flynn089

Over the last few months, I have been revising and redesigning the series of lesson plans I first published in 2016. These lesson plans help to develop students linguistic and digital skills as well as their critical thinking by introducing them to a range of topics and information-rich graphics. What's New about the Lessons in Digital Literacy? I've incorporated a number of new features into the redesigned lesson plans. The biggest change is that I have created digital versions for both teachers and students. Example: Studying How to Study These presentations have been created using a technology called html5 which means that they will work in the browser in pretty much any device, including mobile phones, iPads and other tablets. In order to make it easier for both teachers and students to access the infographic for the lesson, I've added QR codes, so that students can either scan them onto a mobile phone from the teacher's copy or if they are using their own version o...

This is just a quick post to share 5 very short ebooks that have been taken from my award winning ebook - Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers . Winner of the 2016 British Council Award for Innovation in Teacher Resources The ebooks come from chapter 9 of the manual which contains 12 more entries like these. As well as the explainer text, which shows you how to use the tools and gives suggestions for tasks you can do in your classroom, each ebook also has a video tutorial. Each ebook is available either as PDF from Payhip or from the iBooks Store . I hope you enjoy these free ebooks and find them useful. Digital Classrooms - TedEd TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content. It’s an ideal tool for building blended learning. Digital Classrooms - MoveNote MoveNote is a great tool for getting your pre...

There is an assumption that persists in the educational community that more mature teachers are much more difficult and reluctant to be trained on the effective use of educational technology. To some degree, I think this assumption has been built on by the digital native vs digital immigrant myth. But as someone who has trained teachers of all ages all over the world I would say that, from my own experience, this hasn’t been the case. What I have found to be the case is that more mature teachers are: Less likely to lured by the shiny hardware and the seemingly wonderful claims made to go along with it. More critical and sceptical about the way technology is used in the classroom. Less confident when using various apps and websites and less likely to explore the different features. More easily discouraged by failures. Less familiar with various tools, applications and services that have become part of every-day life for younger users. More likely to be able to see through “technology fo...

Over the last few months I have been working on a new book project and finally have it completed. The new book is Digital Tools for Teachers . This book has been written and designed primarily with English language teachers in mind though the majority of the resources and tools contained in the book will have much wider use than just language teaching. The book is available at the introductory price of £1.99 from: iBook Store Payhip The book contains more than 70 tools and resources and these have been hand picked because they represent a broad cross-section of what is at present available. The chapters of the book are divided into simple pedagogical tasks that most teachers need to carry out or help their students with and the descriptions of the resources are suitably concise to make the book easy for a stressed teacher to access and browse in a few spare moments between classes. The sites, apps and resources within the book have been divided into the following chapters: Reading ...

Although the use of internet and digital materials in the language classroom has come a long way over the last 20 years, still the vast majority of web based material that finds its way into the language classroom is used for information input or comprehension purposes. The students’ interaction with the materials is as such largely passive with the teacher controlling the suitability of the materials selected and deciding what information the students will extract from it. In Thinking Critically through Digital Media I have tried to build on this model, but develop it and take it to deeper and more critical levels of analysis that go beyond the superficial linguistic level and help to develop students not only as English language speakers, but as capable information literate participants in the global knowledge economy. The book uses as its basis the development of key digital literacies. These include the ability to understand visually presented data, the ability collect and analyse...

This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook ' Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking '. Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy , which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students. The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet. Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills. Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Serie...

 QR codes are possibly one of the most underused useful features of new technology. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is that many people see them as a form of barcode and wrongly believe that they can only be produced by companies, but the reality is anyone can produce a QR code within seconds. QR literally stands for 'quick response' and it enables you to transfer various types of digital content onto a mobile device in seconds without having to type any URLs. There are two essential things you need to make QR codes work for you. 1. A means of creating the code. There are a number of quick free services that enable you to create QR codes in seconds. These are two that I like: http://www.visualead.com/ http://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/  Here’s how to create the code: 2. A means of reading the code In order to read the codes students will need an internet connected device with a QR scanner installed. There are a number of these also available for free. http://ww...

In my first post in this series - Getting students' attention - I mentioned the use of backchannels. This post should give you more information about the use of backchannels within the classroom. If you are working in a classroom where your students have internet connected devices, either through wifi or their mobile phone, using a backchannel can have a transformative impact on the way you can use technology with your students. “Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel Most backchannels are text based and many-to-many, meaning that anyone can type in a message and it is seen by everyone who has access to the chatroom. Back channels are particularly useful if you are working in a face to face environment where all or pairs/groups of students are working at a computer or if you are delivering live online classes using so...

Competing with a computer or mobile screen for students' attention can be a challenge at best and at worst extremely frustrating. In this posting I will share some techniques and approaches for dealing with these problems. Ban devices Obviously this is the simplest way to deal with the problem, however, banning devices in class can be hard to enforce especially with teen students and older. It will also become harder as more technology becomes wearable, and particularly with adult classes, this approach could border on the insulting.  Banning devices in the classroom also deprives us and our students of the opportunity to develop responsible approaches to using these devices and robs students of the opportunity to develop their digital literacy skills and exploit the genuine benefits that technology in the classroom can bring. Turn off the device This is much less extreme than banning devices from the class and can be part of a strategy for more responsible use of devices. Have pa...

I spend a lot of time looking at different web-based tools and apps and thinking about if and how they can be used for learning. Sometimes it takes some thought and at other times it’s really obvious. With Phraseum it was instantly obvious that this was a really great tool for learning. Phraseum allows you to collect words, phrases and sentences from anywhere on the web while you you browse and organise them into social phrasebooks. Phraseum is a browser-based tool which can be activated from your browser toolbar. Simply create an account and then drag the ‘Clipping button’ bookmarklet to your favourites bar on your browser. Once that’s done you can just collect any words or phrases that you find online by highlighting them and then clicking on the bookmarklet. This opens up a window where you can add tags to the phrase and add your own private notes and annotations. The tags could be a definition, translation, part of speech or something about the context in which it could be used....

I’d like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach . I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - elearning. This first one is from the early 1950’s and is about something called a ‘ teaching machine ’ which was created by behavioural psychologist B F Skinner. As you see Skinner’s teaching machines , though not exactly iPads do look remarkably like  what we would recognise as computers. What’s also remarkable is the claims that he makes for them and the reasons why he believes they are effective are remarkably similar to those made by many producers of learning and especially language learning software today. However, despite the extremely logical reasoning that Skinner expounds I’m sure if you were invited to sit down and use one of these machines for a period of time it wouldn’t hold your interest for very long and like me you pro...

This has been a common theme to many of the presentations, workshops, webinars and seminars that I have been asked to do over the last few years, but however many times I try to present on this subject I never really feel that I get the message across as clearly and persuasively as I would like. The issue of how we use social media for our own development as teachers and as digitally skilled individuals, is one that I believe is of vital importance though, not just because it can enable us to keep developing as teachers through the content, ideas, resources and above all people it gives us access to, but also because the way use digital media for our own development should guide and influence the way we use it with our students and build their digital literacies and communication skills. So here it is. This my own attempt to outline my digital media learning experience, or at least part of it. I’ll split this into 3 sections which I’ll call Information in - This is how and where I find...