News from Brazil, where the nuts are from: Oficinas com professores do NRE (Reuniões temáticas)

I had shown them the pronunciation commercial of the German Coast Guard (you can still see some of the vocab on the board:))

In Brazil, the cities have a center for state teacher education called Nucleo. They have former English and Portuguese teachers who work there and go to the public schools, give workshops, and are a source of help and information for the public schools teachers in the area. Some of the professors at UEL are helping them to give a series of themed workshops for teachers of 5th to
12th grade on the teachers' free day (Monday). Only one school is chosen per town, so teachers can choose which school and city is closest to them, and attend that workshop.

So far, I have gone to two schools, one in Porecatu and another in Rolandia (about 45minutes to 1 hour outside of Londrina). The public school teachers in our state of Parana have received what they call a TV Pen Drive. For some reason, in Portuguese, they use the English term "pen drive" which doesn't mean anything to us. This is like a USB port, and the TVs serve as large computers which teachers can plug in a memory stick and use to show pictures, power point presentations, play movies and listen to music during class. They are a great tool, but most of the teachers are not very familiar with them yet and they wanted to learn more about how to use them during these workshops. I knew nothing about them either, but had to learn, so that I could use it to give the teachers ideas for their classrooms.

The workshops I have done have been on visual literacy (using images and film clips) for the classroom. We have focused on lesson plans with The Olympics since that is current and there are many activities they can do. We spend about 2 hours looking at how to use the images and then the teachers work in the language labs with a pedogogue from Nucleo to learn how to use the computer and save images, and convert them on to a flash drive to plug into the tv and use during class.

So far, the meetings have been really successful. Although, they are supposed to be for English teachers only, and in the first workshop there was one Spanish teacher who didn't speak any English, so I had to do the workshop in Portuguese! This was actually good practice for me, and I learned a lot, even if it would still be preferable to do them in English. I have one more workshop in this series, and then we will return to all the same schools but with a different focus for the workshops, probably working with evaluation techniques for the classroom.

Here are some photos from the workshop in Rolandia.