DRAMA ACTIVITIES

During one of art classes we did some various drama activities (most of them outside the classroom).

1) What is drama?
Drama is a tool that can be used in many different ways to express feelings, opinions, show behaviours and essential human activities. It is present in everyday life. Drama can be easily used for educational purposes, especially with young kids or in language teaching.

2) Drama in foreign language teaching
I study to be English teacher, so for me using drama is very interesting in the field of language teaching.
In that area, drama is widely and very often used to teach foreign language not only children but also teenagers and adults. Drama activities require to use different skills and knowledge from various fields.
That is a good opportunity to organize warm up activity or revision. It is an excellent way to work on vocabulary, grammar; improve speaking and listening skills.
What's more learners have a lot of fun during preparation time and also during the performance.

3) Difficulties
Drama is a very useful and interesting educational tool, however, there are also some difficulties that the teacher can meet with.
First of all, not all the learners like such activities. Some of them may be too shy to participate in that active exercises. There are also some people (especially teenagers) who think that it is too infantile.
What the teacher should do, when he/she meets with such reactions of the students?
In my opinion, the teacher should first get to know the pupils in the classroom and consider if drama activities will be appropriate for such environment. Secondly, drama activities should be introduced step by step (starting from short, little-active exercises ending with longer performances). Thirdly, the learners can't be forced to participate in drama activities. Let them observe, enjoy it first as the public and then maybe it will convince them to take active part in it.

4) Conclusion
To sum up, I think that drama activity is a great opportunity for the learners to improve language skills, gain new knowledge, revise some information, and also to improve social skills: cooperation in the group, expressing feelings and emotions, stretching the imagination.

Above all, drama is a great fun !!!

BOTH DISTANT AND NEAR

During last classess we learnt how to use different kinds of technological tools for educational purposes.

One of them was the programme called AUDACITY. In my opinion, that is a very good tool for both teachers and learners in almost every age. There are many ways of using it:

1) Recording stories (with different sounds).
2) Learning foreign languages (recording your speech and listen to it to correct mistakes in pronounciation).
3) Promoting reading ( for example: children who don't like reading or who are not so good at it may be motivated to learn this skill if they know that it can be recorded).
4) Recording stories/ essays for younger children or blind kids.

During the class we tried to come up with our own story based on two paintings of our favourite painters from Poland. We recorded the story and also we added some sounds. It was a really great fun for us, and I am sure that children will also have a great time during creating such work.

Second program that we were talking about, was SCREENCAST.
Who uses this programme? Most of all teachers and students.
It has a very similar advantages as audacity, however it is also possible to make the image.
I think that screencast is a great tool for distance education.The teacher can easily prepare the whole lesson, show different materials, point at the most important parts, explain everything. That's a significant opportunity for those learners who can't participate in traditional lessons.

Maybe the future school will look excactly like that:
Every student and teacher sit in their own home and participate in the lessons using only the computer.

However, the world without traditional schools is impossible to imagine at the moment, distance learning may occur in the near future.