Great apps to study on your own!

Hi guys!
I highly recommend these two apps for teachers and students who study by their own. One is a prepatory for TOEFL. The other is highly engaging because you can practice your grammar while competing against people all over the world! Very fun!!

Top 12 TED Talks for teachers

In Brazil, we are now getting close to the end of classes (about 1 month to go). Hence, I believe it is time we watched some awesome videos that are very inspirational in the sense of showing our real value as teachers and educators. Enchant your students, you can really change their lives for good.

Follow the link for this top 12 videos:

https://www.weareteachers.com/ted-talks-teachers/#

Parent meeting: questions any teacher must be ready to answer.

Hi friends,
Every time there is a parent meeting, teachers may get anxious about the questions. But what we need to have in mind is that parents are not educators and they usually come up with questions that are superficial and not benefitial for the learning process at all.
So why not preparing a meeting, answering all the questions suggested below. You will show your work and parents will feel confident about you.

 Questions 

1.     What academic standards do you use, and what do I need to know about them?
2.     How will you respond if or when my child struggles in class?
3.     What are the most important and complex (content-related) ideas my child needs to understand by the end of the year?
4.     Do you focus on strengths or weaknesses?
5.     How are creativity and innovative thinking used on a daily basis in your classroom?
6.     How is critical thinking used on a daily basis in your classroom?
7.     How are assessments designed to promote learning rather than simple measurement?
8.     What can I do to support literacy in my home?
9.     What kinds of questions do you suggest that I ask my children on a daily basis about your class?
10.     How exactly is learning personalized in your classroom? In the school?
11.     How do you measure academic progress?
12.     What are the most common instructional or literacy strategies you will use this year?
13.     What learning models do you use (e.g., project-based learning, mobile learning, game-based learning, etc.), and what do you see as the primary benefits of that approach?
14.     What are the best school or district resources that we should consider using as a family to support our child in the classroom?
15.     Is there technology you'd recommend that can help support my child in self-directed learning?
16.     What are the most common barriers you see to academic progress in your classroom?
17.     How is education changing?
18.     How do you see the role of the teacher in the learning process?
19.     What am I not asking but should be?

Activity: pair up your students using homophones

This week I used an activity that worked wonders. I gave each student a slip of paper with a word and they had to find their homophone match. Needless to say that by the end of the activity (5 minutes) they had already raised awareness of the right pronunciation.
Below I suggest a link with the 25 most common homophones in English
https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/homophones-list.htm

Practice your listening with movies! I have some suggestions

 Do you want to practice you English in a more contextualized setting, using real language. Check this ones out. I highly recommend

https://www.learnenglishfeelgood.com/eslvideo/videos3.html

http://en.ver-taal.com/trailer_blooddiamond.htm

http://en.ver-taal.com/trailer_blooddiamond.htm
http://movies.clubefl.gr

Hope you can benefit from it!

Vo