POSTERous Session Epiphany

Just had a posterous epiphany yesterday. We held a poster session, a required piece for our TEFL training program. Our students created posters demonstrating their knowledge on a topic that they had learned in the program. We opened up the session to our department staff, students, interested parties. For two hours our soon-to-be-graduated students talked to mostly strangers about their posters. One colleague of mine asked his students to interview and review each poster and poster presenter. They had two hours, one hour to interview, and then back in class, they would debate on which posters were done well. They had to vote on the three best ones. As these students were leaving, I was chatting with this colleague about what he had planned to do. I offered to take quick snapshots of each poster with my iPad and upload these pictures to our posterous program blog (tefl.posterous.com). He went back to his class and with the classroom projector, showed the snapshots (uploaded to posterous) to his class and they debated. He later said that it worked exceptionally well, that his students were able to discuss more effectively with the visual aid of the snapshots. It took me all of 5 minutes-during the crazy chaos of the poster session- to upload the poster snapshots to our program blog. Minutes later, my colleague (in a different part of campus) was using these snapshots for his class. Amazing, easy, and fast. Thanks Posterous!

Flat Stanley Update

Those of you taking the TEFL to the Young Learner course please take a look at the revision below. These instructions take the place ofthe one i handed out to you two weeks ago.

1. Please decorate one of the flat characters. You can choose either 'Flat Stanley' or 'Flat Stoneface'.

2. Write an introduction letter to your 'future partner'. Just a few sentences. Take on the persona of the flat character. Bring it to class on the FEB. 6th.

3. In this class (Feb. 6th), you will be paired with another classmate and you will exchange your 'flat characters'. 

4. Have an adventure! Take your partner's 'Flat character' with you to three outings. Take it whenever you go (he/she/it is very portable!). Take a picture with the 'Flat character' and the main subject.

5. Later, when you have a moment, write a 1st person journal entry for each of the three places that you took your character. Include the picture. Each episode need only be one page long (including the picture).

6. The new due date for this assignment is: Feb. 27