Judith Dick

'Hi! I'm Judith from the French speaking part of Switzerland. I manage MEC at OPTI alongside Pierre-Alain who looks after the technical details. We have more than 1000 students and well over half of them are absolute beginners or low elementary.

Our problem: many of our teachers were reticent to use MEC at first, complaining that beginners couldn't understand the instructions! We devised the following solution:

When students start using MEC for the first time they download a pre-prepared exercise from their individual servers, or they watch and copy from the projector. They must translate and order the MEC vocabulary correctly. We used TextEdit to create these exercises as we are all using Macs here. You could also use Word on a PC. Here are some examples (tables are shaded in yellow where students have completed the exercises):

The exercises are then saved into a MEC folder on the desktop, always ready for use. Within this folder students keep the files for different MEC activities, vocabulary and instructions that they have translated. This helps them gain greater independence right from the start.

For translations we encourage students to open Wordreference.com in a separate browser. Monolingual dictionaries are great but not much use for real beginners. I suspect quite a number of elementary students find them a challenge too.

We also have another great idea for easy translation if you use Firefox as your web browser. Within Firefox2 (US) you can add a useful instant translation tool. Go to Mozilla Addons click on dictionaries and install the language you require. Then when you hover over a word in your browser, up comes the translation. It's brilliant and defies all those "can't dos"!'

What do you think of the OPTI approach? How does it compare to your organization? Leave a comment.

Judith will soon be back with a clinic on her experiences with MEC at OPTI. For more information, watch this space!

MEC Commissioning Editor and recent CELTA graduate, Jenny Lovel, writes:

'Week three of the CELTA course is a hot contender for the worst week of my life. I have two assignments due, on Monday and Thursday, and three lessons to plan. Lesson five goes well. The students are lively and chatty and I play a game with them that I've stolen directly from one of the teachers I observed last week. Each student has an expression on a piece of coloured card which he or she must describe to their partner. The game is great fun, with students proclaiming "Good Health!" and "Happy New Year!" joyfully. Once again I feel like I’m opening for a stand-up comedian, but the lesson has gone well and I've really enjoyed it.

Such feelings of adequacy are short-lived. In lesson six disaster strikes. Student numbers in our class have been dwindling, and before the lesson rumour has it that three new French students have signed up to the class. This doubles the size of our class, which is welcome news. Wondering if anyone is going to turn up for your class when you've spent five hours preparing it is not a pleasant emotion. The new students do turn up and I start my lesson enthusiastically. Within two minutes I realize that they have no idea what I am saying. They're not used to being taught entirely in English, my language isn't graded appropriately to their level, and they look at me in horror when I attempt some choral drilling. My confidence crumbles. No amount of coloured cardboard is going to get me out of this mess and the lesson is a disaster. The worst thing is that I have to bounce back from this experience quickly, so I can plan tomorrow's hour-long lesson and write assignment number three.

Deciding not to be beaten I stay up until 2 am planning and writing, and set my alarm for 6am to prepare my materials. After copious amounts of coffee I manage to deliver a lesson, and in contrast to yesterday the students understand my instructions and participate fully in class. Confidence restored! I've survived seven teaching practices and have only one more to go. I look forward to the fourth and final week by having a glass of wine and promptly falling asleep.'

Does MEC help you with lesson planning? How have you used support site materials to help you? Leave a comment.

The MEC word games for June are available now! How many words can your students find in Witch's Pot? This month's topics are 'types of music' (Easy), 'words which can mean "first"' (Average) and 'words which mean "surprised"' (Difficult).

The Swamp Disaster topics are 'clothes and related words' (Easy), 'find the countable noun' (Average) and 'relationships' (Difficult).

 Swamp Disaster

The Wordsearch topics are 'eating out'(Easy), 'types of ship or boat' (Average) and 'negative adjectives describing character' (Difficult).

As usual, there are new Crosswords and Bridge Builders at all levels too.

Visit the Word Games area to find them all. Which are your students' favourite word games? Please let us know.

 Wordsearch

The 'one and only' news item

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, looks at protests in China against the government's policy of allowing only one child per family. Find out why people are protesting by going to the Headline News section on your Study Area screen.

8) What are your tips for new teachers using MEC?

'New to teaching or new to MEC? Either way, make it your own - but see what your students want of it. If you really are new to it, get a couple of your students - or some likely people - and sit there with them as they negotiate their way round it, and talk about it with them.'

9) What are your views on blended learning?

'Well, when I went to school/university/tried to learn various languages independently, the expression "blended learning" didn't exist. But combining or integrating resources and environments such as libraries, lectures, seminars, informal study groups, etc is what studying has always involved. And it still will, long after every single currently used PC is long defunct and buried in the Ozymandian sand of global warming.

Learning is tied up with crucial interdependencies between the social/interactional and the material. In the three years I spent at Oxford University doing my first degree, I had between 100 and 150 hours of one-to-one or paired tuition. Looking back, it doesn't sound like much, but it was very powerful. The rest of the time consisted of using the various other resources.

The thing that matters is that those few 'real' hours (i.e. face-to-face, real-time and absolutely not replaceable by any IT mediation) were the skeleton that made sense or gave shape to all the rest of it.'

10) What do you think the future holds for ELT teachers and authors?

'Teachers are no different from anyone else. If your job is very basic and poorly paid, nobody will be bothered to develop the software to replace you. If you're very highly paid and specialist beyond the ken of software developers, you too will be left alone.

Teachers float around between these two poles. Of course, it depends where you live, and at what level of the socio-economic scale your pedagogic efforts are directed.

Paperless IT-mediated educational material I suppose is likely to prove more helpful to most - it saves money in the end, it's easier on the planet and so on. But it requires a lot of costly hardware. I hope the rich/poor divide in the world isn't increased by all this. We need a lot more of the equivalent of the wind-up radio.

English is growing as a lingua franca, and inexorably so. Others will follow.

This takes me to areas where my head starts to hurt. I despise nationalism; but I think globalisation is a nonsensical and transparent veil for pre-Marxian exploitation.

Authors? I suppose we'll have to write either more and more for children or for increasingly specialised areas.'

Wind-up radio. Is clockwork the future for technology?

Do you have any response to Russell's comments? What do you think the future holds for English language teachers? Leave a comment.

Week Two

MEC Commissioning Editor and recent CELTA graduate, Jenny Lovel, writes:

'I start week two feeling quite tired, having spent the weekend at the IATEFL conference in Aberdeen. In the interview for my CELTA course I was asked if I had any social events planned that would prevent me from doing my coursework. Instead of being honest about the conference, I said that I didn't have any plans for the whole month. Consequently, sneaking up to IATEFL seems like having an affair and carrying textbooks in my conference bag like telltale lipstick on a collar. But at IATEFL I realise how much I've learnt in a week and feel heartened that the hard work I'm putting in is paying off.

Jenny's class at IH London

In contrast to the first week, in week two we have to submit lesson plans for assessment. These have to detail learning objectives, stage aims, timing, analysis of target language and even a whiteboard plan. Confident the plan shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, I spend most of the evening combing magazines for photographs to illustrate my lesson on lexis for special occasions. When I've stuck pictures of happy couples, birthday presents and glasses of champagne to clashing pieces of cardboard I turn to the lesson plan. Fast-forward five hours and I'm still writing. The plans are unbelievably time-consuming, and need revising constantly. Working out the timing of each stage of the lesson requires military precision and yet it's hard to know how long the students will need. I don't want to be left twiddling my thumbs for ten minutes at the end of the lesson making small-talk and yet I similarly don't want to have to finish mid-activity.

Planning is a nightmare and I'm starting to have a newfound respect for teachers. In my lesson observations I realise, with a mix of envy and despair, how easy they make it look. The lessons are relaxed, the teachers have good rapport with the students, there are clear aims and, perhaps most importantly, at no point does the teacher look at his or her watch, mutter an expletive and start cantering towards the end of the lesson leaving the students behind. I learn a great deal from watching these experienced teachers and find this aspect of the course invaluable.

As the weekend approaches I start counting down the hours to my well-deserved lie-in and vow to have Saturday off. It's the end of week two.'

Does this bring back memories for you? Do you remember your first ever lesson? How much time do you spend planning these days? Leave a comment.