flynn089

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...

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...

Whilst in the process of designing a unit of online learning I started thinking about the qualities and skills that a good educational technology trainer should have. After thinking of a few myself I decided to draw on the wisdom of my PLN and crowd-source a few more ideas. Please feel free to add your ideas and to copy any of the ones you find here. I'd also like you to selectively vote for the ones you think are most important. You can also add some pros and cons to say why. You can add your ideas and comments without registering. powered by tricider Thank you for your help and participation. I hope you find this list useful. Related links My learning technology reading list My collection of tools for learners My Facebook page A Mural of my work online 10 Tech Tools for Teacher Training Courses   10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses   Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps Best Nik Peachey

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...

Over the summer I was running a number of two week ICT in language teaching courses for teachers from around the world. The courses were part of the Bell summer campus at Homerton College Cambridge. This was the first time in a while I had been asked to teach such long courses and i thought it was a great opportunity to see if I could fundamentally change the way the teachers related to technology, not just in the classroom as a tool for teaching learners, but as a tool within their everyday working practice. As sub goals I set out to run the course with absolutely no paper. That meant no photocopied handouts and no paper based note taking from trainees. I wanted to push these teachers to the point where they could work totally in the digital medium and where paper became totally unnecessary. I also wanted to use a form of loop input (using the technology to teach the technology) so that teachers were learning about the technologies they could use with students by actually using them ...

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...

Some months ago I had a plan to write a book of tasks to get teachers using technology. As with so many of my plans and ideas, time and circumstances over took me and I never got further than the first 15 tasks. When I went back to do some more I noticed that I was taking so long doing these that some had gone out of date, so to try to get some use from the tasks I've decided to revise them and start publishing them here so anyone can download them and use them either to do teacher training or to develop their own ability to use technology. So here are the first five. If they are popular I'll publish the next 5 for new year, so they can be my new years resolution and yours. Task 1: Create your learning journal So here goes. The first task is based around Penzu and you can download the task or read it on Scribd. In this task you'll create an online journal that you can use to reflect on the other tasks you'll be doing, so you should do this one first. Read the task Downl...

I've just been brainstorming digital skills that I believe are required by teachers in the 21st Century. So far I've come up with 45 of them. What's striking for me about this is: few of these skills will have been taught to anyone who trained as a teacher longer than 5 years ago. few of these skills are being taught to teachers training now. the 21st century teacher needs to be a pretty amazingly skilled professional. Please look through the list and tick on the ones you believe you have. Teachers Digital Skills Tick List Teachers' digital skills tick list I'd also be very interested in any comments about any you think I've missed or that you think don't belong there. Related links: Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners? Using wikis for teacher development 10 Teacher Development Task for Web 2.0 Tools Creating a personal homepage Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2 Create your own social network 7 steps 120 + Online A...

Over the last couple of months I've been busy travelling round a bit and doing some face to face training and workshops. As part of the materials for these workshops I created a number of tasks for teachers which I hope will help develop their ability to use technology and to evaluate and create materials using web based tools. I've decide now to share those tasks so anyone who wants to use them to train other teachers or to develop their own skills can take advantage of and make good use of them. Capturing the art shark http://www.flickr.com/photos/artolog/1693491849/ There are ten tasks and they can be done in any order, except for the tenth one which should be last. Please feel free to use and share these tasks and by all means leave any comments or suggestions for improvement. I will also be hosting a teacher development week using and discussing these tasks and the related tools from 7th to 15th December 2009 on the SEETA Moodle site: http://www.seeta.eu/ so by all mean...

The importance of careful thought and reflection on what we do as both teachers and learners can not be overestimated in terms of the learning process and retaining information in a way that we can actually use it and make it part of our experience and practice. Keeping a teaching or learning journal can be a really important part of this process of reflection and writing entries can help us to reformulate what we have read or analyse our experiences and draw conclusions from them which we can later return to, share and reflect on again. For me Penzu is a really good tool which can help me and my students or trainee teachers to do this. How to create your learning journal Go to: https://penzu.com/ and click on ‘ Sign up ’. You will need to create a password and enter a username, email address and agree to the terms of use. Then you just click on ‘ Submit ’.  You can then start creating your journal entries by adding a text and title. Each entry is dated automatically and you can move...

Social networking is one of the key concepts that is driving Web 2.0 these days. With the opportunities social networks offer for collaboration and communication, this is certainly something we as educators should be thinking about being involved in. In this tutorial I'd like to show you how to create your own social network on Ning, just by following 7 steps. I've published these as a downloadable PDF with screen shots, so that you can print them up and follow them / share them. 7 steps to creating a social network>> (944k pdf) Perhaps though, more importantly it's worth thinking about some of the issues, and pros and cons surrounding the use of social networks. Some advantages of creating your own network. Control over the content You can make sure nobody posts anything inappropriate or irrelevant. Control of who joins and the ability to block or ban people You can protect your members, ban anyone who doesn't behave or just limit membership to people you want t...