Let’s make the teacher wiki even more useful..

At the group session on 04 July’14, we talked about ways to re-work the staff wiki. 

Teachers at Lalor have put PLENTY of effort into sharing ideas and resources, and these resources are all shared under teacher names. However, when we look for useful ideas & activities, we’re more likely to search by theme, certificate module or language skill.

So we thought, let’s try collecting resources by theme, and see if that could be more useful. We decided to start with just one theme, and thought that FOOD would be the best place to start.

Suggestion for your collaboration

1) The idea: each teacher gathers 1-3 tasks, activities or resources relating to the theme of FOOD (and 4 other themes – see quiz below)

The idea is that this should help you share resources more effectively, and draw on each other’s expertise. 

(Please add your thoughts in the comments area for other people’s delight and education.)

2) On the day, we chose 16 themes, and decided to ask other teachers their top 5 for collaboration. Here’s the quiz to choose your top 5.

UPDATE: August. Poll results are in, and here are your top 5 themes:

  1. personal information and family
  2. health & wellbeing
  3. technology and communication
  4. food
  5. shopping

With this one: “living in Melbourne” coming in a very close #6.


Other things to think about 

Contexts for language learning: eg workplace & consumer

Texts: written opinion texts, spoken negotiations, telephone messages & conversations, recounts

Tasks for learning: vocabulary (languageguide.org), link to existing websites, phonetics, make a note of CD exercises eg That’s Life,


for example, with food

Contexts: shopping at the market, ordering food in a restaurant, telling someone else how you made a dish

Texts: shopping list, opinion (what’s your favourite food), your country’s cuisine, instructional texts (recipes etc),



Student wiki? 

At the session, we had a meandering discussion. We also wondered whether it would work to set up a student wiki, where students could also explore learning activities by theme and level. People seemed to feel in general that it would be best to start with sharing resources on the teacher wiki.. and then teachers could set up a wiki page for their class if they want to explore that option. 

Carmela is going to have a go at this.

UPDATE: While Carmela is away, Michael has been looking after her group. The wiki was playing up in the computer room – something to do with the anti-virus app. So Michael decided to put some information up on a temporary blog, over here at the LearnatLalor blogspot. What do you think – how would you improve this site?  



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Photo by Geof Wilson at flickr (creative commons: CC-BY-NC-ND).

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