Van Morrison

In one of the exercises you did in Module L1, there was a question "Who is your idol?", and while you were all doing the exercise I got to thinking about what my own answer would be. So I don't think I really have an idol, but if I did I suppose there would be several candidates: from the field of spirituality/psychology, I'd have to say Ken Wilber; from that of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn; from that of literature, James Joyce; and from that of popular music I'd have to say Bob Dylan or Van Morrison.

So today I'm going to write a little about Van Morrison, I've written about Dylan, Joyce and Wilber elsewhere, but not so much about Van the Man! Much like Dylan's work, Van Morrison's music has come to represent something of a soundtrack to my life over the past 27 years, ever since a friend introduced me to his music during my first year in Spain. By soundtrack, I mean that over the years I've followed Morrison's career and listened to his music at many times, in many places, with many different people... And looking back and replaying events from my past - the first friends I made on coming to Ourense; family road trips across Spain and Europe; falling in love with María - when I replay the movie of my past in my mind, it's easy to set such significant events to a background of music by the "Bard of Belfast."

What is it about this body of work that inspires me? Recently Morrison has published a book of selected lyrics from his 50-year career, entitled "Lit Up Inside" and I think that title sums up what he transmits for me - an integration of poetic, numinous words and different musical genres (jazz, soul, blues, rock and roll, Celtic folk etc) that evoke the muse, the inspiration, the inner flame that lights him up inside and kindles a similar response in those of us who appreciate his work. Surely this is what great lyrical art does - it transforms leaden words into luminous gold in our souls. And if ever a singer deserved the epithet of alchemist, that singer would be Van Morrison.

Anyway, I'm not sure writing about songs can ever really do them justice, so here's a song from my life-soundtrack of Van Morrison music that brings back warm memories for myself and for María - it's called "Warm Love" and you can read the lyrics on YouTube, below the still of Mr Morrison that appears as the music plays: I hope you all enjoy it as much as we do:)

CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning

What is CLIL? As you can read in the title it´s "Content and Language Integrated Learning", a concept describing both learning another subject through the communication in a foreign language and learning a foreign language by studying a content-based subject.

I find this methodology very interesting since my main goal in teaching is that children and adults, change their vision about the English language. With this change, I mean to motivate them in such a way that they understand English as a way of communication and not just as a subject to pass at the end of the term. This is a difficult task due to the languages culture in our country (I´m talking as well about coofficial languages in Spain), because the curriculum establishes the languages as simple subjects, it doesn´t integrate them in real communicative situations.

Last week I carried out a Science experiment in one of my lessons with 5th and 6th grade children. When I told them what we were going to do, their first question was, "In English? how can we do it in English?". They are not able to connect that they can communicate in English in any situations of their lives, therefore they thought this experiment was impossible to do.

Afterwards, I explained them that we were going to inflate a balloon without blowing and we needed a plastic bottle, bicarbonate and vinegar. Easy words that they perfectly understood.
The experience was very rewarding for both, me and the students and I think this has helped them to understand that English is a language, not a subject.  I hope so!

 I leave you some links where you can read a little bit about CLIL.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teacher-training/clil-essentials

http://www.ub.edu/filoan/CLIL/teachers.pdf

http://clilforsuccess.blogspot.com.es/

Learning strategies

Learning strategies are the way through the teacher teaches and the way through the students learn how to learn for themselves. We can also say that it’s the process by which the student choose, observe, think and apply the method to choose an end.

THE TYPES OF STRATEGIES ARE:

• Test Strategies: This type of strategy is based on repetition of the contents either written or oral. It’s an effective technique to use the way of repetition as a reminder base. We read aloud, copy material, take notes, highlight...
• Development strategies: This type of strategy is to create connections between the new and the known, for example, summarize, make free notes, answer questions and describe how the information relates. Writing is one of the best memory reinforcement techniques. 
• Organizational strategies: This type of strategy is based on a number of modes of action consisting of group information to make it easier to study it and understand it. Learning in this strategy is very effective because with this techniques: summarizing texts, diagrams, underline... perhaps learning will be more long-lived. 
• Comprehension strategies: This type of strategy is based on achieving track strategy being used and the success of them and adapt to behaviour. Understanding is the basis of the study. Supervise action and thinking of the student and are characterized by the high level of consciousness required. 
• Support Strategies: This type of stratey is based on improving the efficiency of learning strategies, improving the conditions in which they happen. Establishing motivation, focusing and concentration, time management... The student with their teacher's dedication will be important to their development.

HOW TO TEACH LEARNING STRATEGIES?

 - When the teacher evaluates, he/she needs to improve the ability of the student, watching their progress and processes.
 - The teacher should create an ideal environment for students.
 - Not create indifference.

Chi Kung

1- -What Qi Gong is?

Chi Kung or Qi Gong is a Chinese therapy that bellows to the same group as other spiritual therapies like Taichi or Reiki.

All of them come from eastern tradition and have the intention of channelling in a correct way the vital energy through the different meridians that go over our body.  

2-       Translation of the term.

The literal translation of the term is: “work of the breathing”.  Why? Because this method insists in the idea of our breath should be conscious and it must accompany each one of our movements and thoughts.

3-      How can we practise it?

To have a correct state of health we must have the ability of control our own mind and body. Furthermore, it’s very important the equilibrium between them. To do this we should practice meditation and take the control of our breath.  

We have to synchronize the three vital processes of humans that are: BODY, MIND and BREATH. How? To do it, we must take the control of our bodies à  Relax.  

We have to relax, in this order, the mind, the breath and the body to make the energy flows. The following step is regularising the breathing until we get how to do it of constant and calm form.  In addition, this practice has a typical and own vocabulary which represents the eight ways of breathing to achieve our objective. These are some of that we offer to you:

Calm, soft, deep, long, continuous, uniform, slow and delicate.

The last step is the control of the mind or heart. This level is intrinsic to the two other previous stages. So, if we get relax our bodies and our respiration in a succeed way, our mind and our heart will be in peace together.

Finally, the practice of this healthy therapy might be realized in a static way or in movement. The really important thing in both cases is that our body must be well supported. In the second case, some teachers of this practice advise to imagine that we are trees anchored to the floor with roots.

Now we would like you to see this video and try to practice this interesting therapy: 

 

How music affects humans

 1.       Music promotes creativity. But how?

Music has the power to stimulate our minds. When you listen to instrumental music your mind starts to create a story about what you are listening. The same thing happens when playing instruments, your brain works to tell a story without words.

2. Education&music... Success!
On the one hand, music is a great tool for memorization. If we ever want our pupils to learn, for example, a list of words, it would be easier if we use a song instead of repeating one time and another the same list of words (who will forget the famous “head, shoulders, knees and toes; knees and toes…”) 

To test out this affirmation, we invite you to listen to this song once or twice and check if you can remember it after a few minutes.

On the other hand, music can transmit some different emotions or conducts to the children. It is a good idea, if one day you go into your class and your pupils are altered or decentralized, to play instrumental music to calm them down.

Unfortunately, some forms of music can influence children in negative ways through their lyrics, so we must take care of this when we choose the songs that we want our students to listen to.

3.     Music is the language of the Universe. It can make you feel any emotion.

Through music, you can tell stories to anyone, even if they are on the other side of the planet and you both don’t speak the same language: music transcends all boundaries of communication. No one knows exactly why this happens, but in general people agree that emotions pertain to certain scales, chords and harmonies.

Music can whisk you away on an extended journey. Music can make time feel frozen. Music also has the power to suggest movement. All these things deal with the human senses.

We have created a video to prove if this is true, so we invite you to watch it and comment below the emotions and feelings that each melody has made you feel.

For us, the results were:

Song 1: calm

Song 2: anguish

Song 3: good vibes

Song 4: sadness

Song 5: fear

Song 6: hurry

Learn English through movies

Cinema has a great importance for millions of people all over the world and nowadays is one of the main hobbies for the crowd. We have chosen this topic to write because we are in touch with cinema a lot, and it is a kind of art we love. We decided to focus this piece of work in a mix between something we like and our future as teachers, researching about learning English in a meningful way using cinema.

Children are one of the most important costumers of this product and this kind of public can learn a lot if they have the correct material to work with.
The brain has been described like a sponge in kids before 12 years old. In the first six years of his life, the brain changes more with learning skills and the gaininf of a language than with any other cognitive skill. Children born with natural abilities to imitate pronunciations and understand any language by themselves, without the need of studying in a conscious way the grammar rules.

Cinema can teach English, this is a fact, but what kind of films are suitable for children and which are the premises to allow them enjoy and learn?

1. Subtitles: It is recommendable for the children to watch the film for the first time in their own language. After that you can put on the subtitles and the audio in English... the images will do the rest. Children learn fast, so you'll be surprise about how soon they start to repeat some expressions in English.

2. A film they like: They should love the movie don't matter how many times they have watched it before. In addition to enjoy it, they will memorize without realizing it some scenes and the conversations.

3.  A correct vocabulary: No cockney, no slang and no bad language. The best way to learn a language is practicing it with the formal and right level. For children is easier to learn the other level (the informal) with songs or being in touch with native kids.

The boyish and family films are the best to learn English because they have short dialogues, easy plots, a lot of gesticulation, exaggerated and expresive characters, words followed by actions and no niceties or double senses.

Here we have five personal recommendations from the members of the group:

1. E.T. (1982):
The main character of the film has left his home and he finds himself in an unknown place where he has to make questions and express his emotions to come back home.

2. The Nightmare before Christmas (1993):
It's a funny, dramatic and a bit scary film where Jack Skellington, the main character, fight for the triumph of the good over the evil in a fantasy world called Halloween Town.

3. The Lion King (1994):
Representing Disney Company, which has created a lot of animated films since Snow White and the seven Dwarfs, in 1937, allowing the children to be closer to popular tales and culture. Here we can see values like kindness, friendship and love.

4. Harry Potter films (2001 - 2011):
Combining literature and films like in the Harry Potter saga is a good way to teach them two skills: reading and listening. It's recommendable the reading of the books of the saga and to start little by little with a dictionary or the help of the parents (if the books are in English) or to read the books in Spanish and to watch the films in English, although the best option is to do the two things in the original language. It all depends on the level of the children.

5. Finding Nemo (2003):
Representing Pixar Animation Company. This kind of films have a high level of creativity which kids love and represent a change from the boyish films.

In addition, we have created a presentation in Slideshare where you can learn more about animated films:

And finally, if we can't convince you with this entry, here we offer you a very interesting article written by Kieran Donaghy, who won the British Council's Teaching English blog award for his post "I want to learn English because..." where he explains why film is such a good resource and reccomends some useful websites.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH VS COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

The objective of this entry is to compare the Traditional Approach with the Communicative Approach.

As you know, the Traditional Approach presents the following characteristics:

• Memoristic  and repetitive learning
•  Development of reading and writing skills
• Learning of the grammar rules in an explicit way
• Learning the foreign language using your mother tongue
• Teachers play an active role
•  Pupils play a passive role
• Teachers always correct the mistakes of their pupils
• Accuracy are more important than fluency

On the other hand, the Communicative Learning Teaching Approach (CLT) presents these characteristics:

• Practical and meaningful learning
• Development of listening and speaking skills
• Learning of the grammar rules in an implicit way
• Encourage pupils to use the foreign language
• Teachers are guides
• Pupils play an active role, building their knowledge
• Teachers only correct the most important mistakes, repeating your wrong phrases in the correct way, being a referent
• Fluency are more important than accuracy

To clarify this information, we have recorded a video in which appear both approaches. As future teachers, what is the approach that you would like to use?

We have received an education based on the traditional approach and we think that it wasn't useful. We think that the knowledge acquired aren't balanced with the effort and time spent. In our opinion, if we had received an education based in a CLT approach, our English skills could be better. For this reason we have decided to ask some people about their experiences.

After speaking with some people between 20-25 years old, we can conclude that most of people of this generation have received a traditional approach and they think that it have to change.

We expect that it was useful for you. See you.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (Rafa and Kevin)

‘The emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior’ this is the best definition to understand what it the emotional intelligence. This kind of intelligence is investigated since 1980 and nowadays it’s used at school, work, and lifestyle.

On the first place, some studies have shown that people with high EI have greater health than other people. Markers of EI and methods of developing it has become more widely coveted in the past few decades. In addition to this, studies have begun to provide evidence to help characterize the neural mechanisms of emotional intelligence. This is useful to get more information of how our own emotions cause problems in our life like decreasing the efficiency in class, work or relationships.

If you want to know how you can teach emotional intelligence at schools you can observe the next video to understand it better. Enjoy it! CLICK HERE!

Learning in school is a progressive, planned activity cast in the light of the firmly held belief that children are different from adults and that they need to be prepared for the adult world at the same time as they need to be protected from it. This conception of learning and the very idea of childhood are recent inventions. There are reasons to believe that, with the advent of an electronically networked society, the clear distinction between childhood and adulthood is disappearing. One thing is certain, whether it be via the media or directly in their lives, children are increasingly subjected to the whole range of emotions known to adults, not to mention a wide variety of relationships spreading from the best to the worst.

- What would be the consequences of introducing emotional intelligence in schools?

Introducing emotions in schools it could be a problem because nowadays the introduction of this would be a radical change! Yet schools do not change so quickly. Those people who have tried to introduce innovations in schools have come up against a huge resistance from teachers, parents and politic powers.

One possible solution, it could be introducing the emotions and the skills that we work with them in the spaces around school. During the breaks, for example. Daniel Goleman, the best investigator of EI, describes how appointed pupil mediators, once all involved know the rules of the game, resolve conflicts in the playground. With emotion intelligence you can improve skills like self awareness, managing emotions, empathy communicating, co-operation, and the skill how to resolve conflicts.

DANCE

Dance is an art where the body moves along with music, as a form of expression, and personal interaction, with the purpose of entertainment, artistic or religious. It is also important for children because it promotes the development of their sensibility towards music.

Through dance we can help the child to gain autonomy, personal identity. Dance also promotes team work. It satisfies the child´s need of expression and creation, across the knowledge of his own body, and helps him to discover the multiple possibilities of movement that our body has.

In general, dance helps children to coordinate their movements and to organize and plan their actions. In addition, it´s an activity that can be performed by both boys or girls.

One of its main goals is to use the expressiveness of our body and the movement to communicate feelings, ideas, mood and to understand messages.

Dance could be used as an educational tool for two reasons:

-Dance is an important resource for the communication and the relationships.

-Dance is an activity that is related to physical and artistic education.

In pre-school education, the aim is not to train professional dancers but to help the making of a well-rounded person.

Games and class activities are based on situations where the children learn about themselves and the others under certain circumstances. There will be games in which they have to be the leaders, the pursuers or the pursued; games in which they only have to close their eyes and be by themselves, games in which they have to work together as a team to achieve a common goal, etc.

In addition, dance classes help develop other basic skills that the children will use all along their lives. These skills are: coordination, spatial conscience, memory, different ways of expression, concentration, auditory skills, and many others.

We have chosen this video because it shows some basic real exercises that could be done in a pre-school class. In the video we can see how the children try to move all their body parts, something that, in our opinion, is essential for the development of the corporal scheme. So, this way, we can help our children build their mental and physical development.

KEN ROBINSON and his thoughts about CREATIVITY

During this activity you will have to work with a TEDTalk. You might be asking: What is a TEDTalk? Well, according to their own definition, "a TED Talk is a showcase for speakers presenting great, well-formed ideas in under 18 minutes". Our purpose is to make you think about schools and creativity, so do the following exercises and have fun!

BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO:

 

1.      In pairs, look at these paragraphs from the TED Talk and try to order them.

 “We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. (…) Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. (…)And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct.”

 “Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. (…) They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.”

  “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.”

 “In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history.”

 “Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.”

 “Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. (…) At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. (…) Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?”

 “Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.”

 “I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top.”

2.      Take notes of the words or sentences you don’t understand and see if you can solve your doubts with your group. If not, don’t worry: do the following exercise and you will know the meanings. Make sure you download the file.

DURING THE VIDEO:

3.      Watch the video and check your answers from exercise 1 with your partner.

AFTER THE VIDEO:

4.      Form groups of 3-4 people we will give you a paragraph from the exercise and discuss the main ideas of them. Then, share your ideas with the other groups to get to a conclusion. Take notes or underline if you notice some ideas you disagree with.

5.      Look at this paragraph from this blog. What do you and your group think? Could Sir Ken Robinson be absolutely wrong with his arguments? What are the things you don’t share with him? Do you think he could be wrong in more things that he says in the video?

“The evidence isn’t often on Sir Ken’s side. He mentions that the reason why women multi-task better than men is probably because the ‘corpus callosum’ in the brain is thicker in women. It turns out this is from one study in 1992. The evidence from a meta-analysis of 49 studies from 1980 to 1997 shows that ‘no sex difference could be found in the size of the corpus callosum, whether or not account was taken of larger male brain size.’ This is just one example of the faulty evidence for his claims.”

  

Interview to a primary school education teacher

As future teachers, we consider essential to use each of the "skills" for the students to learn a language. We believe that is necessary to know the four "skills":

• Receptive skills:

- Listening: the ability to receive and interpret oral messages in the communication process. It’s the key to all effective communication.

- Reading: the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning.

• Productive skills:

- Speaking: an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information.

- Writing: good writing skills allow you to communicate your message with clarity and an easier way to get a larger audience.

For this reason, we have considered interview a primary school education teacher to tell us her experience and complement our future as a teachers.

Our intervention is in preschool education, we especially focus on the skills of listening and speaking, although we all work together.

There are different methodologies for teaching English in the classroom: Communicative Approach, Community Language Learning, Silent Way, The Natural Approach, but in this case, our interviewee use in their classrooms Total Physical Response (TPR): The main teaching technique that uses TPR is the use of the imperative, based on what the child hears when learning their native language: mainly imperative orders.

It's important that teachers develop creative activities that allow us to motivate all the students.

Hyppotherapy

As future teachers we think that alternative therapies are a good choice to deal with physical, mental and cognitive issues in children. This kind of therapies look for  the complete wellbeing of kids, in other words, it helps to keep body and mind healthy. In  this case we will focus in the Hyppotherapy like a good alternative for autism kids.

Autism is a developmental disorder that affects development of the brain, particulary in areas of communication and social interaction. For that purpose, in our work we will explain the meaning of hyppotherapy and which are it benefits.

The Hyppotherapy is a technique which uses horses to improve physical and psychological problems. We think that this method can be a good option to work with autistic kids because it produce benefits for them. 

Here there are some positive aspects of working with this kind of therapy:

•  The horse's movements are similar to the humans, furthermore, it is good for their posture.
•  Doing organizes activities provide a state of calm. 
• Motivating experiences are ideal for learning and for generalization into everyday settings.

We will add a presentation to show you the main points about this item. In it will appear a video which will clarify our knows about hyppotherapy.

Click here to watch the Prezi

A PRE-SCHOOL ENGLISH LESSON

In our opinion, as future teachers, it is important to know what students think about learning English: if they like, if they don’t like, why... Thus we have gone to a pre-school English lesson to have some contact with real situations. 

We went to E.E.I. Noalla in San Cibrao. It is a one-room school where there are fifteen educated children. They have English lessons twice a week and each one is about one hour. In this post you could read how is a pre-school English lesson. 

After the break, children sat down on the floor to start an assembly. First, they greeted the English classes’ mascot, a monkey bear. One by one were saying “Good morning, Monkey, how are you?” After welcoming Monkey, they revised the days of the week and vocabulary in relation to weather (it is raining, it is cloudy, it is sunny…). To revise vocabulary of weather, students played a game called “the gangster”. This game consists on say the word of a flashcard that the teacher shows them, they have to do it quickly because the last one is eliminated. Next the children stood up to dance while they were visualising the following video:

   

The last activity in the assembly was practice a short stage play to represent the Mayos’ Day. After twenty minutes of rehearsal, the students sat down again to watch an episode of Magic English.

Finally, we asked the children if they like learning English, why and if they would like to change something about their English lessons. The majority answered that English is one of their favorite subject because lessons are enjoyable and they usually are playing games. Some of their answers are:

• “Me gusta porque también jugamos jugando”.
• “Me gusta porque mi palabra favorita es butterfly”.

There were some children who don’t like English because they sometimes don’t understand what the teacher tell them. For example, one student said: 

• “A veces, porque a veces no lo entiendo”. 

In relation to if they would like to change something they have different opinions: 

• “Yo quiero cambiar la mascota porque es fea y su nombre no me gusta”. 
• “Yo no quiero cambiar nada porque son muy chulis”.

To sum up, children are satisfied with their English lessons and they feel happy in them.

MINDFULNESS

Stress is a problem that affects our society in different ways. As a result of this tension, in a lot of obsessive cases, we create all types of illness, blocks, depressions and diseases.

For the reduction of stress the mindfulness has turned out to be a great success in a internationally level, it is recognized nowadays as the best intervention to reduce stress, anxiety and emotional distress inside the context of mind-body medicine. "When the mind is overwhelmed by events of the past or worried by threats of the future a kind of automatic pilot comes on and makes us think things over and over in our head leading to a state of near obsession that, far from solving the problem, plunges us into deeper states of stress, anxiety or depression.”

Mindfulness means paying attention to conscious experience of the present moment with interest, curiosity and acceptance.

It is an ancient practice that originated over 2500 years ago and is the fundamental essence of Buddhist practice for the treatment of physical, and psychological, chronic pain, and other symptoms associated with stress.

This practice is carried out by Professor Stuart McNicholls during a class session with students. The initial idea is to create a state of physical and mental activation even to a state of stress, then search for deep relaxation and being able to connect body and mind.

In this video we can see the progress and results of the study and the personal opinions of some of the students about this experience.

Mental, physical and social health in primary education.

In our opinion, as future teachers, working and developing these three points is fundamental. If talking about schools, they doesn’t work with these aspects at all, and if they do, they only focus their attention into corporal health.

So, to know how to work properly with these topics, firstly we must understand their meanings:

Mental health is the balance status between a person and its sociocultural surroundings, that warrantees ones intellectual and working participation, and promotes social relations to achieve a well-being and a good standard of living.

Corporal health is based on physical well-being, taking care about the absence of diseases and infections and the amount of physical activity an individual does.

In addition, social health is the ability that someone has to maintain healthy social relations with the family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc.

So, our idea is that, by means of many practices as mindfulness or relaxing techniques, the teacher can help the students to improve these three aspects. There are many objectives we can achieve using this methods at class or at home:

• To be conscious about the body and knowing how to relax it. This point is crucial to keep calm in certain moments of stress like exams.
• To learn how to get over anxiety and tension.
• To recognise good and bad feelings and learn how to balance that emotions.
• To control impulsiveness.

On the other hand, projects such as workshops can stimulate children and, at the same time, could be adjusted to the daily routine of the class, without setting aside the lesson.

Also practising sports is important as we have said. Nevertheless, in our opinion, it still doesn't have the importance it should have.

All these strategies should be improved along our lives, therefore, as teachers, in collaboration with parents, we should be responsibles of initiating this process.

To conclude this entry, we have also done a slideshare where you can find additional information about this topic.

Monday class: FLASHmettā and OurSitCom

Hi everyone, on Monday we will be trying something different in class, by rehearsing a mindfulness activity that I’m planning to do in a few weeks time as an open-to-all event on Campus in collaboration with the Vicerrectorado de Campus and with the Gabinete Psicopedagógico. My idea is to try it out in class - and in English - with you, before offering it to the University community at large. How exciting!

What I would like is a couple of volunteers to film the activity on their mobile phones and then prepare a blog entry using video and text as their contribution to the class blog, OurSitCom. Please contact me via the Comments section below or via email (stuartmcn@ymail.com) if you are interested in collaborating and doing your blog entry about the FLASHmettā activity.

Here is a copy of the poster for the activity (in Spanish, sorry!:) - the date is not yet official but it's to give you more of an idea of what I mean by FLASHmettā: