Dealing with prep work as a language teacher can at times be a huge burden.  Coming up with new ideas that are interesting and valuable for your students can take a lot of time.  Taking hours to make materials that may only be used once can be frustrating.  Having a lesson flop after a ton of work can be very demoralizing.  Yet this is the daily life of a language teacher.  And we still haven't dealt with the marking load yet.

Here is something that I very thankfully had taught to me very early on be a teacher who was my accidental mentor.  I won't explain here, but suffice it to say that I had the great benefit of having a very experienced teacher acting as my helper (subordinate) in my first 3 months of teaching.  I was also fortunate enough that she was an extremely gracious, helpful and considerate person who spent hours giving me guidance and direction and never once complained about at the obviously mistaken roles.   One of the key things she let me in on very early is that:

It's easier and simpler to revise a lesson than create a new one

What this means is that if you have lesson ideas that you've worked with before or have learned about, it is nearly always much easier to use those lesson ideas and materials again, or in new ways than it is to create a new lesson from scratch. This also remains true for lessons that don't work out quite as you would have liked.  It is usually simpler to simply review what went wrong and see about making changes to that lesson to improve the weak areas.

This is really true with computers in language learning.  Because computers are so perfectly suited for 'create once - use often' type materials, you can very often create computer based language lessons one time and use them again and again with new groups of students.  The rapidly changing nature of the internet - new content is added every second online - means that there are always new sources of new information and materials that can quickly and easily be incorporated into existing lessons that you may have.

This brings up another key concept - to the extent possible it is very helpful to develop lessons and activites that lend themselves to quick modification by the change of a single element - this could be simply changing realia (view photos on 'x' topic vs. 'y' topic), to changing outcomes (write about 'x' photos, vs. record a story about 'x' photos).  In both cases, you as a teacher have to do next to no prep to reuse or recycle that lesson to a different purpose.

I'll post something here shortly to demonstrate how one simple desired languge learning outcome can result in many possible activities with little to no prep work on your part as the language teacher - yet will still provide excellent, and interesting computer based language practice opportunities for students.

I think I'll title it something like "Descriptive photos in the CALL Lab"  Look for it in the next couple of days.  I'm in the process of writing it up right now.

Till then,

Cheers,

Eric

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Teachers Call RSS Feed. When you subscribe you will get updates provided regularly to your RSS reader. It is a great way to stay up to date with the latest in CALL information and ideas. So go ahead and subscribe right now.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!