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Showing posts from January, 2014

Managing behaviour in the digital age

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If you ask most teachers, especially newly trained ones, what one of the biggest challenges of teaching is, they would probably say managing student behaviour. Especially as class sizes grow and more students are bringing along potentially distracting digital devices, making sure you are keeping students on task is becoming ever more important. If this is something that concerns you, then read on. ClassCharts could be the solution to your problem. ClassCharts is a digital management tool which can help you, your students and their parents to track and improve student behaviour across the whole school. Using ClassCharts you can set up seating charts for every room in your school and create a profile for each student. Teachers can then use ClassCharts to monitor and reward positive behaviour as well as track negative behaviour. As the teacher builds up data across classes they can start to understand how different seating arrangements and student pairing and grouping can impact on be...

Publishing 3.0 - A new model for independent educational publishing

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My New Years resolution this year was to start work on a series of ebooks for iPads, e-readers and other digital devices. This has been my ambition since I published my first book Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers back in 2009, but I’ve never felt that the time, the technology or the market was at the right place. Significant changes over the last couple of years though have led me to believe that now is the time to look at a new model of ELT publishing, at least for the realm of teacher development books. The changes I mention above include A proliferation of increasingly low cost e-reading devices and tablets. The development of powerful free software and applications such as iBooks Author for the development of media rich ebooks. The combination of these applications with secure and reliable marketing platforms, such as Lulu and iBookStore . The development of crowd-funding platforms such as KickStarter and Indigogo . I believe that the combination of these developments is now enabling...