Okay, some more cross promotion, as I was quite busy with the blog.deutsch20.de, which is in German, as mentioned earlier. Hence, there are no reblogs but links:

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In the last week, I've written a number of posts on deutsch20.de. As they are written in German, I won't reblog them here. However, here are the links for those, who understand German and are interested in the topic. Please also note the new role of "deutsch20.de", decribed in an earlier post.

Few years ago, I opened the twitter account "@herr_doepel" to communicate with my students. As I left NUS in December last year, this account lost its role. However, I'm going to teach a seminar on media in foreign language teaching next semester. The account will be used to exchange information with the students in this seminar. So, please don't get confused by some notes, which are unusual for the former purpose. Feel free to unfollow the account. I won't take it personal.

Cheers, Martin.

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As an academic, I have to read a lot. A former professor of mine, Klaus Dicke, underlined the importance of writing excerpts of articles and books, one's reading: After you read an article or book, you want to quote from (directly or indirectly), you write down the essential ideas and quotes of the publication. While doing this, you keep also track of the page numbers, the idea or quote can be found. So, the ideas stick better to your head and you can find these faster than just by highlighting in the text. An excerpt done by hand might look like this example from the beautiful blog "Minimalismus und mehr".

handwritten excerpt

Handwritten excerpt, seen on the blog MinimalismusUndMehr

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When dealing with presentations, I came across two problems that occurred quite often:

  1. Students did not stick to the time-limit. Okay, one could interrupt, when the time is up, time them using cards (5 minutes, 1 minute, final sentence). The first option is not very polite and the second one might put students under pressure with a negative impact on the quality of the presentation.
  2. When accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation, they tended to read from the slides, even after I made clear that they should not do it.

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