9 Tools to Create E-magazines and Newspapers for Your Class 1- Uniflip UniFlip converts your magazine, brochure or catalog from its original PDF format into an exciting, professional multi-media digital format with pages that flip. 2-Joomag Joomag is a web tool that lets you create your own magazines using a simple online editor. 3- Scribd Scribd is known for being a reading library where you can search for and find ebooks and slides but it is also a magazine creator which allows users to upload their own content and turn it into a magazine 4- Issuu This is like Scribd above. 5- Zinepal This tools lets you create an ebook or magazine from posts and articles of a blog. 6- Build A Newspaper This one is a professional platform that provides teacher based templates to create mazagines. 7- Fodey This is most simple of all the tools mentioned here. 8- Open Zine This is another web tool that allows users to create their own magazines without any need for advanced tech knowledge. 9- Calameo
A Simple Comprehensive Guide on The use of Personal Learning Networks in Education Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs, have been around for a long time. Originally they were your family, relatives and friends, or probably other educators and fellow teachers you work with in the same institution, but now and thanks to the development of web technologies and wireless connections, the concept of PLNs has been expanded to engulf people you have never met before in real world. Much of the learning nowadays takes place online and via a network of interconnected relations. PLNs are basically based on the concept of a learning community. Teachers who are passionate about developing their learning experiences recognize the value of sharing their knowledge and expertise with others. Outline : What is a PLN ? What is a PLN ? Why PLNs in education ? So, why bother thinking about creating a PLN ? Benefits of PLNs in Education Here is a list of some of the pluses of PLNs in education as featured in Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education
The greatest creative writing activity ever UPDATE: This post was awarded the British Council’s Teaching English blog award for February, 2013. Thanks to all those who voted for my work, you’re awesome. This post is a response to a question posed on the British Council’s Teaching English page on Facebook: ‘Have you got a favourite lesson plan or class activity that you come back to and use again and again? Ok, let me dive straight into it. First, I’ll describe the activity, and then I’ll tell you why it’s great. 1. How long have you been on the planet? 2. You are going to write a paragraph that tells a story.Your paragraph will be a response to these questions.Any sentence you write is OK, but you must follow the sequence of questions.You can ask me for help while you are writing. 3. What kind of language might we use to answer the first question? 4. Twenty minutes is long enough for most to finish. 5. This keeps the early finishers busy, while the slower writers aren’t disturbed and can get on with their writing. 1. Passive structures
This Is What Happens When A Kid Leaves Traditional Education Logan Laplante is a 13 year-old boy who was taken out of the education system to be home schooled instead. Not only was he home schooled, but Logan had the ability to tailor his education to his interests and also his style of learning, something traditional education does not offer. As Logan has mentioned, when he grows up he wants to be happy and healthy. At a TEDx talk in 2013, he discussed how hacking his education is helping him achieve that goal. Logan’s story can be seen in a similar light as Jacob Barnett‘s story who was first put in Special Ed by his school until he was pulled out of standard education and is now seen as an incredibly intelligent young person who is on track to winning a Nobel Prize one day. I also recently did a TEDx talk in 2014 about my story of leaving college for good. More on Education & Homeschooling Currently about 3.8% of children ages 5 – 17 are home schooled in the US. Does Education Kill Creativity? Sources: Learn To Use Your Thoughts To Reverse Aging!
Alternative Video Use in the Flipped Classroom Guest post by FLN executive director, Kari Arfstrom. Recently, you may have heard about flipped learning. If you read any professional journals or education publications over the summer break, most of them have written at least one story on this new ideology. Every education blogger seems to have an opinion on the topic as well. National news organizations like CNN and NPR have covered it, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, which has done multiple stories. Survey says: Flipped learning boosts grades, attitudes, satisfaction You may have decided to flip your classroom (or are thinking about it) to increase student interest and learning, to stave off doing the “same thing day after day,” and to utilize past technology purchases that can finally be realized as increasing satisfaction for both teachers and students. The vast majority of educators who responded to the poll have more than 7 years of experience (85%) and have flipped their classroom two years or less.
A world where grades don't exist and learning is free As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries to talk about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be. PALO ALTO, Calif. -- About a mile from the main quad at Stanford University, one of the nation's bastions of exclusive and expensive higher education, a street-level office building across the street from an Olive Garden houses the makings of an up-and-coming contender. In this version of education, learning will be free and available to anyone who wants it while operating like a whimsical playground: No one is late for class, failure is not an option, and a lesson looks something like Angry Birds, the physics-based puzzle game that has been downloaded more than 1 billion times. "You want learning to be as much fun as it is to play a video game," says Sebastian Thrun, a Google vice president and Stanford research professor best known for his role in building Google's driverless car.
A place of greater safety | macappella Motivation is key to learning, the carrot being better than the stick, and if the carrot is brought in by the learner themself, why, even better. Of course, motivation is a lot of things: it’s output from input (as a ratio), it’s challenge, engagement, effort, empowerment, being energised, it’s having needs met and then some. As teachers, we often think of needs in linguistic or language learning terms: he needs to be able to write business emails to engineering companies, she needs to be able to understand articles about plant genetics, he needs to pass his first year secondary school exam, she needs to improve her pronunciation as she’s difficult to understand.. and so on. But there’s more to life than language, and the classroom – if we open ourselves to it as teachers – is more than just a language box or drip, it’s a microcosm – and a good place to be. Do you remember Maslow and his five neat layers working their way up the hierarchy of needs? Why am I banging on about this?
Goal 10: Spread Your Knowledge (15+ Tools to Bookmark, Aggregate, Curate) Posted by Shelly Terrell on Thursday, June 14th 2012 Goal 10 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators ! Click the link to find out more about the new changes to this year’s 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! ““If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. ” ~ Margaret Fuller Short-term - share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Long-term - develop a community for sharing resources in your teaching environment. My Personal Thoughts About This Goal As educators, we are in the business of learning. Resources Related to This Goal I love learning. The tools that I use meet a few criteria: They have a free app! Tools Diigo - saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet, allows you to highlight sections on websites and make notes, takes clippings, tag, search, and more! More resources: Important News Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours! Challenge:
No document camera? No problem! Use your smartphone, Dropbox, and PicMonkey to do even more! | Nathan Hall Image courtesy of Cushing Library Holy Names University One of the tools I use quite a bit in my English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom is a document camera. While I tend to use a lot of computer based tools, it is still easier (and in some ways better) to have students work in pairs and groups on writing projects with pens and paper. When talking with teachers who are limited in their technology resources, such as not having a document camera, I try to find alternatives that do basically the same thing without the expenditure of another tool to buy. Students work on their projects with coloured pens and white paper. Once they are done, I take a photo with my smartphone of the project. After taking photos of all of the paper-based projects my students have been working on, I go the computer hooked up to the projector at the front of the class and I go to the PicMonkey editor which does not require an account to use. Like this: Like Loading...
IATEFL 2014: Q and A with Sugata Mitra – Saturday 17.00 BST: a summary At 17.00 BST (18.00 Palermo time!), the Q and A session with Sugata Mitra took place. Questions had been sent in advance of this session, and these appeared in turn on the slides, for Mitra to answer. I attempted to make notes during the session and here is what I managed to catch: Slide one a)If you look at the paper, which was written in 2005, it describes quite carefully what the measurements are. b)With regards to the second question, Mitra doesn’t have all the answers. Slide 2 He would love to see State involvement and indeed states across the world, U.S., U.K, India, has shown positive response. Slide 3 Mitra is not sure what they mean by wider approach, but likes the first part – 60% out of school factors, 20% teaching, 20% personal – but would like to capture that 60% and bring it into school. Slide 4 a) Of course they would have learnt better from a good teacher but they didn’t have teachers so two options either learn nothing at all or learn by themselves. Slide 5 Slide 6 Slide 7 a.
Do coaching and technology make a good fit? - Biz-E-training This post is adapted from an article published in Business Issues, the IATEFL BESIG Newsletter, Summer 2015, Issue 90, and is reproduced with the kind permission of the Editor, Chris Stanzer. Available from In recent years, the use of coaching techniques in ELT has become increasingly widespread. The shift in role from teacher to coach has perhaps been prompted to some extent by the possible financial rewards it can bring, but when working in corporate settings with adult learners, establishing a coach / coachee relationship in the classroom, especially with one-to-one clients, would seem to make good pedagogical as well as commercial sense. In their recently published e-book From English Teacher to Learner Coach (FETLC), Daniel Barber and Duncan Foord make a very convincing case for adopting coaching in ELT to develop learner motivation and autonomy. Early in the book, the authors observe that Self-study set for the group to prepare the role-plays Apps to go
An ESL Listening Lesson Plan Template I Had no Idea about How to Teach ESL Listening I’m always surprised when I get reader questions or talk to people preparing for their upcoming job interviews that they don’t know how to make a basic lesson plan. But, it’s not so crazy and I actually had no system of any sort until I took the CELTA course a few years back. After that course, I could recite the basic ESL listening lesson plan in my sleep! Thank you CELTA! (If anyone is interested in doing the CELTA course in Korea, you’ll need to see this post: Is it possible to do the CELTA in Korea?) The ESL listening lesson plan that I’m going to share with you today is modelled after that and it can provide you a solid foundation upon which to expand and adjust to suit the needs of your own class. ESL Listening Plan Template Step #1: Set the Context It’s really difficult for our students if we start the class off by getting straight into the task. Don’t forget to set the context at the beginning of your ESL listening lesson.
David Petrie: The autonomous exam student An autonomous learner is one who goes off and does their own thing while an exam very often acts as a constraint on the learning process, focusing everything in towards what is required to get that passing grade. And yet, it is very often the students that sit there waiting to be told by the teacher what they need to do to pass are the ones who have the greatest difficulties and who struggle to achieve the grades they need. A good definition of learner autonomy is that of Henri Holec, who categorised it as the ability to take charge of their own learning and to be responsible for decisions about their learning (Smith, 2008; Borg & Al-Busaidi 2012). This though, does not need to be the case. Focus and Content Thus while the exam may determine the focus, it does not have to determine the content. Learning Objectives While needs analysis reveals what learners need or want, it doesn’t always show what learners lack, particularly in vocabulary and grammar development. Evaluation and Feedback
The Language Teacher Online 20.10: Crossing Borders: The Development Parameter When I heard that the theme of this year's JALT Conference was to be Crossing Borders, my heart sang. The idea resonates at so many levels and in so many ways: the physical, the cultural, the political, the geographical, the psychological, the social, the personal -- and that is without even beginning to consider what might be seen as the core, professional borders of language and pedagogic style which we cross daily in our necessarily cross-cultural TESOL activities. One challenge, then, when responding to the theme, is to find a constant -- something to hold onto which will give coherence to one's ideas as one crosses so many borders. I have attempted to do this by focusing specifically on what I have called the development parameter. The Development Parameter By development, I mean a continuing process of self-directed movement towards becoming the teacher which one wishes to be. Let me take a moment here to expand slightly on that last distinction. "What's the difference?" Conclusion