Teacher+Reflections

The Lunch Box Project is not just a great opportunity for students to share and learn from each other - but it’s a great chance for us teachers to do the same thing!

**Teacher Introduction Task**  Just a quick intro video to say who we are, where we’re from, what languages we speak and what we hope to get out of the project - the sort of things we’d want students to talk about. A brief video, maybe 30 seconds or a minute. Nothing fancy! Hey, we should share something about our lunches....like eating it in the teachers staffroom or something like that.

**The TEACHER BLOG - Recording Our Lunch Box Project Experiences**

 I’m thinking that we should be blogging about our experiences as part of this project and so I’ve gone about it the simplest way. I’ve set up a group blog on [|Posterous] . Best way to do it, is for you to sign up for an account at Posterous, and then visit [|http://lunchboxproject.posterous.com]  and click on the green 'Subscribe button in the top left corner. Once you have subscribed I will then change your access from 'Subscriber' to 'Contributor' and you will then be able to post.

All you have to do to post to it is send an email to lunchboxproject@posterous.com  and whatever you have in your email - text, picture, video or audio - will be posted to this site. Too easy!

 It would be great if we can all use this site to add these sorts of things:
 * thoughts on how we feel the project is going that week
 * how the project is or isn’t motivating students to talk about different languages
 * an audio recording of a great teachable moment you had in your classroom or a recording of students trying out some new language
 * a short video of the kids working on something to do with the project, or of them making a comment about something etc
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">images of kids working on the project
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">thoughts on a new tool you have discovered that you are using for the project
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">questions or comments you have heard the kids make about other classes, or what they think of the project
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">anything else you can think of that is relevant!

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Make sure you try adding a few different things. It would just be fabulous to have a collection of audio recordings of teachers thoughts for example. That would make a great podcast, and an amazing thing about the Posterous service is that is automatically creates a podcast - too good!

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Any video, audio or images that you post will automatically be posted to Vimeo, Flickr and iTunes.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**Teacher Reflection Task** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I thought we could just do another less-than-one-minute video each just saying what we got out of the project as teachers, and how we will use what we’ve learned in our future teaching.

Hopefully you are all ok with doing these things. Please let me know if you have suggestions for making any of this better!

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**Regular Conversations** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Apart from recording our experiences with our students, we could have some great professional conversations and learn more about how each other plans, what assessment tasks we are using, what educational guidelines have to be followed in other countries and how we cope with those. And of course conversations about second language education in the country we are teaching in.

I will schedule regular online chat sessions using Skype or Elluminate. See more details on the Meetings Page Don’t stress about having to be at them - just whenever you can. I will plan several so that they suit all the timezones we are working with and so that we all have several chances to chat with each other about the project and teaching in general.

Here is a great map that shows time zones and the current time - <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.worldtimezone.com/__]