Links that may save your life, or maybe just your lesson....

1. Jamie Keddie that I have already mentioned. His ideas are very fresh and work really well in practice (at least those that I have tested myself).
You also get feedback from other teachers who have tried them on their students.
Some ideas are of course better than others. What I like about them is that they normally have this "wake me up" effect on students. I am rarely disappointed with it.

Jamie Keddie

2. Swiss Miss has been a never ending source of inspiration for me for a good few years now.
It is a blog of a Swiss- American designer and entrepreneur Tina Roth Eisenberg.
The advantage of this blog is that it is uncluttered, so without wasting a lot of time, you can quickly grasp what is important for you.

http://www.swiss-miss.com/

3. BTS written exam topics and (sometimes) corrections. Probably everybody knows it, but... we never know...A comprehensive list of all the topics from the exam, it can come in handy.

written BTS exam topics


4. In need of a video from a BTS exam for AM, AG or COM? Visit this website:

 BTS oral exam



5.Teaching English through films? I think you could give it a go. A website of Kieran Donaghy:

http://film-english.com/


6. A French blog devoted to different types of BTS(s) from NRC to design.

http://btsanglais.over-blog.com/tag/bts%20de/


7. Museums' websites can also be full of ideas:

MoMa

Tate Modern

Design Museum London

8. or Webquests - an interesting source of inspiration for lessons on conceptual art,  art and design, protest art and others:

http://nmolp.tate.org.uk/webquests/

9. I also like to visit the Guardian's website on art and design, especially Oliver Wainwright's videos: very good both aesthetically and information-wise.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign

10.  And this is a virtual goldmine of ideas concerning creative jobs, case studies, interviews with all sorts of artists, information on what their days look like, how they ended up doing what they are doing, problems they face, advice they can give etc.


Creative choices

Cities, their stories and what comes out of them

1. The topic of cities can easily lend itself to conditionals (1st and 2nd) thanks to the Hello Lamp Post project:

Here are some of the questions that were asked and some of the answers to them:




If you listen carefully, what's the quietest thing you can hear?
Via parking meter #2995: "Fingers clenched to moving parasols"
Via lamp post #21: "The wine sloshing in my back pack"
Via lamp post #3: "I'm blasting drum and bass through my headphones, nothing is quiet..." 
Can you smell something?
Via lamp post #103: "Fresh broad beans - I'm podding some now and can't resist popping one or two from each pod in my mouth raw. Yum."
Via bench #6bs: "Ice cream and dry kebab fat"
Via lamp post #1: "The fresh scent of the rain and the earth - the scent of the outdoors!" 
I can't turn. Can you tell me what's behind me?
Via parking meter #2717: "Bristol Library. A most beautiful library and one of my favourites."
Via station #bri1: "A man in a yellow Jamaican shirt with a pot plant in a plastic bag. But he's more 'in you' than 'behind you'."
Via green box #6: "You are in front of Colston Hall, you must enjoy listening in on the concerts"
If I was yours for the day, what would you write on me? (Asked by a billboard) Via billboard #cabt: "Everything will be ok"
Via billboard #cabt: " "I love you!" so that everyone who went past would think it was for them XD. "
Via billboard #cabt: "I think I'd write 'be excellent to each other'."
What would be your super power? (And why?)
Via parking meter #2721: "To be able to grow money out of my belly button"
Via crane #29: "The ability to float above water - because we could make some side cash"
Via Biggles #2688: "Super beak that can tap tap tap on the top of people’s heads... Why: pick peoples brains"


As you can see some of these questions are perfect to practice the 1st and 2nd conditionals.

To add to this list and develop the activity further, I often use quotes, that students have to finish with their own ideas... there is a lot of laughing on the way (provided you happen to be teaching a class which has got a good sense of humour, of course)

“If men could get pregnant, ………………………………………..”
  Florynce Kennedy

“If everyone on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, …………………………………………………………………………………..”
Jerry Adler

“If there were no bad people, ……………………………………………….”

Charles Dickens

     “If I had no sense of humour, ……………………………………………...”

Muhatma Ghandi

“If women didn’t exist, …………………………………………………...”
Aristotle Onassis

“If God lived on earth, ……………………………………………………..”
Jewish proverb

“If life was fair, ………………………………………………………………...”
Johhny Carson

 2. Cities can also be a good introduction to the topic of comparative and superlative adjectives:

There is an excellent video which compares Paris and NY, made by Vahram Muratyan

Here is his blog (that landed him a book deal with Penguin, by the by)

 http://parisvsnyc.blogspot.fr/

and that's the video:

It is an excellent start to comparing and contrasting. 

3. Cities can also be a good introduction to the problems of our good old environment:

do you remember the postcards from London?

 or walkable cities

walkable cities projects

or San Francisco and its Zero Waste Programme

 http://www.sfenvironment.org/zero-waste

http://cityclimateleadershipawards.com/san-francisco-zero-waste-program/

or .....
(here is a place for your own idea....)

Maps can also ba a piece of art

The topic of using maps in lessons came from the idea I have always wanted to materialise, namely, that of visualising (on a map) lives of two people, whose paths finally crossed somewhere in the world.... Maybe one day...


I start the lesson with a map of the London underground:

We, obviously, identify it, see whether students are familiar with it, have used it before, their experience of using it, its aesthetic side etc.

Then we compare it with the Great Bear by Simon Patterson:

Some ideas for discussion:

What are maps and what is their purpose? (quite an obvious question, I suppose, but a good enough to start with)

What do you think of O.Wild's comment: “A map that does not contain utopia is not even worth glancing at”? 

The other ideas come from a lecture by Jerry Brotton, who is a Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. The lecture ca be found on BBC radio 4's website:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03lrzjm

Each period of history gets the map it deserves – whatever version of salvation it offers.

A map answers an enduring human question, that is as much existential as it is directional – Where are we?

How you see the world depends where you stand on it.

All maps have to omit some things to show others.

Any map is only as good as the data that is fed into it.

The digital maps we find on google these days fulfill primarily a commercial goal - the idea of a map driven by profits?

Map as a metaphor of our life?

There is another good example of how maps were interpreted by artists, this time from MoMa.

It is a video which presents a Jasper Johns' map. I use it as a gap filling exercise and, of course, another prompt for a discussion:

….It’s this beautiful 1……… where the colours are all interacting with 2….. other.

You see his different consistencies of paint, all these 3……… that Jasper Johns made. 

And in the 4…………………….. is this almost grid –like structure, this modernist idea that represents the country. I think it’s jam-packed with interesting …………… to talk about.

…..

It’s a map you couldn’t use if you were driving a car, you couldn’t use it to find 5……………..

Jasper Johns has put in just the basic information where you have the 6………….. of the states and then he stencilled in, not very carefully, but he stencilled in the names of a lot of these states.
….

What students notice when they look at this piece 7…………………… is the different ways in which Jasper Johns put the paint physically on the 8………….. So they focus in on places like Kansas her in the 9………….., you can see that the paint is really built up, and you can imagine that he is using a really thick consistency of paint. And then as you move over to the East Coast you’re seeing that the paint gets a little bit drippier; New York, Pennsylvania…

Students invariably 10…………….. to ask why Jasper Johns has made these decisions, why the painting looks so chaotic, and 11…………… I point them to the label, where we 12…………….. that the painting was made in 1961 and we start to come up with theories about what was 13…………… in 1961 and then kids start to take it into these metaphors. There are ideas that come up all the time about, you know, the messiness of the country and the politics always come up and thinking about what was Jasper Johns trying to process in his head while he was taking on this image and making this piece.

You can imagine Jasper Johns 14………. around his studio, flinging paint at this canvas, and there is an energy to it that I think really reads when you’re looking at the piece, you know, 15………… year after it was made.

Time for some reading:

I have chosen Going Underground by Dorian Lynskey, as it is related to the London underground maps.




Could we chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map? Dorian Lynskey explains how a box of coloured crayons and lot of swearing helped.
It seems like a deeply implausible project: to plot the history of 20th century music on the London Underground map devised by Harry Beck in 1933. Artist Simon Patterson transformed the tube map into a constellation of famous names in his 1992 work The Great Bear, but he didn't have to make them all link up. It is, after all, a tall order to find a saint who was also a comedian. But for this one to work every interchange had to be logical in the context of musical history, an unlikely prospect.
I started out with a packet of coloured crayons, four sheets of A4 taped together and a big box of doubt, but the different character of each line quickly lent itself to a certain genre. Pop intersects with everything else, so that had to be the Circle Line; classical music for the most part occupies its own sphere, which made it perfect for the Docklands Light Railway. There were a couple of false starts but by the end of one afternoon I had assigned genres to almost all the lines.
The system thus in place, the next couple of days were devoted to writing names in, scribbling them out, agonising over certain omissions, asking classical music critic Tom Service for invaluable help with the DLR, and swearing just a little bit. Amazingly, it just seemed to make sense.
Some bands I cannot stand are in here, while some that I love dearly aren't. I also followed chronology wherever the path of the line allowed it. Each branch line represents a sub-genre: rock sprouts off into grunge and psychedelia when it reaches South-West London; hip-hop diverges, north of Camden, into old school and New York rap. If I was really lucky, the band name echoed the original station name: Highbury & Islington became Sly & the Family Stone.
Of course, it is not flawless. Musical influences are so labyrinthine that any simple equation will be imperfect. But this is not some definitive history of music. It's an experiment to see if one intricate network can be overlaid on a completely different one. I hope you like it.

TATE modern has published a little booklet entitled "More than Meireles", which is a resource pack for artists, teachers and educators. It is a really interesting read. Among the different activities I have found "Tagging Boundaries" which is very much related to maps and hopefully will be inspirational for you:

If you are still looking for ideas, you may have a look at:
Influential Power of Maps by Denis Wood

Influential Power of Maps on amazon

or Where You Are published by Visual Editions (have a good look at all the books they have published, as they are definitely out of the ordinary) 

 http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/where-you-are





One last thing, as homework, I ask students to prepare their own custom-made maps and describe them using 200- 300 words.

Those bespoke maps can be very insightful.