Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

I'm a visual learner, I studied art. I can't tell you how valueable a picture file is. If your school doesn't have one, make one.

Cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers and glue them on white paper, people, animals, landscapes, houses, things. The list goes on.

It's so useful for any level and age. Use it for beginners. What color is her shirt? What's her name? To advanced. What has he been doing? What would have happened if...?

Students especially like pictures of celebrities from other countries. So before you go off to teach in a foreign land, go through old magazines and cut out pictures!

[shmooj]

Well, I do understand it can be valuable and so I did collect quite a number of wierd wacky interesting and otherwise stimulating pics for my early teaching days. After carrying them halfway round the world and finding that I tended to forget I had them at all, I got real and binned the lot. I simply did not use them in class.

I'm not knocking them, I'm just saying that, with a mobile lifestyle, a lot of materials is going to weigh me down. Now that I have the technology though, I wish I had scanned them in so I could print them out at an opportune moment. So, I'd say that a picture file is great - if you can carry it around the world in the form of a CD!

[been_there]

One of the best sources for a picture file is out-of-date calenders.

Reasons:
-already on heavy-stock paper for balancing on the chalk-tray
-free or low-cost (who wants last years calender? well, unless its the Carmen Electra one...)
-you get 12 pictures, usually in a theme (you know, kitty cats or lighthouses of Maine). You can do a lot with this. Give two students different pictures and have them describe how they are the same/different. Mix up a few from different calenders and have the students put them in catagories


One thing I like to do with pictures is to give a group a random bunch of picts and have them make a story. Fun fun fun.

Shmooj, yeah, love CD files. I'm scanning ALL my stacks of papers and materails I've been hauling like Magellen around the world onto my portable hard-drive. Save me some serious money on overweight baggage.

And you guys might want to check out http://www.gutenberg.org/, I'ts got all the ebooks with expired copyright. I download and print them out when I get hold of someones printer....

[joe-joe]

Pictures are great and do have their place in the classroom, but I would agree that a CD is the best way to store and transport such data, unless you're prepared to give yourself as hernia carting this material hither and whither. And not forgetting the costs of excess baggage either!

[Wolf]

We used to do tons of that in my place of work in Japan. Cutting out pictures of famous people (one set for Japanese, one set for other, and one set for Dead.) In my current place of work, I don't use such things that often. Half the time I teach classes with a spcific focus (literature or writing) and my speaking classes are so large that preparing such visual materials out of magazine ad-sized pictures for class use would end up being a lot of work.

I'm a child of technology. Some of the classrooms in my university have a neat internet/computer setup. You can project a computer screen on a big screen and play sound out of speakers. That's what I want. Used in moderation it woud do wonders for my class. Pictures, movie clips, songs, online literary archives (my kingdom for an online literary archive I could acces in class and display to my students) would all be good. Things from real life.

[shmooj]

I effectively have the benefit of what Wolf longs for. We have a wireless LAN in our school and, on my laptop, which I often use in class to read my lesson plan, access files on students' vocab etc, I can also whip up a relevant picture or text.

Example: last Thursday a student brought dried persimmons to the class. I ate one and said, "Hmmm, these taste a lot like dates." Never heard of dates. Whip out all the Japanese - English dictionaries we can find. No entry for date as a fruit (can you believe it?!). One second later I had an excellent picture of a guy picking dates from a huge palm tree in somewhere that looked like Egypt by running a Google image search.

Now THAT'S a picture file

[Lynn]

I love picture files. I would like to open up my own school and have a whole picture file library. I would also cover the walls with Word by Word posters.

[Wolf]

[shmooj]

Wolf

go here
THIS LINK

download the pdf about Football in the UK and never be caught out again

[naturegirl321]

I usually start a picture file for the school that I"m at and leave it there. Then when I move I start again.

[Wolf]