The Pomodoro Technique

I was speaking with a student today about working in focused bursts. The discussion reminded me of a teachmeet that I went to where one teacher talked about using the Pomodoro technique with her students to help them with time management. She shared her great success with her students and here I am looking it up on the internet for my students.
So what's the big idea with the Pomodoro technique? It's all about chunking your time into focused work times and short breaks. 25 minutes of focused work time and a 5-minute break this is called a "Pomodoro" and you record that you have completed a task. I love how Pomodoros pair nicely into an hour. Now the neat thing is that when you batch 4 Pomodoros together you take a longer break of 15-20 minutes. It's a simple idea and this blog post by Steve Scott does the technique better justice. I'm going to give it a go and see how it works for me.
Here is the link to the main site on the Pomodoro Technique created by Francesco Cirillo.

How to leave a comment

To promote more flipped learning opportunities, I have provided you with a tutorial on how to comment on a Google Slide to make tomorrow's work a bit more streamlined.

Click on this link to view the tutoral on how to leave a comment

What I learned today

Today I realised that many people were making composite pictures for eBooks, so I added a tutorial on how to remove backgrounds on pictures in PowerPoint

Teaching, Brewed Survey

Teaching, Brewed, a podcast that is about international teaching and teaching in general, is looking to gather some data to inform their subsequent episodes. If there are topics that you would like Teaching, Brewed to cover, you are encouraged to fill out this survey and listen to their podcast

Preservice/Pre-qualified teachers survey
New Teachers (first 2 years) survey


Teaching, Brewed website

Scribd is better now

I like audiobooks, I really like audiobooks. They’ve changed the way I access a lot of non-fiction books and give my eyes a break from my daily screen-based grind. When I’m finished reading the things that I have to read on a screen, the last thing that I want to do is to spend more time in front of a screen reading the things that I want to read. Yes, I’m well aware that I can read a “book” but I find the readability of white text on a black screen so much easier for me to track and you can’t beat the portability of all our little devices. 

Back to Scribd. 

Scribd has changed their service, but not their price. Before I was paying $68 HKD per month to get

An audiobook and three books. I found that at this price, it was very limited and prevented me from actually having a solid service. Now they’ve changed to stream what you want (with an invisible, but promised, high ceiling of a limit) 

Now I can grab as many audiobooks as I have time for and there are a lot more quality audiobooks than ebooks that are available. 

If you haven’t gotten into audiobooks, I highly recommend this service. 

For teaching, I would recommend audiobooks for second language learners that would benefit from more access to English. It may even change D.E.A.R. time to D.E.A.L. time (Drop Everything And Listen). 

Verso feedback system

I found this app looking for videos to support my students with educational apps. I found Verso which is an interesting feedback system for students. Based on what I'm seeing, I think it might work well for Secondary ELLs and might also be an interesting tool for university students.

The idea is that you create a class and set assignments. Students write their answers anonymously and either answer the question or look at other students' questions. The thing that I like about this is that a class can comment on each other's work but the person whose work is being assessed can highlight posts that are beneficial to them.

Additionally, teachers can group responses so that related answers can be more easily identified.

Check out the promo video:

GoNoodle

Thanks to the awesome folks from Teaching Brewed I received the recommendation to take a look at GoNoodle.com

GoNoodle is a site that helps get kids moving and adds a kinesthetic kick to learning. Its a great way to help young learners transition from one activity if they have been stuck there for too long and it has lots of great topics. The ones that I really enjoyed were the mindfulness exercises that are great to help students reset from one activity to another while at the same time helping them develop skills that will help them to self-regulate their behaviour.

Implications for the EFL classroom. A lot of the material supports language across the curriculum (LAC) by strategically selecting content, teachers can support links to other subjects while also providing exposure to English. Much of the content supports English phonological awareness and helps develop early literacy skills through music, movement and singing. Awesome stuff.
To get even more ideas, check out their blog: blog.gonoodle.com

• Mindfulness
• Numeracy
• Literacy
• Hooks for lessons
• Transition activities to reset a class
• Home and classroom support
• built-in assessment platform (I haven't investigated it yet)