Friday 26 December 2014

Paragraph Writing Module PDF

The PDF version of the slides can be downloaded either via Issuu below or via Google Drive

Friday 5 December 2014

Past Simple and Progressive

In this e-lecture, I describe the different situations in which we use the Past Simple and Progressive. I also explain the various adverbs we can use with each tense.

Diglossia

In this e-lecture, I discuss Ferguson's classical article called "Diglossia" published in 1959. I define what is Diglossia. Then I go through its main features as introduced in his article: namely:
*Function
*Prestige
*Literary heritage
*Acquisition
*Standardization
*Stability
*Grammar
*Lexicon
*Phonology
Then I go through Fishman's "Extended Diglossia". Finally I present the versions onto which diglossia can develop according to some sociolinguists. These are Triglossia (Mkifili, 1978) (Youssi, 1995) and Poliglossia (Platt, 1977).

Friday 28 November 2014

Paragraph Writing Lecture 1

In this first lecture for the Paragraph Writing Module for Semester 1, I go through a definition of a paragraph, its main features which are unity, transitions and coherence, and the structure of a paragraph.

Sociolinguistics Lecture 2

In this lecture, I discuss the following topics about sociolinguistics:
*What do sociolinguists study?
*What determines language use?
*What is variety/code?
*What is the meaning of bilingualism?
*What is individual bilingualism?
*What is societal bilingualism?
*What is a first language?
*What is a second language?
*What is a foreign language?
*What is diglossia?

Present Simple and Progressive

In this lecture, I explain the different ways we use the Present Simple and Progressive in English. I also introduce the different forms of each and the types of adverbs with which each can be used.

Thursday 20 November 2014

Sociolinguistics Syllabus

In this lecture, I present the syllabus of my course for Semester 5 Module called Sociolinguistics. I introduce the main topics and concepts to be covered in my following lectures. The following amazing video complements my explanation of the concepts to be presented afterwards.



Friday 14 November 2014

Overview of Tenses in English Grammar

In this class, I briefly generally overview the tenses in English Grammar. I gave this lecture within the framework of my Grammar I course for university Semester 1 students.
If you wish to follow the whole course with me online, you are most welcome to join me in my Online Grammar Course for University students hosted at the Elearning Portal of our University. The direct link to that is below. You can simply just login there as a guest. But if you wish to do the interactive exercises, you need to create an account and login:
http://foadm1.uiz.ac.ma/course/view.php?id=23

Wednesday 29 October 2014

ELT Methodology

Some of my lectures on ELT Methodology delivered to Semester 6 students.

Sunday 26 October 2014

General Linguistics Lectures

Some of my lectures on General Linguistics delivered to Semester 5 students.

Friday 4 July 2014

Google Calendar Application to Education: Part 3


Plan a Course Curriculum and Schedule

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the video.

You will learn:
  • How to plan a course curriculum and schedule using Calendar


Create and use lesson plans using Calendar

Planning and organizing your curriculum on a semester, monthly or even a daily basis can be a hassle. Yet staying on schedule with your class(es) and related lesson plans can lead to dramatic increases in student learning and your efficiency as a teacher. Many educators are now using Google Calendar to:

Plan curriculum per class, subject and semester
Organize student activities such as reading assignments, group or team reviews and project time
Guide new or temporary educators, as well as use as Professional Development templates
Provide access to school administration, peers and parents so everyone has visibility into their children’s education and tasks.
Learn more from these two teacher videos on how to leverage Google Calendar for organizing your curriculum and developing more robust lesson plans!

Video 1:



Video 2:


Reference: GOOGLE

Google Calendar Application to Education: Part 2


Increase Communication and Collaboration

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the video.

You will learn:
  • How to increase communication and collaboration amongst all members of the school community

Use Google Calendar for your school schedule

A calendar can be created with Google Calendar to mirror the information usually printed in a school academic calendar. This could include events such as:

  • First/last days of classes
  • School vacations
  • Finals/mid-term weeks
  • Teacher in-service days

Creating a school-wide academic calendar is done in the same way as creating any secondary calendar. The sharing settings for a school-wide academic calendar will be very broad.

The following training video gives more details:


Using Google Calendar for class projects and as a student

Sometimes it can be helpful to separate long-term project assignments from the general class schedule. For example, if there is an end-of-year research paper and presentation, it might be helpful to have a separate “Research project” calendar that has all the due dates and milestones for the project. Then the project calendar can be viewed on its own. It is easy to find the information because it won’t get lost in all the events scheduled in the class calendar.

Another example of a way you could use a special project calendar is when working on a group project. Group members can collaborate and share a calendar together so everyone can have access to the project meeting times, project deadlines and milestones, and other project related activities (going out to do a survey/market research, conducting an interview, etc).

The use of Calendar for class projects is fairly identical to how students can equally save time and become more efficient and successful learners. Check out this teacher-built video to learn more.

Now watch the following Video Tutorial:

Reference: GOOGLE

Google Calendar Application in Education: Part 1


Increase Productivity and Classroom Management Skills

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the training video below.

You will learn:

  • How to use Calendar to increase productivity and efficiency

Google Calendar is an outstanding tool to leverage in your role as an educator or school administrator. This includes adding student assignments, copying assignments, attaching class or project files and creating work folders.

While your Google Apps school account automatically creates a primary calendar for you, it can be useful to have several additional calendars to help organize the different parts of your life. The primary calendar that comes with your Google Apps account will be associated with the name and email address of your account. However, you can create as many secondary calendars as you like. For example, you might want to have a school/work calendar that has all the events and appointments related to school (staff meetings, school events, conferences). In addition, you may want to have a separate personal calendar for keeping track of events and appointments outside of work (a doctor appointment, dinner with a friend, exercise class).

These different calendars not only allow you to see different information on your calendar (you can choose a color for school and a different color for personal), but also let you set different privacy settings for the calendars. This allows everyone at your school to see your school/work calendar, while not allowing anyone to have access to your personal calendar.

Watch the following Video Tutorial:



Sharing Google Calendar with teachers and students


Besides creating a personal calendar to help organize your own activities and priorities, it can be useful to create calendars to share information across groups of people. Here are some examples of group calendars that could be used at your school:

  • Class calendar for class-related events such as activities, class meeting times, testing schedules and lesson objectives
  • Homework calendar with detailed descriptions of homework assignments, links to relevant materials and due dates
  • School-wide holiday or academic schedule with in-service days, holidays and other scheduling anomalies
  • Group project deadlines and milestones for a group or team to track workload
  • School sporting event schedules that can be shared with the entire school

Calendar sharing options in Google Apps:


If you use your personal email address with Google Calendar, you have the option to keep a calendar private or to share it. However, with Calendar for Google Apps you have a third sharing option. You can choose to keep a calendar private, to share it with the world, or to only share it with members of your domain. If you share it with members of your domain, the calendar can only be accessed with those who have an “@your_school.edu’ account.

With the sharing options available, it is easy to create a school calendar with varying levels of access – you can specify certain users that can make changes, others that can only see the calendar, or set a broad access setting for the public or individuals at your school.

The following are the different types of access levels you can grant to individuals, users at your school and the public (everyone in the world). Please note: If you don't see all of these options, you may need to speak with your domain administrator to enable these features.

  • Completely private calendar: You can set your calendar to be completely private so that none of your calendar information, not even free/busy information, will be available to anyone except those people you specifically add to share your calendar. You can use this setting for the entire world (Do not share with everyone) and/or for your school Apps domain (Do not share with everyone in my domain).
  • Limited calendar view (free/busy information): Sometimes you want people to be able to check your schedule and see only the times you're busy. In the free/busy view, someone will only see blocks of time marked as busy for times when you have entries in your calendar. They will not be able to see the name of the event or any of the event details.This view can be useful to share as an appointment availability calendar that you could share with students or parents. This way the students or parents could see when you are available without knowing any of the details of your schedule.
  • Full calendar view (show all event details): With this setting, other users can see your calendar and events and invite you to events, but cannot see events on your calendar that have been marked as private. This is a common view for school-related calendars that are shared with users at your school domain. For that calendar, your colleagues or students would be able to see the events and details, but you could also add private events such as conferences or sensitive meetings that cannot be viewed by colleagues or students at your school.
  • Full calendar access (make changes to events): This setting is for sharing with individuals only. You can add specific people to a calendar who have access to see and change all events, including private ones. This can be useful for team calendars as it grants multiple people the ability to add and edit events on a single calendar. For example, a team project calendar could function better if each of the team members could check availability and add meetings instead of just one person. It would also allow the team members to edit the events, allowing each person to add to event descriptions, like an agenda. 
Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar (this is the calendar created by default with your Google Apps account). However, any secondary calendars can be shared, such as a calendar created specifically for homework, school projects, school sporting events, etc.
  • Full calendar ownership (Make changes to events AND manage sharing): The final privilege you can grant is the ability to manage sharing access for a calendar. This setting also is for sharing with individuals only. With this setting, an individual would essentially become an owner of the calendar, as they would be able to add, remove and edit events as well as add, remove and edit the sharing settings of the calendar. This is a setting to be treated with care. For example, someone with this permission setting would be able to change the sharing-access level of individuals or change if the calendar is viewable to the domain or public.
Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar

Now watch the following Video tutorial:



Printing calendars and events


Sometimes it's handy to have a printout of your calendar to take with you when you don't have a computer. To print a calendar or multiple calendars, these are the typical steps to use:
  • Make sure the calendar(s) you wish to print are selected in the calendar list to the left of your calendar window
  • Select the view that you would like to print: Day, Week, Month, 4 Day, or Agenda
  • After selecting print, a Print Settings menu will appear in a new window. Basic options for your printed calendar:
  1. Print range: Select the dates you would like to print of your calendar
  2. Font size/Orientation: Choose the size of the font and the orientation of your calendar (landscape/portrait)
  3. Events you have declined: Choose to have events appear even if you have declined
  4. Black/White: Check if you want to print in black and white
  5. Agenda view only options:
               - Descriptions: If you would like to have all the details for your activities printed,
                 select the Print descriptions check box 
                 (Please note: this is not checked by default.)
               -End times
               -Attendees
               -My response

  • Events you have declined

Start printing!

Please note: If you've scheduled a large number of events, your calendar may print on multiple pages to better display all your entries.

Now watch the following training Video:


Reference: GOOGLE

Thursday 3 July 2014

Google Calendar Basics

Introduction


The Google Calendar Basics lesson will introduce you to a fundamental basics of Google Calendar, its features and general benefits in the classroom. First, you can review this first lesson and then watch the video tutorial from a Google Certified Teacher.

In this lesson, you will learn:
  • How to describe Calendar
  • How to identify Calendar's main components
  • What is the typical application of Calendar in the classroom
  • How to identify the unique value to educators and teaching
  • How to access supporting information


What is Calendar?


Google's free online Calendar helps you keep track of life’s important events, all in one place. Calendars can be shared school-wide or with select colleagues. You can overlay multiple calendars to see when people are available. Google Calendar is integrated into Gmail and compatible with popular calendar applications.

What features does Calendar have?


Google apps integration


Calendar integrates with other Google apps like Gmail, Hangouts and Drive. You can create a Hangout link in the calendar event and join from your computer, tablet or phone. Gmail allows you to RSVP to events without ever leaving your inbox. And attaching Drive files to events ensures that everyone has the materials they need.

Mobile calendar


The Calendar app for Android syncs across devices, so you can access your calendar no matter where you are. You can also access your calendar from any device with a web browser. This app lets you set up calendar notifications via SMS to receive reminders when you hit the road.

Offline support


The Calendar app for Chrome lets you view your class schedule and respond to invitations, even without an internet connection. Changes made to your calendar will be synced the next time you connect to the internet.

Share calendars


Using Google calendars makes it straightforward to share and collaborate on calendars with people in and outside of your organization. You can give access to one person, a group of parents, or even publish calendars on websites for all to refer to them. Calendars work with Google Groups, allowing everyone to edit. They automatically update when new members join or old members leave.

Security


Google Calendar is designed with a focus on security and reliability including features like encrypted connections to Google’s servers, simultaneous replicated storage for your calendar appointments and built-in disaster recovery.

Suggested tips for using Google Calendar in education


Google Calendar is free for schools. It helps you to easily share your calendar with your entire organization or select specific people. This makes scheduling really easy when you overlay calendars to find a time that is suitable to everyone’s agendas.

Google calendar also makes it very easy to schedule school events, send out invitations and let Google Calendar handle the RSVPs for you. This way students can effortlessly find time to meet up for school projects by using shared calendars.

Calendar integrates with other Google Apps, like Gmail, Hangouts and Drive. You can respond to invitations right from your inbox without visiting Calendar. You can also incorporate a Hangout link in calendar events and join the Hangout from the web or your phone. Furthermore, you can attach a Drive file to an event so that everyone has the agenda and knows the files that should be reviewed.

You can create a calendar for each class, and make it public. The calendar can incorporate class sessions, activities, assignments and their due dates, and exam schedules. Students (or parents) can subscribe to the calendar to view course information.

Watch video tutorial below:


Reference: GOOGLE

Friday 27 June 2014

Employability of University Laureates


Wednesday 9 April 2014

Purposes of evaluation

In this video lecture, I elaborate on the various purposes of evaluation.

What is evaluation Part 2

                     In this video lecture, I describe in a bit of detail what evaluation means.

What is evaluation Part 1

In this video lecture, I describe in a bit of detail what evaluation means.

Approaches to evaluation

In this video lecture, I globally describe Evaluation and its approaches and methods.

Classroom discourse for learning

MATEFL&ICT students describe the relevance of classroom discourse to the learning process.

Sunday 23 February 2014

Approaches to Classroom Discourse

In this video lecture, MA students present their tasks where they talk about approaches to classroom discourse.

Classroom Discourse for ELT: Part 2

This is the second part of my lecture on Classroom Discourse for ELT.

Thursday 20 February 2014

Classroom Discourse for ELT: Part 1

This lecture introduces classroom discourse and shows its importance for ELT.

Teaching Practice Observation Guidelines: Part 2

This lecture presents further very crucial observation guidelines for teaching practice.

Teaching Practice Observation Guidelines: Part 1

This lecture introduces some useful observation guidelines for teaching practice.

Initiation to Training

This lecture describes tips for doing observation and reflective portfolios for teacher-trainees.

Sunday 9 February 2014

Classroom Management: Whole Class, Individual, Pair & Group Work

In this video tutorial, I talk about classroom Seating Arrangements and tips for pair and group work.

Saturday 8 February 2014

Novice Teachers' Classroom English: Part 2


For an introduction on this very much needed aspect of ELT, namely classroom English, please, you are invited to check my previous blog post here.

Below are a few key expressions that novice teachers can use. They are classified according to headings regarding various language functions related to ELT classroom interaction. In this post, I suggest sample expressions that have to do with aspects of Organisation namely Giving InstructionSequencing, and Supervision. In coming blog posts, I present example phrases concerned with Interrogation, namely Asking Questions and Replying to Questions, Explanation, namely Metalanguage and Reference, and finally Interaction, namely Affective Attitudes and Social Ritual.

A- Organization:
  • Giving instructions: The teacher gives appropriate instructions related to recurrent classroom activities, e.g. using textbooks, blackboard work, group work.
  • Sample Expressions:
                                  - Open your books at page 52.
                                  - Come out and write it on the board.
                                  - Listen to the tape, please.
                                  - Get into groups of four.
                                  - Finish this off at home.
                                  - Let's sing a song.

Thursday 6 February 2014

Novice Teachers' Classroom English: Part 1


One of the main goals of an ELT teacher to achieve in his daily routines is to use as much as possible the target language which is in our case English. This routine language that is used by ELT teachers on a regular basis during their teaching process is referred to in the relevant literature as classroom language. It is mainly related to giving instructions such as "Stand up", "take out your books / pencils", "sit down, please", etc. Teachers can exploit this opportunity of these daily routines to minimise the students' use of their mother tongue and to maximise the use of the target language and increase its use by students. This makes the ELT classroom setting more authentic. 
It is novice ELT teachers that usually are not well prepared and trained to handle and deal with this quite sensitive area of English teaching and learning when they start teaching. This post and others to follow describe how classroom language can be used and suggest some tips for novice ELT teachers for employing classroom language. This first blog post presents the appropriate classroom language for starting a lesson.

Teacher: Good morning, Good afternoon, Hello, Hi
Students: Good morning, Good afternoon, (teacher's name), Hello, Hi (teacher's name)

SFL and Pedagogical Implications Part 2

Part 2 of my lecture on Systemic Functional Linguistics and its pedagogical implications

Wednesday 5 February 2014

SFL and Pedagogical Implications Part 1

Part 1 of my lecture on Systemic Functional Linguistics and its pedagogical implications

Wednesday 15 January 2014

Answers Key

This video tutorial includes the answers key for the final exam.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

General Linguistics Final Exam

This is the final exam for General Linguistics course for Semester 5.