My favorite feature of the mylabs is the ability for students to record and for teachers to give oral feedback. This is a real class time saver. It is often hard in class to listen and give honest feedback to each student individually. What a great way to improve students communication skills without using precious classtime!
Click this link to find out how:
One great thing about the MyLabs is that you can customize not only your course content, but what and how students see your pages. I love to customize the welcome message on today’s view page. I add my information, the course information and any important bulletins like school closings.
Click the link below to see how easy it is customize your Welcome Message.
Another great feature is the ability to create an announcement for the entire class. Often times we want to get a message to the whole class. This video shows you how easy it is to send your class a message.
If you need some help learning the basics of the mynorthstar lab, why not try Course Assistant? Here’s a short video how to use the course assistant button and the details on navigating the tabs.
Click the video hotlink:
Course Assistant and Navigating Tabs
I have been using mynorthstar lab for a few semesters now and love it! It really is a great vehicle to reinforce course content. I find that my students interact with the mylab content so much more than they interact with the book. I have some really great tips for getting started with the mylabs. First, start out small. Just learn to customize your course and add content to your calendar. You can see how to do these two things from these two videos I made:
customize your today’s view page
How to Assign work/content to Students via Calendar
I’m so surprised, and positively so. We had a great class. This topic got my students participating, and talking. First we briefly talked about the topic of teenagers and text messaging, and then we went and did the vocab and listening comprehension on this worksheet Teen Texting Soars_Listening_MW.
They really had a lot to say on the topic. I asked them to work in small groups and make a list of how teenagers use text messaging in their countries, and then orally present and comment on them to the class. Some of them actually said teens used it to break up with others. Well, I couldn’t believe it, so I asked them if they thought it was OK to do so. We had a light ethical conversation about it and that was an added bonus. They always say they want to practice their conversation. Well, we certainly found a good talking point.
If I could go back and do it again, I would eliminate the second item in the ‘Before you listen’ section. I’d also give the audience a task to do as they listened to groups present their lists, like listen for vocabulary words included in the worksheet.
After the discussion on different cultural attitudes about sharing class notes, we went on to the big question of competition among students: good or bad?
The debate was prepared in two groups, each side preparing their arguments. Some of the quotes from my students:
The students felt the victory went to the side arguing for competition. I am not so sure that I agree with them, although that side definitely came up with some good arguments.
I had another idea for a debate on education, but we didn’t do it with this group: corporal punishment and whether it has a place in education.
With this group of students, the debate might have been too divisive among the different countries. But we did touch on it with bullying. Physical punishment for children – what does it really teach them?
In the next class we organized a debate: should we have competition in education or only cooperation among students?
This question arose in part from the Listening /Speaking passages on homework and asking other students for help.
The discussion also came from one student’s experiences at an American Community College. She wasn’t able to take good notes because the teacher spoke very quickly and the student’s English was not very good.
She emailed other students in the class and asked them to give her their notes so she could study them. I asked her if anyone had actually sent her the notes. She said only another international student but none of the American students.
She couldn’t understand this but, of course, I could. We had a great discussion about student culture in different countries (lots of vocabulary came out of this!).
As the students explained to each other, in some countries, students “stick together” at all costs. Sharing notes is considered helping out your fellow student, and everyone is expected to support everyone else.
In other countries, education is very much an individual endeavor. Asking someone else for their notes can sometimes be seen as not wanting to do your own work and just wanting to benefit from the work of others. As this student soon learned, the situation in the US is much closer to this end of the spectrum.
This was a great opportunity for me to point out to the students why we spend so much time on note taking skills! Being able to take notes is a very important skill, and it’s one my international students need to develop—they may not be able to look at anyone else’s!
As I mentioned in the last post, I gave my students homework to answer a specific question about bullying. They also had to find expert opinions online. The next day was the discussion of their findings.
That class was very lively.
In general, the students correctly predicted the very negative effects of bullying on victims (lifelong psychological scarring) and the fact that shy or quiet children were often targeted — those who couldn’t fight back or were afraid, especially among girls.
But they did not predict the high rate of later criminal behavior among bullies. Sometimes students got “leadership” and bullying mixed up. Nor did they predict the studies revealing that bullies of both sexes were quite often victimized, beaten, or denigrated in their own homes.
The interesting point for everyone was how much this problem preoccupied people in all countries. In some countries, students committed suicide when they did not do well enough in school to please their families or were shamed in front of fellow students. In other places, it was tied to dating and rivalries among girls.
One question to research was how to prevent or stop bullying. The students were very skeptical about the “conflict resolution peer groups” used in many high schools in the U.S. today. They were interested in the fact that such efforts existed here while in most countries the problem is ignored. However, they doubted that anything could be done.
Next year, I would like to invite a speaker from one of these groups to speak to the students. This was a very lively discussion and in addition to fluency practice, we learned a lot of new vocabulary and a lot about each other’s countries and culture.
Last time, my students discussed memories from school, and the subject of bullying came up across the board.
For the next class, I prepared a question sheet about bullying and the students worked on answering the questions to the best of their ability in small groups of mixed nationalities. The questions were:
For homework each group was given ONE of the questions to research on the web. They were told to find expert opinion on the issues by consulting reputable websites (and we discussed how to tell websites of value by looking on the web together as a class).
The students had to find answers to the question their group was assigned and report back to the class. They also had to compare their original thinking with the experts’ opinion.
I’ll report on the actual discussion next time.
As I mentioned in the last post, we did a free writing activity on what my students remembered from their school days as children.
Almost all the students remembered some positive experiences learning about friendship or loyalty or how to get along with others. But students from all nine countries, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe to Asia and Latin America, remembered incidents of bullying as they grew up.
They said it was rampant and were very shocked to hear that it had not been a major problem in past generations. Now it seems ubiquitous. Each student (sadly) gave examples of bullying and the worst seemed to be among girls. We practiced indirect speech and paraphrasing by having another student summarize what had just been said and we compared experiences.
This gave an interesting background for what most of my students did not at first understand: home schooling. Put in this context – as a possible reaction to bullying and other negative influences — the home schooling movement from Reading One became less completely strange to them.
How have you all handled discussions of bullying with your students?
