flynn089

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...

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...

Back in April 2013 I delivered a workshop at the IATEFL 2013 conference in Liverpool. The topic of the workshop was ' Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps ' and in the workshop I encouraged participants to share and explore their subconscious criteria for deciding which apps and web based tools they used with their students. I particularly encouraged them to think about 'authentic' apps rather than those made for learning. This is because in many ways I feel that most made for learning apps have made very little pedagogical progress beyond their roots in CALL from the last century. I also believe that encouraging students to get 'hands on' with authentic apps has a much more important role in helping them to develop digital literacies which they can use outside of the classroom. Check out my ebook As a result of that workshop and the research that developed from it I've now developed this list of criteria for evaluating mobile apps for educational purp...

One of the great things about mobile devices such as tablets, iPads and phones is that most modern devices have good quality cameras and microphones built in. This opens up a really wide range of potential for communication and speaking practice that used to be such a struggle to organise on older laptops and desktop computers. App developers have also been quick to exploit the potential of this powerful tool and in this post I'd like to look at some of the tools that have been created and how they can be used for language development. Mailvu for asynchronous messages Mailvu has been a long time favourite of mine, mainly because the web based version is so easy to use and doesn't require any downloads. You just point your browser at: http://mailvu.com / and as long as you have the Flash plugin installed on your computer you can start recording immediately. Mailvu also provides mobile apps for iOS, Android an Blackberry. These are easy to use and it allows you to send short spo...

Recently, I have been asked quite  few times about IWBs and which ones are best etc. My usual answer is 'none' and then I have to explain, so I thought, instead of explaining I would write this post so that I could point people towards each time they ask. So this is my classroom set up of preference and these are the key components. 1. Data projector - I'm not really bothered which one as long as it produces a good screen resolution (There's a reasonable article here on how to choose one: How to Buy a Projector ) 2. A Laptop - My preference here is for a MacBook, but I can understand why some people find that extravagant and don't feel they are worth the extra financial outlay. Personally, I think they are worth the extra money, because they work faster and so save time (the most valuable commodity we have) and because they are pretty durable(The Apple products I've owned have lasted at least twice as long as their PC counterparts I've had and are still go...

I'm often getting asked what my criteria are for choosing the tools, apps and resources that I feature on my blogs and in my teaching and do be honest I don't really think about it that much. I look at so many sites and apps that I just get a feeling when I see something that I think will work. As that isn't a very satisfactory answer to give people I decided to start exploring my own criteria for what influences my choice. I ran a workshop on this topic at IATEFL 2013 on looking at apps and how we can evaluate them. I came up with a number of 'first impression' criteria that I think I apply before even thinking about 'how' I will use the app / tool. Here is the presentation / workshop recording You can download a copy of the presentation from here: Evaluating Web-based Tools Please feel free to browse the list and add any 'pros' and 'cons' for anything you think I've missed. powered by tricider I hope you find these criteria useful as...

A couple of years back I wrote about a really nice web based tool called Xtranormal and since then I've heard from so many teachers saying how useful their students have found it, so I was delighted yesterday to find that the same makes had now produced a free mobile / tablet app called Tellagami . The app runs on a mobile device and allows users to add animated speaking characters to a selection of backgrounds or to the users' own images. You can then either use text to speech to write a script for the character, or you can record your own voice and the app will lip-synch you text to the character. This is very quick and easy to do. Here's how. Open the app an click on create. Then choose your background, either from the ones provided, from your own image library or you can take a photograph of wherever you are at the time. Then you can choose the character you want to use and customise their appearance. Next you can select an emotion for your character. Lastly, you can e...

In 2010, after buying my first iPad I decided to do some research into how teachers were using mobile devices in their classrooms and their teaching. At this stage ‘smart’ phones were already starting to make an impact and tablet devices were just coming onto the market.  The research results from this first survey were published in the Guardian Online under the title ‘ English language teachers connect to mobile learning’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/teachers-mobile-learning and the complete results and report can be downloaded from: http://technogogy.org.uk/mobile_survey.pdf I followed this research up in 2011 using the same survey questions in an attempt to see how things had advanced with the intervening period and the results from that survey were  published in May 2011 on the DELTA Publishing blog under the title ‘ mLearing and ELT: Are We Mobile Ready? ’ http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development/mlearing-and-elt-are-we-mobile-ready One of the mai...