Infographic generators

Infographics are a very interesting way to share ideas. They are the new trend online because they are atractive, easy to read, and easy to remember. And so teachers cannot stay behind on this tool. There are, though, some teachers like me who are not gifted in terms of designing these kind of material. Don't panick, thanks to the internet, there are some Inforgaphic Generators that can save us!

Here are some Infographic Generators that are very useful for teachers. Both of them are for free(!).

1. Infogr.am. Sign up, pick up a template and submit your information. The best part is that no design skills are needed!

The Communicative Approach | Infographics

2. Easel.ly. Register and enjoy this easy to use infographic maker, which has a lot more themes to choose from. You will only need to drag-and-drop onto your canvas and your visual idea will be ready in no time!

Presentation Stage - easel.ly

Comic strips conversations

After a year of not formally teaching English at the Language Institute, it feels pretty cool to be back into creating materials, even when it is for Portuguese classes. I am not the teacher, I am just being asked to help make games to teach a certain grammar point or vocabulary set for beginners learning Portuguese. And since the content is pretty much the same, just in another language (verbs and pronouns need to be learned in either language, right?), I can used my ESL ideas to come up with pretty cool games and activities.

There's this pretty cool tool online (free!) to make cartoons characters and create your own comics. However, as cool as it is, it pretty soon became extremely annoying (at least for me) because they were all over Facebook for a little while, at least among my contacts. I was already fed up with that. But Today I needed to make comic strip conversations and thought of Bitstrips. So those annoying cartoons became useful to me (not for senseless FB purposes, though)!!

Comic strips conversations: simple images that represent either a conversation or a short story. You can print them, cut them all and put them in cards. Then ask students to put the story in order and tell the story to the class using the pictures.

What I did this times is images for students to learn "daily routines" such as have lunch, watch TV, sleep, go home, work, go shopping, etc. 

Here are just a few I made.

How to succeede in your studies

The three steps that people should follow to succeed in their studies are organization, punctuality and communion with God. Organization should start with writing the errands and writing down what has been achieved. If you do it at night, before you fall asleep, you can set what time you will wake up and what needs to be done the next day. There is a sayings that goes something like this, "he who knows not where he goes, already arrived." Second is the punctuality (to be on time for your classes, to get to the dinning hall or church, etc.). Punctuality is needed to perform small everyday tasks that in the end make a whole. And most important of all is communion with God through worship, Bible study and meditation. Ellen G. White says that fellowship with God must be first in our day, it should be our first work. If we follow these easy steps, sure we will succeed in our studies this summer.

This is a post written by one of my students from English Composition I during the summer at Universidad de Navojoa. I had to do lots of editing, though. I wanted to share it because this was written after a just one week of English (writing) class, and it shows how students are able to write fairly good texts within a short period of time.

Questions to think (write) about

Today I started the "English Composition" class at Navojoa. Since this class is of general education, the first thing I did was a placement test. With an average of 47 (out of 100) in the Elementary Placement Test, their level of English is definitely basic. However, they are expected to write an essay and a research paper by the end of the class. If they are going to be able to do it, that's a totally different story.

Anyway, what I wanted to do with them for a small devotional (warm-up) activity was to have a 5 minutes time for the "Questions to think (write) about". However, there are two main reasons why it will not be possible this time: class size -21 students, and their language level.

So here I leave just one of the questions I was thinking of using with the class.

I guess we will stick to the good old learning-a-Bible-verse version of the devotional activity.