Posts

Showing posts with the label ebook

5 Free Edtech and ELT eBooks

Image
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...

Digital Tools for Teachers

Image
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 ...

Thinking Critically through Digital Media

Image
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...

Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking

Image
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...

10 reasons why you should buy my book

Image
Over the last year I have been working on the first in what I hope will be a series of books to help teachers exploit new technologies in ways that will enhance their students learning. My first book - Digital Video - A manual for language teachers - was released in August 2015 and here just a few of the reasons why I think it's worth the price of a cup of coffee. 1. It’s a ground breaking ebook that combines text and images with 26 embedded video tutorials. Here's an example: 2. It combines instruction on how to use the best in new technologies with creative practical classroom activities. 3.It gives an overview of how new technologies can be combined with existing methodological approaches such as TBL, CLIL and Flipped Learning to make students’ learning more engaging and effective. 4. It shows you how to build your own technical and pedagogical skills to enable them to create their own materials and activities for students. 5. It helps you to see beyond the concept of usin...

Publishing 3.0 - A new model for independent educational publishing

Image
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...