Wednesday 5 March 2014

Learning to Listen

So I have finished my online tutoring course with International House which was great and thanks to the tutors and other participants really made the experience worthwhile.I highly recommend it to anyone in teaching.It makes you reflect on the different types of tasks and especially the tutor/learner relationship.A brief summary of what I thought was important was:

  • Engaging learners by creating collaborative tasks online
  • Creating discussion forums and topics where learners can share opinions
  • Encouraging self reflection
  • Colourful and meaningful online feedback using conventions like font,colour and net lingo 
  • Realising that being an online tutor is no way an easy option!
A great thing this course has ignited in me is to have more confidence in teaching with technology and I am very lucky that I have groups of learners that are really engaged in that process as well.Something my tutor suggested was using a wiki as a means of online collaboration so I set one up with wikispaces and discussed with my Business class how we could use it.A work in progress!

Learning to Listen

Something I used today which was great was a TedTalks by Julian Treasure about listening.This is a skill that many of my students have problems with.

To begin with we discussed active listening and did an observational exercise from the British Council
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/active-listening-activities

The next step was talking about how we listen and barriers to listening in today's society.
I asked the class to note down 5 ways in which we are losing our ability to listen and why? This was essentially preparing them to listen to the talk.

After watching and listening to the first part of the talk, we discussed 5 ways we could overcome these barriers and what advice we would give to become a better listener.

We then watched the second part of the talk and then compared answers.The students then discussed how they could use what they had heard in the talk to change their listening strategies in the future.
Here is the link:http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better