flynn089

There are so many talented teachers who create materials for their students each day and never have the opportunity to get them published.  Perhaps this is you. Would you like to develop your career as an ELT writer? Would you like to generate an income from the materials you produce? Do you enjoy creating materials for your students? Do you write articles for a blog that you would like to put into a book? Do you create teacher development sessions that other teachers could use? Do you like creating your own stories or games for students? Do you have an idea for a teacher development book? Do you have an idea for materials that don’t fit within the usual ELT paper-based niche? Would you like some feedback and help with your ideas? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, please sign up here to keep in touch with me about a new opportunity that I’ll be launching soon. Sign Up Over the last few months, I have been developing a plan to expand PeacheyPublications Ltd and t...

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...

One of the true keys to learning and developing any ability is the willingness and capacity to reflect on what we have learned. So how can we encourage our students to reflect on what they have learned? Generally we want them to reflect from a slightly more distant perspective of time rather than more immediately within the classroom and this is where Recap can really help. Recap is a cross platform app that allows teachers to create classes and manage students and set them reflection questions that they can respond to using video on their laptop webcam or smart phone from their own home. How does Recap work? To create a class and add your students just register on the site as a teacher. Once you have registered you click on Add Class and complete the class details form. You can also decide at this point whether you want your students to register with a PIN or an email. Email is a better option for older learners, whereas a PIN is better for younger ones as this doesn’t require them to...

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...

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 ...

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...

Infographics are a great source of information and make reading information from the computer screen much easier, but just showing students an infographic and telling them to study it isn’t the most effective way to exploit the medium. Creating your own infographic tasks can be time consuming though, so in this posting I’m presenting a number of generic ideas that should work with a number of types of infographic. You can use these ideas with students to help focus their comprehension of the information and give them clear goals for engaging with the information in the graphics. Peer created questions Give your students an infographic and get them to create a quiz based around it. Once the students have created their quiz they can use it to check the comprehension or knowledge of other students in their class. You can make this competitive and have teams to quiz each other. You could also have different infographics for each group and they can exchange questions and infographics. This ...

 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...

Well I never thought I'd say this, but I've become a fan of microblogging ! I have to say that it's mainly because of Plurk . When I first saw Twitter some time back I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I had a look at a few 'twitterers' sharing such information as what they had for lunch or that they were washing their hair and decided there are levels of detail at which information stops being informative - if you know what I mean. Anyway, as the Twitter phenomenon continued to grow and other players joined the market I decided to give it another try. At the beginning of June I started a Twitter vs Plurk comparison . Now almost 6 weeks later, I have to say that for me Plurk has come out as a clear winner. Watch this demo to see why. Here's a quick demo of Plurk and some of the features. To view the demo in a new window click here (2.7Mb) Download the demo as Quicktime movie (4Mb) Download the movie for i-pod (5Mb) What I lik...

This is the first in what is going to be a series of postings looking at Skype and the range of plugins freely available for it and how these can be used for teaching languages and creating ELT materials. As most people know, Skype is a freely available VOIP program which allows users to make computer to computer 'telephone calls' for free. What many people don't know is that there is also a huge range of 'plugins' available for Skype which expand and enhance its functionality and turn it into an even more useful tool for teaching and learning. This first video shows how you find and install these extra plugins and focuses on one in particular (Pamela) which helps you to record your Skype calls. Click the play button and turn up your sound I hope you can see how easy it is to start installing and expanding the functionality of Skype. Having this ability to record calls really helps as us language teachers and as materials creators to get a lot more out of this f...

Love them or hate them, you have to admit that Google does offer us all manner of useful free tools. One of my favourites is Google Maps, especially useful on my odd trips to London (when I never seem to be able to remember my A-Z!) So, I've been thinking about how we could use this 'real world' tool to help our EFL students and to develop their abilities to give and understand directions. It's actually quite simple to use. You just go to http://maps.google.co.uk/ or http://maps.google.com/ Click on 'Get Directions' and then enter your start point and destination. Click the Google logo below for a quick video tutorial that shows some of the features. Click for flash video tutorial (1.4 Mb) So how can we use this with students? Choose a location and destination and get Google Maps to create your directions, then print up a map of London with the two destinations on and ask your students to mark the route on the map. A variation on this would be to have the ma...

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc. Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project. What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique. How to use this with students When ever I've tried to do drama, video...