On reading the latest blog entry of my friend and colleague , Jenny, I was inspired to visit my own blog after a rather long hiatus. Jenny says the following in response to creative visuals:

Just because they see something it doesn't necessarily mean they are learning.  Learning is by doing.  Surely we as teachers, should be spending our time and energy getting the pupils to be active and  produce.
http://www.jencanjot.blogspot.co.il/

It seem to me that the enormous variety of tech tools today really forces us to find that balance between employing them for our students' enjoyment and ensuring that they are in fact "doing" most of the time. The element of games in lessons also needs to be critically examined. In most cases, when team games are being played, only some of the students are engaged. When inviting one or two students to the front of the classroom to play a game, they are actually the only ones "doing" anything at that moment. Don't get me wrong; games are wonderful for enhancing motivation. But a 2-3 minute break for a game does the trick. Then it's back to engaging the whole class in some language activity.

That is why I simply love Scott Thornbury's Teaching Unlpugged. 
http://www.amazon.com/Delta-Teach-Dev-Teaching-Unplugged/dp/1905085192/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369158582&sr=8-1&keywords=teaching+unplugged

Scott doesn't reject technology but suggests that , quite simply, we shouldn't throw  the baby out with the bathwater.I'll be giving a lesson on this soon in my Methodology class . I call it "Using Dogme ELT" and it is actually one of the most creative methodologies that I teach over the year. And it's creative because for 45 minutes (the usual length of a lesson) the kids  are constantly PRODUCING English.  I hope I can convince my student teachers  of its worthiness.

When  Purim comes around I always find myself musing on the meaning of performance and disguise. Purim is about digging deep within ourselves to discover those elements of our  being that are normally hidden in  everyday life. The idea fascinates me because , let's face it, we spend most of our waking hours covered in layers upon layers of protection shields to avoid the vulnerability of psychological nakedness. On Purim, however, we are asked to don masks and costumes, not to hide who we are , but to become more of who we are meant to be.

As a teacher of drama ( not acting), the possibility of contributing to our students' emotional growth through performance intrigues me. It is through performance that we become more of who we are. By pretending to be someone else, we discover parts of ourselves hitherto unknown or realized. I love P.S Baber's quotation about drama : "The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen." When we enter a theater we enter into a world within a world which engenders a magic and mystery. At the same time, we are asked to "willfully suspend disbelief" (the phrase coined by W.T.Coleridge) because what we are about to see will engage us in ways that our "real' life events  simply do not. Whether we like it or not, we become part of the drama on the stage and will continue to take it with us well after the play has ended. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create an EFL classroom in which the magic and real coexist, in which our students find a voice through drama and performing a myriad of characters?  Research shows that it's not enough to just talk about the plays. They must be experienced first-hand if they are to truly engage our students.

In The King's Speech, George resisted becoming king for several reasons. His main reason was that he didn't believe he could "perform" the role of king because of his speech impediment. When forced to replace Edward as king  he found his voice as he "performed" his coronation speech and with it the sheer joy of  discovering who he really was. The act of becoming king came about as he found his voice, not before or after, but during.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVcK0XEic3U.


Getting back to the EFl classroom, I leave with the following:

“dramatic activities help students investigate a subject while finding its relationship to themselves and society; moreover, they make students counter with performance of social roles they had never experienced before, with the corresponding language and communicative styles” (B. Robbins, 1988) 

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I expect you are wondering about the title of my blog. Not very digital friendly. Which is precisely the point. There's a little resistance going on here as I am also attempting to maintain a measure of sanity amid the onslaught of technology. But more importantly, I believe we must continue to nurture and develop our unplugged methodological skills in EFL . There are naturally several reasons for this. I'll leave that for next time. I'm still trying to just cope with the fact that I have a blog!