks are higher and you can still apply the criteria strictly.

o   You can also flag students whose grammar needs major investment through their scores in Criterion D, whilst still rewarding them for some of their successes elsewhere.

o   One challenge with the MYP criteria is that they grow in intellectual depth across the Phases, seemingly more than they grow in linguistic depth. The intention of this is clear – the MYP wants to tie foreign language learning with the development of critical thinking. However, there exists a disparity between younger students with advanced language skills and their ability to do some of the cognitive heavy lifting of the upper Phases, such as analysis and drawing conclusions.

•         The alternative, a more generous/sequential use of the Phases – e.g. viewing one year as one Phase, with some Grade 10 students in a Phase 5 class – comes itself with problems that are not to be overlooked: