flynn089

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...