Dr
Judy Willis applies new knowledge in neuroscience to develop better learning
strategies for children. She's found that using video games can be a powerful
way to engage young people in effective and enjoyable learning, and mindfulness
plays a part too. These techniques are also being employed in the Shaping
Brains program in Queensland with some encouraging results.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
100 blogs for language lovers
100 blogs for language lovers
You don’t have to speak several
languages to love it. Whether you just want to brush up on your main language,
learn another, or even choose which to learn, there is tons of help on the
internet, especially in blog form. To make the most of it, check out these 100
fantastic blogs for language lovers who enjoy vocabulary, grammar, linguistics,
and much more. They are written by professors, students, and language lovers
alike.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Hot Chalk Lesson Plans Page
This site
looks interesting. Why don't you check it out...
the ultimate
free resource for teachers
HotChalk’s Lesson Plans Page (LPP) was created
with one goal in mind—making life easier for teachers. You’ll find over 3,500
relevant lesson plans here, created by teachers, proven in the classroom, and
absolutely, positively, completely... free! Choose from a wide range of
subject-specific plans, available for all grade levels.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Shaggy dog stories podcasts
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Other blogs of mine.
The
primary goal of this blog is to provide a free and useful resource for
students, to engage with independent language study out of class time. It can
also be used by the classroom teacher to familiarise students with the
functionality of the various sites and check that they are able to navigate the
sites easily.
The purposes of this blog are twofold. One, to
fulfill the requirements for the "Education for Sustainability"
course in OP's GCTLT qualification and two to act as a repository for useful
sites and materials that concern themselves with sustainable practice.
Course builder for creating online education courses.
|
This site looks promising. Google is entering the online education game.
Welcome to Course Builder!
Course
Builder is our experimental first step in the world of online education. It
packages the software and technology we used to build our Power Searching with Google
online course. We hope you will use it to create your own online courses,
whether they're for 10 students or 100,000 students. You might want to create
anything from an entire high school or university offering to a short how-to
course on your favorite topic.
Course
Builder contains software and instructions for presenting your course
material, which can include lessons, student activities, and assessments.
It also contains instructions for using other Google products to create a course
community and to evaluate the effectiveness
of your course. To use Course Builder, you should have some technical skills at
the level of a web master. In particular, you should have some familiarity with
HTML and JavaScript.
If
you have technical issues or feature requests, please report them in our Issues Tracker.
Withing the Course builder site I did a search for ESL courses see here
|
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Allthink and Engrade. Lesson creation and class management tools.
Allthink & Engrade, and Why You Should Use Them
1 Allthink can be used to create engaging mini lessons. Integrating a variety of media is simple and, unlike a PowerPoint, the material exists online rather than as a file and is accessible to anyone with the link. The introduction video on the site explains quite simply how to create a good Allthink lesson and you can view some of the available lessons to get even more ideas. If there is a lesson already made that will suit your purposes, you can also just use it as is. As a resource that you, the teacher, can use to give presentations in class, Allthink is pretty good but it is even better when used to deliver instructional content outside of class. Having students view lectures at home frees up class time for more interesting learning activities where the teacher can simply act as the facilitator. This arrangement is known as the flipped classroom and is gaining in popularity as many teachers want to include more interactive activities in class but also struggle to cover all the required material in the allotted time frame. This site provides more information about the flipped classroom approach to teaching.
For an ESL class, Allthink might work something like this. Students are given the link to an Allthink lesson about the past tense to view and study as homework. The lesson consists of a short PowerPoint that you have used in the past and find quite effective, images to better convey key points, videos either drawn from the web or created by you, other related text, and finally a short quiz. Based on the results of the quiz, you know whether or not your students are comfortable with the material and where to start when you see your students next. Assuming the majority of students do well, you can devote 90% of the next class period to past tense speaking exercises maximizing the amount of time students are using English and minimizing the amount of time you spend lecturing. This can be used for any number of ESL topics. Besides the fact that students are required to use listening, reading, and writing skills to complete the Allthink lessons, another benefit of this teaching method is that each student is viewing the homework material at his or her own pace and can therefore gain the most from it. Unfortunately, when material is delivered in a traditional lecture format, mid-level students often gain the most whereas high-level students become bored and low-level students are left confused and frustrated. Making materials available online gives students at every level the support they need to excel.
2 A Note About Engrade Allthink is linked to Engrade through the Apps tab at the top of the Engrade website so let's take a look at Engrade for a moment. While actual teaching is obviously the most important part of a teacher's job, there are a lot of other important tasks, such as paperwork, that teachers must attend to on a regular, if not daily, basis. Some schools have their own software to make tasks like grade keeping and attendance easier but many others do not so a free platform like Engrade is the perfect solution. Teachers can set up every single one of their classes on Engrade, keep attendance, and track assignments. The platform also has many tools to aid teachers in creating materials such as flashcards and rubrics. Additionally, if students are given access to the site, online quizzes, wikis, and discussions can be created easily. Finally, Allthink lessons can be assigned to classes through the Engrade platform which makes assigning and grading them even simpler!
1 Allthink can be used to create engaging mini lessons. Integrating a variety of media is simple and, unlike a PowerPoint, the material exists online rather than as a file and is accessible to anyone with the link. The introduction video on the site explains quite simply how to create a good Allthink lesson and you can view some of the available lessons to get even more ideas. If there is a lesson already made that will suit your purposes, you can also just use it as is. As a resource that you, the teacher, can use to give presentations in class, Allthink is pretty good but it is even better when used to deliver instructional content outside of class. Having students view lectures at home frees up class time for more interesting learning activities where the teacher can simply act as the facilitator. This arrangement is known as the flipped classroom and is gaining in popularity as many teachers want to include more interactive activities in class but also struggle to cover all the required material in the allotted time frame. This site provides more information about the flipped classroom approach to teaching.
For an ESL class, Allthink might work something like this. Students are given the link to an Allthink lesson about the past tense to view and study as homework. The lesson consists of a short PowerPoint that you have used in the past and find quite effective, images to better convey key points, videos either drawn from the web or created by you, other related text, and finally a short quiz. Based on the results of the quiz, you know whether or not your students are comfortable with the material and where to start when you see your students next. Assuming the majority of students do well, you can devote 90% of the next class period to past tense speaking exercises maximizing the amount of time students are using English and minimizing the amount of time you spend lecturing. This can be used for any number of ESL topics. Besides the fact that students are required to use listening, reading, and writing skills to complete the Allthink lessons, another benefit of this teaching method is that each student is viewing the homework material at his or her own pace and can therefore gain the most from it. Unfortunately, when material is delivered in a traditional lecture format, mid-level students often gain the most whereas high-level students become bored and low-level students are left confused and frustrated. Making materials available online gives students at every level the support they need to excel.
2 A Note About Engrade Allthink is linked to Engrade through the Apps tab at the top of the Engrade website so let's take a look at Engrade for a moment. While actual teaching is obviously the most important part of a teacher's job, there are a lot of other important tasks, such as paperwork, that teachers must attend to on a regular, if not daily, basis. Some schools have their own software to make tasks like grade keeping and attendance easier but many others do not so a free platform like Engrade is the perfect solution. Teachers can set up every single one of their classes on Engrade, keep attendance, and track assignments. The platform also has many tools to aid teachers in creating materials such as flashcards and rubrics. Additionally, if students are given access to the site, online quizzes, wikis, and discussions can be created easily. Finally, Allthink lessons can be assigned to classes through the Engrade platform which makes assigning and grading them even simpler!
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Khan Academy School of the future.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Language Arts worksheets
This site has a wealth of useful and interesting worksheets. Some are free and some are for members only.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Free rice. Educate and feed the world at the same time.
World Food Programme (WFP.org)
This site operates with the objective of feeding the poor and also educating people. A vocabulary site with words graded to 60 different levels. Sign up yourself or a class. Make it a daily before class challenge. Which class in your school can accrue the greatest amount of rice donated?
What is the process?
A word shows and you have to choose the correct synonym. Acorrect word chosen and 10 grains of rice are given. If you get it wrong it gives the correct answer and asks the same word later in the session. This time youi will hopefully get it right.
The words adjust to your level. They get harder as you get words right and will get easier if you get too many wrong.
When you get three words correct in a row you go up a grade. For each correct word the site gives 10 grains of rice to the poor through the World Food Programme (WFP.org). The site remembers your grade and your rice contribution. Advertisements show on the bottom the screen and this is what pays for the site and the rice.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Breaking News English
This site Breaking News English has a wealth of excellent freely available resource materials including MP3's and an 11-13 page lesson plan for each story. You can search for stories by topic, explore global breaking news stories nad check out lessons based on particular themes for example:- Health, Business English, Environment, Issues, News, Lifestyle, Famous People and Gossip and Technology.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Academic and General vocabulary
For the visual learners amongst us.
This site has a great range of training videos. Just the thing for a visual learner. Some of the topic areas include:- ELT/ESL, ICT, Top 20 videos, Videos to recommend to students, videos for other languages, podcasts, how to make your own videos and there are a range of training courses. This site looks most promising.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
A plan for dealing to classroom and office clutter.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
Ever wish you had more time? Wish you could save time? There is no better time saver than being organised. Having a well managed classroom is the key to a successful learning environment. Check out this website for tips on organising classroom and office spaces.
The busy teacher
 |
| The busy teacher. |
This site has it all. R,W,L,S,V,P, worksheets articles ice breakers and heaps more. Check it out.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Blog Purpose
This blog has been put together as a repository of useful (mainly) ESOL websites for teaching professionals to use.
If you have suggestions for tried and true sites that you have found to be excellent please contact me and I will add them to the site.
If you have suggestions for tried and true sites that you have found to be excellent please contact me and I will add them to the site.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Teacher development
These pages have teacher development materials to provide guidance and ideas for teachers at different stages of their career. Check our Continuing Professional Development Framework for a starting point, or browse through our downloadable publications, conferences and top story news items.
Using songs in the ESOL classroom
Using songs in the classroom
Submitted by Rob Lewis on 6 March, 2012 - 13:40
Do you use songs in your lessons? How? Watch here to see how Seema uses them and then share your ideas below!
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Breaking News English Training Video
This video clip steps you through all of the things that you can do on the Breaking News English Site.
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