Teachers are Like Sharks In the classic 1977 movie - Annie Hall, there is a scene where Woody Allen compares relationships to sharks and says that they have to constantly move forward or they start to die. In many ways I think the same can be said of teachers. Many of us work with our classes in complete isolation and are rarely observed and when we are then it is often only for the purpose of quality check rather than as part of a process of continuous development. In my own case I was often lucky enough to work in schools that had regular development seminars, or a lively staffroom where teachers willing talked about and swapped teaching ideas and materials. Please contribute your ideas to the questionnaire below. Add ideas for developing your teachingAdd Pros and Cons to the ideasVote for the 4 you think are most effective. Related links: Best Nik Peachey
Transl8it! - understand SMS text message slang & chat lingo shorthand ESL, English Grammar Exercises, Video lessons,Quizzes, Vocabulary Exercises He goes to school with his three brothers. I always believe that the best sites and web tools are the simplest, and this is certainly the case with Phonetizer. It's a really easy to use tool that takes and text and adds the phonetic spelling below it. It's really easy to use. Ways of using Phonetizer with EFL ESL studentsThis is a great tool to add pronunciation support to any reading text and help students to develop their pronunciation while reading.You could also get students to use it to record their own version of the text using something like Audioboo.fm.You could use it to produce vocabulary records with pron symbols added You could get students to transcribe a short text then use Phonetizer to check their own work.It can be especially useful with things like scripts or poems which are intended for reading out loud.It's a great way to add a pronunciation record to any dialogues students work with. Related links: Best Nik Peachey
10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses Over the summer I was running a number of two week ICT in language teaching courses for teachers from around the world. The courses were part of the Bell summer campus at Homerton College Cambridge. This was the first time in a while I had been asked to teach such long courses and i thought it was a great opportunity to see if I could fundamentally change the way the teachers related to technology, not just in the classroom as a tool for teaching learners, but as a tool within their everyday working practice. As sub goals I set out to run the course with absolutely no paper. I also wanted to use a form of loop input (using the technology to teach the technology) so that teachers were learning about the technologies they could use with students by actually using them for themselves. I would like to add that this course took place in a computer room with 1 Internet connected computer per teacher. TodaysMeet This was my fundamental communication tool. Related links: Best Nik Peachey
Juegos para aprender Inglés Games to learn English es un sitio con numerosos juegos para el aprendizaje y la práctica del Inglés realizados en flash por el Profesor Owen Dwyer de la Universidad de Tecnología de Hefei en Anhui China. Algunos de los juegos se pueden ver en la imagen siguiente con su descripción: educational technology This will be the first in a series of articles I’m planning to post over the next few weeks on the topic of the future of learning technologies. In this series I’m going to look at some trends and developments in a range of technologies and try to see how they relate to each other and how they might impact on education over the the next few years. One of the first things I would like to focus on is the digital divide and what I believe is the ‘myth’ that technology is expensive. Firstly, I would like to state that the digital divide hasn’t been created by technology, but by economics. It’s a financial divide that has been around for thousands of years and one that thousands of years of paper education hasn’t been able to bridge. Here is some thing that I feel puts this in perspective though. PastI first bought a computer in 1997. PresentTen years later in 2007 I bought an iPod Touch. Related links Best Nik Peachey
Inglês Fluente - Aprenda Inglês Online edte.ch My Reflection on #28daysofwriting February 28, 2015 – 4:23 pm It was in about early January when I began to mull over the idea of getting back into a writing habit. I wanted to renew the discussion and connectedness I enjoyed through my blog and get myself writing regularly again. The #28daysofwriting idea sprang from that desire. What Makes People Creative? February 27, 2015 – 9:10 pm When you start to explore the literature around the definition of creativity, or what it means to be creative, the lists and references go on and on. Convene your Classroom Creative Council February 26, 2015 – 9:28 pm During some research on Thomas Edison I stumbled on the fact that he deliberately surrounded himself with a diverse range of expertise in order to generate new thinking and ideas, a creative council. Education Suffers from a Lack of Knowledge Urgency February 25, 2015 – 10:26 pm My EDtalk Interview from ULearn14 February 24, 2015 – 8:27 pm