alice’s posterous

I am not a big fan of textbooks and was thinking of creating my own exercises this year since my new school has very few resources but I found a brillant textbook called Gente Joven in the school library.

Good points about this textbook:

• Everything is in Spanish, there is no English explanation or translation. For me, it is very important to immerse pupils in the target language. This is how toddlers learn how to speak.
  
• The exercises are fun, engaging and challenging. For example, we were describing how people look like and there was an exercise about a casting for a TV serie. Pupils had to say why they would choose this boy or this girl. So not only, they had to say basic sentences describing people, thay also had to give their opinions using "creo que el chico puede ser ... porque...".
  
• The teacher's book is full of great ideas to get students involved with group and independent work. The collaborative listening activity which I posted earlier on this week is based on the teacher's book.
  
• There are also tasks to assess students such as creating the school website in Spanish or recording a radio show for a speaking assignment, along with sheets to mark pupils and to let them reflect on how they performed (again all in Spanish).
  

I also went on the publishing website "Difusión" and found a list of useful resources for free. So only, you have to register to access them.

What about you? do you use a very good textbook or create your own resources?

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Yesterday, I was telling you about Flickr groups.
After writing the post, I decided to create a group called Images to teach languages where you can share or use photos or videos to teach either a word, a conversation or a grammar point.

From my own experience, looking for the right picture to teach a word or a phrase is very time consuming so I thought it would be nice to have all the pictures in one place tagged by topic, i.e. animals, places in town, shops... (thanks for this tip @icpjones!). This way, it is much easier and faster when you need THE picture!
You can then copy and paste the pictures to your slideshow, or download them or print them and use them as flashcards (that might be expensive on cartridges though!)

Today, there are already 24 members (mostly from my twitter network) who have shared their own pictures (thank you :)). There are shops from Germany, France, Spain...And even pictures from as far away as Japan (thanks to @ajep). Now, this what web 2.0 is all about: collaborative work set in less than 2 days! I just find this very exciting :)

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You can join groups on Flickr where you can share similar interests for photos.
I joined two groups:

• Images4Education part of the EVO course I attended in January
  
  
• Great quotes about Learning and Change. Look at some of the photos I already favorited, they prove useful as a display or to explain a post on a blog, a slideshow or a document...

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