flynn089

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...

Moodle is a magnificent free product and has the potential to enable schools and teachers to build wonderfully unique interactive online learning courses in which learner interaction can be tracked, measured and responded to. Despite this the vast majority of Moodle courses I see are a long list of Word and PDF documents with at best a few forums that enable a minimum of human social interaction. Given the state of many of these courses, it’s no wonder that drop out rates for online learning are so high. And of course Moodle isn’t the only culprit. Many of the other commercially available LMS (learning management systems) and VLE (virtual learning environment) platforms aren’t doing any better. Moodle has been around now since 2002 and research carried out in 2013 showed that more than 7.3 million students had studied in more than 83 thousand registered sites. Image from ELTPics: https://flic.kr/p/jBXAwK So why is it that so little progress has been made in developing innovative course...

I've started this article with quite a bold statement, but it's a conclusion that I have been coming to over the course of quite a few years now. I should really put this into context though, as most of the teacher training I do deals with pedagogical training for the use of technology and is most often delivered during intensive face to face sessions, usually with groups of teachers working in a computer lab. Though, having said that, I do still believe that many of the reasons I have listed below do also apply to other kinds of more 'mainstream' teacher development too, especially intensive courses. So, here are my 15 reasons why I think developing your teaching online can be more effective. Learn while you teach - This gives you the opportunity to try things out with your own classes working in your own environment with your own students. Often when we take a face to face intensive course we leave our familiar teaching environment and come back with lots of new idea...

At the end of 2010 I published the first 5 tasks in a series to help teacher learn how to use technology with their students. Now I would like to add 3 more tasks to that collection. The first few tasks are all quite simple to lay the ground work and get teachers started. As the series progresses I hope to get on to more adventurous tasks. Please feel free to use these tasks yourself or to share or use them for teacher training. Task 6: Creating a video review activity In this task you’ll learn how to create a film trailer review activity using film trailers from YouTube and an online notice board called Wallwisher. Here’s an example to look at before you start: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/nikstrailers Wallwisher is a really useful tool for giving students a semi restricted choice of online videos or links to other resources from around the Internet. Read the task Download Task 6 (pdf) Task 7: Creating screenshots using Jing Jing is a really useful free tool that allows you to cr...

For the last few days I've been playing with WallWisher a handy tool for creating online noticeboards that you can add sticky notes to. You can see a wall that I created here with some notes about Web 2.0 Tools for EFL ESL Teachers. It's very easy to create your own noticeboard, just click where it says 'Build a Wall' and you'll see a new wall with some options on it that you need to complete. Basically these are: Uploading an image Choosing colours Adding title and subtitle Creating your password Deciding who can see and add to your wall Once you have done this you just click the big 'Done' button and you are almost ready to start adding content to your wall. Before you start to add content you'll need to check your email account where you should find your password. Then you just log in to your wall and double click on the wall to start adding the sticky notes. The sticky notes are quite simple, you just add some text and you can either link to an image...

When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try. If like me you've never had the patience (or the time and money) to really master a tool like Flash, but like the idea of creating interactive materials that can run online (SCORM compliant to run in an LMS), then this could be a handy tool for you. I spent the best part of a day working out how to use it and creating some materials with it for a teacher training session and by the end of the day I had two 'modules' each of 4 -5 different activity types combining images, audio, video and swf animation. Considering that I hadn't used this before and I had to actually write all the materials to put into it, I think that's pretty good for just one day, and having put the time into learning the program, I'm pretty sure that my next efforts will be much quicker. Wh...

Anyone who uses their whiteboard for ELT / EFL classes will know what a really useful teaching aid it can be, so how about using one with your distance learners? In Part 1 of this series on Skype plugins, I looked at how and where to find and install plugins for Skype and I also looked at how to use Pamela to record audio materials and interviews with Skype. In this posting I'd like to have a look at an online collaboration tool called Yugma which allows you to share files, share your desktop, make live presentations and have a shared online whiteboard all running along side your Skype application. This quick tutorial takes you through some of the basic features. You can download a version for your computer in Quick Time here . Or Open the tutorial in a new window here . How to use this with ELT / EFL students Well I think this is definitely a distance learning support tool rather than some thing to use in the classroom / multi media lab with students. It could be ideal...