flynn089

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 few weeks I have been playing with a very simple brainstorming and voting website called tricider . The great thing about tricider is that it is incredibly quick and simple to use, and yet it enables users to collect information and opinions from all over the web in a very easily digestible and powerful way. It's very easy to create a tricider topic or question and you don't even need to register, just type your topic or question into the field. You can also add a bit more detail and instructions to guide your students. After you have saved the description, you or your students can start adding solutions. Once there are some solutions added it's easy to either vote for them or add arguments for or against, using the + or - symbols. Once you have set up your page you can add your email so that you get notifications when ever anyone adds something new or votes. You can also get a URL to edit the page (in case anyone adds something offensive) and a separate URL...

Listening in the EFL / ESL classroom can be a pretty dull business. Usually it consists of students all listening to the same thing at the same time and doing the same tasks. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you feel the urge to get away from the course book and get your students listening to and interacting with some real native speakers from the safety of their computer then why not check out some of the people on Vyou.com ? I've already written about how you can set up your own Vyou Q&A video booth , but it's also well worth looking round some of the people who are already there and seeing if there are any your students would be interested in, as a lot of the people there a quite young and some are quite interesting and quirky and Vyou offers your students the opportunity not only to listen to them and hear a range of accents, but also to ask them questions, though the answers might take a while to come. It's very simple to use. You just go ...

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 recently spotted this very interesting site called Vyou.com which exploits video to create asynchronous conversations. I find it interesting because of the simple way it creates presence. As you can see below, it looks like the person (me in this case) is waiting ready for your question. All visitors need to do is type a question into the text line below the video and the creator will get a message with the question and post a reply. You can try it if you wish by posting a question to me. I'm not sure yet how long it will take for me to answer though. This is very quick and easy to set up. You just go to the site and register for free, then once your registration is validated you record two short video clips. One is the one you can see above and another for unanswered questions. As questions are answered they appear below the 'waiting' video. It's also a bit like Twitter in that you can 'follow' people and build up a group of followers. These people all recei...

Well this is my first blog posting for quite a while, but I'm hoping to have a lot more coming up very soon. This is just a quick posting to share a session on building your own Personal Learning Network, that I did for teachers in British Council Bilbao recently (25th September 2010). The session was part of a larger conference that was happening all over Spain to celebrate 70 years of the BC in Spain. You can watch a recording my conference presentation here. Or follow this link to it: http://tinyurl.com/382rmy2 The links from the presentation are also below and you can download a PDF copy of the presentation slides here: PLN Presentation slides (PDF 4.7 Mb) Tools for growing your PLN Twitter Twitter is a great tool for starting to reach out to a huge network of teachers. http://twitter.com/ You can follow me and see who I’m following here. http://twitter.com/NikPeachey This is a great starter list for Twitter of people involved in ELT who you can follow. It includes some of the...