Posts made by Hasmik Ch

@Kalimullah-Memon
@Yousuf-Memon, thank you.

Dear Iqra Khan, thank you for bringing this important topic into the forum.
Regarding professional development, educators have many opportunities to enhance their teaching and learning skills. State programs, online learning platforms, experience exchange, and scholarships provided by private companies and institutions, make a path for educators to enrich the methodology of teaching and master new approaches to working with all types of learners.
In my country (Armenia), in recent years lots of NGOs and ICT companies have been involved in the professional development of teachers running different short-term programs and training, seminars, and long-term programs (STEAM, Civic education, financial Literacy, environmental education, Media Literacy) integrated into school curricula. These kinds of programs create a nice community where teachers cascade their knowledge, share their experiences, and help and support each other with lessons, and projects, and it makes the community productive, dynamic, and firmer.

@Kalimullah-Memon thank you,
I would like to share one of the projects we had with my colleagues from Romania, Jordan, Ukraine, Tunisia, Italy, and Turkey (and my school from Armenia) where we aimed to collect all the inspiration our students had and the sayings and quotes inspiring them to have mindfulness and motivation. During this project, they explored science, history, technology, sport and medicine, art and literature, music and architecture, geography, and ICT. The amazing fact was that all the teachers participating in the project were not English teachers but all the findings and materials our students provided and collected were in English. We created educational materials in English which were formed by the needs and demands of our students and which inspired both the young generations and adults.
Here is the link to the final product of the project, the blog >>> "Inspirations"

@FarhanMehboob
Indeed, the integration of subjects also plays a great role in learning with this methodology. English (or another target language), digital skills, and content-based learning provide the students with up-to-date knowledge, and it forms also tolerance and respect toward other countries and national values.

@Yousuf-Memon thank you for your comment. I am very glad to hear that in terms of academic objectives students in your country also practice different subjects in English. In this era of digital education students are keen on learning foreign languages as it helps them to explore more than we have in our textbooks. They surf the net and meet different content in frames of their hobbies and interests, they play games with their peers from different countries, they have no boundaries to contact English speakers and native speakers from dozens of countries, so they have lots of other resources and opportunities to get knowledge, master their speaking skills. What we do in our classes, is: to bring this content to our class, using English and sometimes Russian to enlarge their imagination and fantasy, to show what their peers learn, what common challenges they meet, what they can do by knowing English, and what makes their learning enjoyable and entertaining.

@BRYANb8875625e5 you are welcome.
Sometimes I use students' interests and hobbies to foster language learning and we dig deep into Science and Technology, Art, and Sports. It helps my students to be motivated and more involved.
Here are some of the presentations my students and I created due to their interests.
Museum International Day

World Press Freedom Day

Red cross establishment date

@Adel-8d693e36c4 That's true, when we explore new cultures we compare, analyze, and appreciate ours more and more. Cross-cultural communication enriches our personalities and knowledge, enlarges our mindset, and helps us to respect different points of view and diverse outlooks.

@Tabassumlaghari you are welcome,
I want to share other links to a YouTube channel and a website where you can find informative and interpretive videos about CLIL and useful resources for lesson planning.
CLIL Matters
CLIL Resources

Thank you, @Sanjay-Kumar-1 for your remarks, and the important and broad tips you have mentioned, that's true, with CLIL methodology students enlarge their mindset as they explore different fields, subjects, spheres, and concepts and get acquainted with various cultures and approaches. And in parallel with getting knowledge they practice languages and master their fluency in speaking, writing, and listening skills.

Dear Ani, thank you for bringing this topic to the discussion.
I would like to share one of the best websites about Media Literacy where both teachers and learners can find lots of resources for different age groups and various topics for their studies to integrate media literacy into their curriculum.
Common Sense Education

And here is one of the best tools we use when we have any media in our classroom which helps the students to analyze media content, find the hidden messages of media products, and identify the target audience the media is created for. We call them 5 Questions of Media Literacy.

1. Who created this message?
   Help your students "pull back the curtain" and recognize that all media have an author and an agenda. All of the media we encounter and consume was constructed by someone with a particular vision, background, and agenda.

Help students understand how they should question both the messages they see, as well the platforms on which messages are shared.

2. Which techniques are used to attract my attention?
   Whether it’s a billboard or a book, a TV show or movie, a mobile app or an online ad, different forms of media have unique ways to get our attention and keep us engaged. Are they using an emotional plea? Humor? A celebrity? Of course, digital media are changing all the time, and constant of updates and rapid innovations are the name of the game.

Help students recognize how new and innovative techniques capture our attention—sometimes without us even realizing.
3. How might different people interpret this message?
This question helps students consider how all of us bring our own individual backgrounds, values, and beliefs to how we interpret media messages. For any piece of media, there are often as many interpretations as there are viewers. Any time kids are interpreting a media message it’s important for them to consider how someone from a different background might interpret the same message in a very different way.

Model for your students how to ask questions like: What about your background might influence your interpretation? Or, Who might be the target audience for this message?
4. Which lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented—or missing?
Just as we all bring our own backgrounds and values to how we interpret what we see, media messages themselves are embedded with values and points of view. Help students question and consider how certain perspectives or voices might be missing from a particular message. If voices or perspectives are missing, how does that affect the message being sent?
Have students consider the impact of certain voices being left out, and ask them: What points of view would you like to see included, and why? You could even have a discussion here about how popular media can sometimes reinforce certain stereotypes, values, and points of view.

5. Why is this message being sent?
   With this question, have students explore the purpose of the message. Is it to inform, entertain, or persuade, or could it be some combination of these? Also have students explore possible motives behind why certain messages have been sent. Was it to gain power, profit, or influence? For older students, examining the economic structures behind various media industries will come into play.

Source: 5 Questions Students Should Ask About Media

The 5Cs of CLIL

When teachers are planning a CLIL lesson, there are five things to think about - Content, Communication, competencies, Community, and Cognition.

1. Content
   In traditional teaching, teachers prepare a lesson around a logical development of the area the students have been working on. It’s just the same with CLIL. Teachers develop lessons around what the students already know. In this way, students build their content knowledge like building a wall, one course of bricks on top of the next.

2. Communication
   In the past, students learned a lot of lesson content while they were listening to the teacher talk. With CLIL, teachers talk much less, because the students don’t have enough of the new language to learn in this way. Instead, students study together and work in groups, talking to each other as well as to the teacher, using as much of the new language as they can.

A CLIL teacher needs to ask herself a series of questions:
What sort of communication will the students be involved in?
What language will be useful for that communication?
What key content words will they need?
What scaffolding can I provide?

3. Competences
   ‘Can-do’ statements describe the outcomes of a lesson, for example, ‘I can calculate the area of a triangle’. CLIL teachers think about the can-do statements they want their students to be able to make after the lesson, either about lesson content and skills - or about a new language.

4. Community
   CLIL teachers help students to relate what they learn to the world around them. Students see that what they learn is not just a school subject, but something that relates to ‘the real world’.
   The CLIL teacher therefore needs to think about:
   What is the relevance of this lesson to the student’s daily life and surroundings?
   How does it link to the Community or Culture surrounding the students?
   Does it also link to other cultures?

5. Cognition
   Of course, teachers were helping students learn to think long before the CLIL approach was introduced. They have always asked their students ‘when?’, ‘where?’, ‘which?’, ‘how many?’ and ‘who?’. These questions focus on real, specific and concrete answers.
   Students who learn to answer them correctly develop the thinking skills of recalling, repeating and listing, and of understanding.

Thinking skills such as these were categorised in Bloom’s Taxonomy as Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) as early as 1956 (the Taxonomy was revised in more recent years by Anderson and Krathwohl). According to the Taxonomy, students practising LOTS, as in the questions above, learn to remember and understand information, and to explain it. They also learn to apply new information in a different situation.

The CLIL approach has attempted to add to these concrete thinking skills by adopting more abstract, complex and analytical questioning. This is not just for older or more able students, but in all lessons. A student following a CLIL course will soon have learned to think about such probing questions as ‘why?’, ‘how?’ and ‘what evidence is there?’, and so will have practiced some of the thinking skills categorized by Bloom as Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Using HOTS encourages students to investigate and evaluate new information and to use it to develop something new.

Source:Chapter 3: The 5Cs

CLIL aims to simultaneously develop proficiency in both the content area and the target language. This methodology is used widely in bilingual and multilingual education settings.

Key Features of CLIL
Dual-Focused Learning: CLIL emphasizes both content learning (e.g., math, science, history) and language learning, providing an integrated approach to education.

Language as a Medium: The target language is used as the medium of instruction, allowing students to acquire language skills in a natural context.

Authentic Materials: CLIL often uses real-world materials, such as articles, videos, and presentations, to engage students and provide contextually rich learning experiences.

Cultural Awareness: The approach often includes cultural elements of the language being taught, fostering intercultural understanding and communication skills.

Cognitive Skills Development: CLIL encourages the development of cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, through complex content tasks.

Benefits of CLIL
Language Proficiency: Students improve their language skills by using the target language in a meaningful context.
Content Knowledge: Learners gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter, as they engage with it from different linguistic perspectives.
Motivation: The integrated approach can increase motivation and engagement, as students see the practical application of language learning.
Cognitive Advantages: CLIL can enhance cognitive abilities, such as memory and concentration, due to the mental demands of processing information in a non-native language.

Challenges of CLIL
Teacher Preparation: Educators need to be proficient in the target language and skilled in integrating language and content teaching.
Resource Availability: There can be a lack of suitable materials that meet both language and content objectives.
Assessment: Evaluating both content and language proficiency can be complex and requires careful planning.
Implementation Strategies
Collaborative Planning: Teachers of different subjects can work together to create integrated lesson plans that align language and content objectives.

Scaffolding: Provide support structures, such as vocabulary lists, visual aids, and language frames, to help students navigate the language and content.

Interactive Activities: Use group work, discussions, and projects to encourage active learning and language use.

Assessment: Develop assessments that evaluate both content knowledge and language skills, using rubrics that include language-specific criteria.

ICT tools and mobile applications became to our classroom more active after the pandemic, and teachers and educators are practicing them nowadays for many reasons, for presentations, formative and summative assessments, collecting data, and online teaching-learning.
One of the platforms my students and I are using for the projects is Renderforest. It has lots of templates for making logos, videos, animated presentations, postcards, etc. Here is a link to a summative video created for a project with Renderforest.
Yes, We Can! eTwinning project
Another tool we are using for collecting ideas and evaluation is Mentimeter, which enables us to create word clouds and presentations.

Screenshot 2024-08-09 004212.jpg

The most favorite tool we use today is Canva which has a wide range of templates for presentations, logos, posters, videos, certificates, and infographics.
Hit the link to see the presentation >>>

Hello @NAJMAc79e2494d9,
My students and I practiced BookCreator for storytelling and as a final product for the project, the tools of the app are very good and multifunctional, we can even upload a video in the book. My elementary and middle-class students love StoryJumper very much are there are lots of animated characters and the students can create an audiobook as it allows recording audio and adjusting it to pages. Here is one of our stories created as a final product for an international project called "Inspirations".

The story of Afflatus

One of the favorite topics my students and I constantly refer to is Nature protection and a few years ago we conducted a project about environmental holidays where we learned about World Wildlife, International Forest, World Water Days, Earth Hour, and Earth Day. First, the students represented the idea and meaning of those days then they had individual tasks to find issues and challenges our country faces related to those days. They dug deep into ecological issues and their solutions and learned how to take care of Nature.
Here is the link to the EcologyProject

Dear @Ana_moderator, I would like to share another experience I had lately with my students. It was a lesson on Social Study (in Armenian) and I was invited as an expert in Media Literacy. The topic of the lesson was Hate Speech and the students discussed social media and cyberbullying. To my surprise, all the materials they used were in English. They were speaking about their favorite TikTok stars, the issues teenagers get through Social media, and digital citizenship and footprints. They also introduced the vocabulary of unknown words and expressions of the video to the class and after watching the video they discussed all the key points and had a short debate about posting personal life on social media.
Here is the video link >>> and the activities they had during the lesson.
Brainstorming/Mind-mapping about trends, mobile applications
Group work: Discussion (online edutainment, addiction, time management)
Observation (video, content analysis)
Pair Work: Writing ( media messages (hobbies (real life and virtual), target group, influencers, digital footprints, hate speech, support systems, trends and memes)
Debate: My Digital Footprint
Hometask: Create an educating video about Digital footprints in TikTok

@Adel-8d693e36c4 thank you for your comment. We have a new concept of teaching in our country (Armenia) and our curriculum is structured on competency-based learning. It means that our objectives for teaching are mainly concentrated on forming and developing different competencies and skills and all the tasks are designed to foster the analytical thinking and creativity of the students. The teachers are mostly guiding the students and they are doing lots of things on their own or with groups. We experimented with Student-Centered Inquiry a few years ago and found it very productive. Learners get the instructions and they find- investigate, discuss, analyze, reflect, and create and the teacher assesses them with rubrics and questions about their social-emotional state. There were also cases when teachers were involved in the learning process as well and as a result, with the help of the students, they improved their ICT and media skills.

Hello @Tabassumlaghari, thank you for your response, all you mentioned above is what learners relate to while learning different subjects, foreign languages, and navigating social media. When I researched CLIC I found that my students are mostly interested in traveling and when we had a tour of our neighboring country Georgia I asked them to collect their postcards and photos on a Padlet board and share it with their Georgian friends. Here is the educational material they created which is highly used by Georgian students as well.

Lnadmarks of Georgia

@Ana_moderator, thank you
I am sharing my experience when I introduced CLIC methodology in my teaching. I implemented a project called "Show Me My Country" about Armenia and asked my students to explore the architecture, cuisine, culture, customs, and traditions of the country with web resources and collect the information, and represent them to their peers. As it was a familiar topic and they knew a lot about our native country they could get resources and content very easily. The most exciting thing for them was to represent their works in English and they did it with great enthusiasm as they were speaking about their favorite places, dishes, cultural events, and traditions. As they mentioned they felt like
being tourists in their own country and this kind of experience gave them the confidence to be a tour guide in summer in their local area. This kind of project helped them enlarge their vocabulary, and improve their digital literacy, cultural competence and their communication skills.
Here is the link to the final product of the project.
"Show Me My Country" e-book

Game applications and platforms are what make the lessons more exciting and interactive. My students and I use them for learning grammar, for practicing vocabulary, for project assessment, and entertainment. Most of all we practice LearningApps.org, Quizizz.com, Wordwall.net, and sometimes also Kahoot.com and what's more involving we love to create games ourselves.
Here are some of the games we created:

<iframe style="max-width:100%" src="https://wordwall.net/embed/10587f44e0924b318c9ab014b3ebf0d3?themeId=45&templateId=3&fontStackId=0" width="500" height="380" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe style="max-width:100%" src="https://wordwall.net/embed/647fe04ff512434681590b37efcd9240?themeId=22&templateId=2&fontStackId=0" width="500" height="380" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe style="max-width:100%" src="https://wordwall.net/embed/c4bcbc731acd44c3b753f7159df072e0?themeId=2&templateId=5&fontStackId=0" width="500" height="380" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe src="https://learningapps.org/watch?v=p73amd8ia20" style="border:0px;width:100%;height:500px" allowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

<iframe src="https://learningapps.org/watch?v=psop7jmzj19" style="border:0px;width:100%;height:500px" allowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>