Tagged: textbooks

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A Lesson On Stereotyping

Scott Thornbury offered up a stimulating blog post this week titled “R is for Representation“. About how textbooks don’t represent the world of the student, the spaces they live and walk among, the people they know nor the dreams they have for themselves. I won’t...

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All my “tech”books

I like the term “tech”books. I’ve been busy the last couple of years creating lots of free books for teachers, books meant to bypass the clutter of the textbook vultures out there. Kind of born of my angst against how textbook culture (and it is...

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Hitler Reacts to poor language teaching

I’ve previously blogged about the “Hitler Reacts” series of remixes. It’s a great activity for students and I finally got to making my own video remix, about textbooks. Here it is. Thoughts welcomed and I’ll comment more later and relate more about how I feel...

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Disrupting ELT

Clayton Christensen, Harvard professor and proponent of how new technologies change traditional market structures and relationships, defines disruption as “the process of transforming something that was previously expensive and complicated into something affordable and simple that everyone can obtain.” This is my own drum beat,...

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Dancing to the pied “textbook” piper

I spent a few hours looking at the conference offerings this coming fall. Something I’m used to doing and invigorated by – I’m energized by the pursuit of knowledge and no better place than a conference, a meeting of minds. Yet, this usually vitalizing activity...

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Extensive Watching

The last few years, I’ve been very focused on the role and possibility of video in the classroom. Thus, my recent work developing Gif Lingua and EnglishCentral and my focus on the potential of a “Flipped Classroom“. I had an interesting skype discussion with Dan...

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The Future of the “Tech”book

The past few weeks, I’ve been mulling over the future of “the book”. In particular, the textbook and even more precisely the ELT textbook. Probably been thinking about this because I’m busy every day making books (and I use “make” deliberately – authors these days...

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Viva la (textbook) revolucion!

I’ve been, like I’m sure many other have, watching the ongoing events in the Middle East with sheer fascination. The power of normal people to say – “we aren’t going to take it anymore”. The invigorating energy given by technology to inform and empower the...

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Culturally Specific Content

I recently gave a lecture titled, “Korean Content for Korean Students”, highlighting my contention that given the new educational environment (a global village, a wired world), we need to use more local and culturally specific content in our teaching/lessons.  I focused on Korea but the...