How to help every child to fulfil their potential
How to help every child to fulfil their potential – ever wondered why kids say they’re bored at school, or why they stop trying when the work gets harder?
Educationalist Carol Dweck explains how the wrong kind of praise actually *harms* young people.
This short video is essential viewing for EVERYONE – from teachers and education workers to relatives and friends – and will totally revolutionise the way you interact with children.
Some parents jump to the conclusion that their child is gifted, that the work is too easy for them and that is why they are bored.
Other parents jump to the conclusion that it is the teaching methods or the teacher not presenting the material in a way that engages the learners. While both of these are valid assumptions, they’re not the only reasons children get bored in school.
Generally, some of the reasons that children get bored in school is because they are:
Under-Challenged
Bright learners who don’t need a lot of instruction to master a skill or start out ahead of the rest of the class often complain of being bored at school. What they’re really telling you is they are not being challenged by the work in the classroom.
Learners who are under-challenged are not always gifted – there are specific qualifications for giftedness – but they are typically very capable and very smart. Surprisingly, these children don’t always appear that way. In fact, many under-challenged learners are sloppy in their work, don’t study much (though still get good grades) and tend to dash through their work without much in the way of editing or rechecking.
Under-Motivated
Under-motivated learners often complain of being bored in school, but not because they already know what’s being taught. This complaint is different. Often “school is boring” is paired with “that’s why I don’t do the work” or “that’s why I don’t pay attention.” An under-motivatedlearner is not the same as a lazy learner.
In some cases, the lack of motivation is tied into a feeling that what they are learning isn’t personally important, that the learning process has no meaning for them and their lives.
Why is learning so hard?
Don’t be fooled on April Fools Day !
Have you heard of April Fools day ?
It occurs in many countries but not necessarily on April 1st.
It is a day when people like to play practical jokes on each other and then shout “April fool” at the unfortunate victim(s). These days more and more newspapers, magazines and social media platforms report very strange unbelievable stories as a joke.
So watch out for these stories and don’t be fooled.
As a practice take this quiz to see if you can spot some fake stories.
Don’t be fooled !!!
How much do you know about social media
How much do you know about social media – are you really savvy about the world of social media or just on the edges?
Social media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:
- Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
- User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.
- Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
- Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.
Users typically access social media services via web-based technologies on desktop, computers, and laptops, or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers). When engaging with these services, users can create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content or pre-made content posted online. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities, and individuals.
Social media changes the way individuals and large organizations communicate. These changes are the focus of the emerging fields of technoself studies. Social media differ from paper-based media (e.g., magazines and newspapers) or traditional electronic media such as TV broadcasting in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, interactivity, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers).
This is in contrast to traditional media which operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers), such as a paper newspaper which is delivered to many subscribers, or a radio station which broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Some of the most popular social media websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), Gab, Google+, Myspace, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChat, Weibo, WhatsApp, Wikia, Snapchat, . These social media websites have more than 100,000,000 registered users.
In America, a survey reported that 84 percent of adolescents in have a Facebook account. Over 60% of 13 to 17-year-olds have at least one profile on social media, with many spending more than two hours a day on social networking sites.
According to Nielsen, Internet users continue to spend more time on social media sites than on any other type of site. At the same time, the total time spent on social media sites in the U.S. across PCs as well as on mobile devices increased by 99 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to 66 billion minutes in July 2011.
For content contributors, the benefits of participating in social media have gone beyond simply social sharing to building a reputation and bringing in career opportunities and monetary income.
Observers have noted a range of positive and negative impacts of social media use. Social media can help to improve individuals’ sense of connectedness with real or online communities, and social media can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, including advocacy groups and political parties and governments. At the same time, concerns have been raised about possible links between heavy social media use and depression, and even the issues of cyberbullying, online harassment and “trolling”. Currently, about half of young adults have been cyberbullied and of those, 20 percent said that they have been cyberbullied regularly.
Another survey was carried out among 7th grade students in America, which is known as the Precaution Process Adoption Model. According to this study, 69 percent of 7th grade students claim to have experienced cyberbullying and they also said that it is worse than face to face bullying.
However both the bully and the victim are negatively affected, the intensity, duration, and frequency are the three aspects that increase the negative effects on both of them.
(Source Wikipedia)
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Most influential hashtags of 2017
Six quizzes to help you learn about social media
What is going on in these sequences
What is going on in these sequences – can you tell just by listening to the sounds?
The best language learners are a combination of people who are curious, who keep asking themselves questions and are actively involved in their own learning proces, and those that can hear well, and I’m not talking about hearing well versus hearing impairment – that is an altogether different subject.
What I am talking about is those learners that can hear the sounds that are specifically English sounds (as in the language and not the nationality).
This includes things such as; elision, glottals, liaisons between words, low and high tones, pitch, volume, rate and intonations etc.
The story goes that if you can’t hear the sounds in a language, you will never be able to understand nor be able to produce accurate language through speech.
This takes a lot of time and perseverance and does not, in any way mean that a learner has to understand every single word in a sentence or a section of speech, because sometimes we don’t even do this in their own native language – sometimes we listen to parts of what are said to us, sometimes we lose concentration or we drift off.
This activity is designed to train your ears to sounds and not words.
Sounds will often give a lot of clues about the context of a conversation – where the people are for example.
See if you can work out what is happening and send your answers through the comments at the bottom of the page or you can comment on Facebook.
Developing listening skills is a language is at times difficult, often frustrating, rarely made up of shortcuts and always rewarding – at the end.
Try listening to a video or DvD in English without looking at the picture, now pause the video and without looking at the screen, try to imagine :
- Where the scene takes place?
- How many people are in the scene?
- How they are dressed?
- How old they are?
- Are they men women, or children?
- What relationship are they to each other? etc. etc.
Now turn around and look at the paused image – How close did you get?
The more of this type of activity you do, the more you will sharpen your hearing skills and thus your listening skills – give it a try, you have nothing to lose!
Three items on my Bucket List – Merry
Three items on my Bucket List – Merry came in today to tell us a little about what three things are at the very top of her bucket list.
She is just starting out with learning English and we are both very pleased and grateful to welcome her along to record a podcast at EFL PodBlog.
“Some people die at 25 years old and aren’t buried until they are 75 years old.” Benjamin Franklin
“Every man dies — Not every man really lives.” ~ William Ross
What is a Bucket List?
If you haven’t heard about the term “bucket list”, it is a list of all the goals you want to achieve, dreams you want to fulfill and life experiences you desire to experience before you die, or kick the bucket – hence the name “Bucket List.”
Here is a podcast asking just that question, “What is a bucket list?”
Why Create a Bucket List?
If you don’t live your days by personal goals and plans, the chances are that you will spend most of your time caught up in a the humdrum routine or the rat-race of everyday life.
Have you ever had the feeling that your days and your life is just passing you by in such a rate of knots, without any tangible results to speak about?
What did you accomplish in the past 3 months / 6 months, 12 months, 3 years?
What are your upcoming goals for the next 3 months / 6 months, 12 months, 3 years?
Look at the things you did and the things you’re planning to do next — Do they mean anything to you if you were to die today?
Having a bucket list reminds you of what’s really important in life so you can act on them.
A bucket list helps hone your goals and ambitions into a set of achievable, ‘I-really-want-to-do-this’ steps – now how exciting is that!
It’s just like planning ahead all the highlights that you want to be featured in the rest of your life.
The objective of creating this list isn’t to instill some kind of a race against time or to create aversion toward death. I don’t see our existence to be limited to just our physical years on earth — I don’t see our existence to be limited to just our physical years on earth — our physical lifespan is but a short speck of our existence in the universe.
The whole point of creating your list is to maximize every moment of our existence and live your life to the fullest.
It is a reminder of all the things we want to achieve in our time here on this planet, so that instead of wasting away our time on pointless activities, we are directing our lives fully towards what really matters to us.
Have a look for some ideas on Bucket Lists Here
