This video from the English Club gives you some ideas on how to learn English in a different way, from real life. I really enjoyed it and I hope it can be useful. If you don’t have 15 minutes to watch it now or want to share it with your peers, you can download it
If the video Thoughts from Brazil doesn’t appear, you can get it by clicking here.
————-
A green attitude is to use Ecosia for your search. It’s a cool search engine with results slightly different from Google’s but, most of all, it contributes to a greener planet.
Ecosia is an eco-friendly Internet search engine backed by Yahoo, Bing and the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). It basically works like any other search engine but, unlike others, Ecosia gives at least 80% of its advertising revenue to a rainforest protection program run by the WWF.
Because of this, Ecosia users can save about two square meters of rainforest with every search they do – without paying anything. Furthermore, all Ecosia servers run on green electricity, so they do not cause any CO2 emissions. By using Ecosia, you can turn your web searches green.
I still have so much to learn about Web 2.0 tools for education and now comes Web 3.0. Any suggestion for it’s use in education and language teaching?
Wow !
I’ve just registered for some sessions of the English Village Online 2010. It’s a great opportunity to boost your skills to embed technology in your classes. I signed up for 2 sessions 2 years ago and learned a great deal. Last year, I couldn’t attend because I was traveling on vacation, but felt sorry about it.
They have sessions about:
So, if you are willing to study and develop on a 6-week period, join one or two sessions too.
You can find the outlines of the sessions here.
Want to know what the major trends in teaching are and how our profession will change, take a look at these slides:
You can also visit directly this interesting blog “The clever sheep“.
If you’re giving conversation classes or simply want to help your students improve their communication skills, here is a handy handout.
I got it from Teaching Students to Dialogue by Angela Cunninghan, together with an interesting link to learn more about Accountable Talk.
I hope you find it can be useful.
Upcoming event for the first week of November, here is a conference that should be interesting.
Social Networking: thriving as a community of practice
From November 5-8, 2009, we will be running the Social Networking 2009 Conference. This open-knowledge event will be completely online and free and it is aimed at ELT practitioners to grow in the use of social networks as learning development tools encouraging practioners to reflect on the role of communities of practice as a social network in ELT.
I’ve just read this great list – by Richard Byrne – of tools available to integrate technology in teaching. You can find it here as a booklet whose pages you can turn or here as a PDF. It tells about Google Docs, Zoho, Animoto, Edublogs, Drop.io, Weebly, Wikispaces, Voicethread, Ediscio, Snag Films, School Tube and DotSub, many of which I’ve been using and have proven very useful.
It’s worth a visit.
A book has been published telling you almost everything you always wanted to know about e-learning (but were afraid to ask), i.e. how to get started, the pedagogy of e-learning, learning environments, creating digital learning objects, networks and communities, etc.
Here is an excerpt of its preface:
“Information and Communication Technologies are being increasingly used to create richer learning environments. In all sectors of education from primary schools to adult education, in schools for pupils with special education needs and in colleges and universities, technologies are being used across the curriculum to enhance students’ experiences.
However, technology is not enough. The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realised in a way that
stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and can also be exchanged freely with others.
This handbook has been produced by the TACCLE project partners in six different European countries. The TACCLE project is part funded by the
European Commission’s Comenius programme. Its aim is to train teachers to create e-learning materials and raise their awareness of e-learning in general in order to establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work.
It has been written by teachers for teachers and caters for those with only basic computer skills and limited technical support.”
You can get it for free by paying a visit to Taccle. You’ll have to register (it takes 2 seconds) and when you log in you download your 170-page book to your computer.
I hope it can be useful to some of you.
Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS
Francis Gilbert got stuck into New Labour:
‘The government’s policies have led to the creation of the “robot teacher”, who is programmed to teach to a rigid format, drilling pupils for the test without imparting the enthusiasm and passion that’s necessary to inspire our young people. Passive, dull-eyed pupils have become used to being spoon-fed, expecting the top grades to be handed to them on a plate, with a worksheet or revision guide that explains everything. New Labour has truly returned us to the days that Dickens writes about in Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind insists pupils are taught nothing but “facts”. Replace the word “facts” with “assessment objectives” and you have a carbon copy of Gradgrind’s techniques.’
Does this article in the Guardian about how Labour ripped the heart out of education concern the English only? Or is it a worldwide trend?
