We have a bang on, great, fantastic, superb group on LinkedIn. Dozens of conversations, hundreds of comments shared daily by teachers. Here’s a summary of the most recent popular conversations. Great professional development and teacher sharing. See the full archive HERE. Spring 2016 1. Teaching Young...
There has been a lot of debate about the ideas of Sugata Mitra. He tends to get under teachers’ skins, especially those in ELT. Find a nice summary of these posts / discussions through this post. I’m kind of confused by all the kerfuffle. I’ve been...
View the full “Human Emotion” big screen presentation Human emotions are a universal and something that provides great context for teaching how to refer to them in English. Paul Ekman’s work in this area has always fascinated me and brought out the anthropologist in me...
Teachers by training or usually just instinct, know that music works in the classroom. For all ages, for all topics. I’ve even used a song to teach chemistry! This post is further to my well visited Top 50 ways to use music and song in the...
The Olympics will be here upon us in no time. So much excitement and its a great topic to harness student motivation. This is a very inspiring and poetic promo video for Rio. One of 4 promo videos. the others are Respect, Breath and Counting...
I’m busy these days with Gif Lingua and building a “gif corpus”, a collection of gifs that perfectly describe human experience. Daunting task but I’ll be inviting many others along this journey in the coming months. Up to over 60,000 perfect gifs in my library....
Dear EFL Classroomers, I hope this update finds you well and humming along in your classes. Now officially 10 years we’ve been sending out emails and newsletters to teachers! Here are some new things on the community that you might find interesting or use in...
I’ve long loved and supported the use of music in the language classroom. Check out my very popular guide or also any of my karaoke related posts here. Dubsmash is a very popular app where students lipsynch to popular movie lines, song lyrics and more...
Over the years, I’ve turned into a bit of a “gif” guru. They are a fascinating material for any course designer or materials developer. Gif Lingua and Gif Lingua Books offer a gif “corpus” where gifs are tagged and learners learn over 50,000 words of...
It’s Star Wars Day and the perfect opportunity to get your students practicing English through this popular movie series! I highly recommend the Star Wars Intro Generator! It’s really cool and your students can write their own intro text and share it with the link...
I am a proud curator. Very proud. Making music from the noise out there. to cure: to make better. curator: someone who makes things better. So yep, I’m pleased to call myself a curator. Really will begin calling myself this rather than “aggregator” (sounds too...
My work building EnglishCentral and Gif Lingua have convinced me how images are so important for teaching language. The future of language learning and teaching is visual, is controlled reality. We teachers can provide so much context to teach direct and also the most salient features, points of...
Dear EFL Classroom 2.0 members, Sorry I’m so late with this series of updates. Very busy and you know, April is indeed the cruelest month! Newsletter brim full coming soon. Make sure to access and subscribe to our two magazines to get full updates to...
I’m always keeping up on what’s new in the world of visual text – be it kinetic typography, gif, wordle, tagxedo and loads of other similar applications. They are truly something valuable for us educators – allowing us to add context to text and help students...
Teaching affects eternity. It really does. Our lives affect eternity but not near as perfectly and precisely, not near as powerfully nor presciently as teaching. I’ve been thinking lately about my own affect – how I stumbled along and began EFL Classroom about 15 years ago...
Movie trailers are stellar for listening. Short, well produced, clear lines of language being communicated. Here is a quick lesson I put together based on a template I shared here previously for another movie trailer. Intermediate and advanced students will love this lesson. Don’t forget...
Today, I’m in Vancouver and gorging on newspapers and English reading. One thing I read was the Metro newspaper and I got to thinking of times I’ve used it in my own teaching. The Metro newspaper is a real newspaper, an authentic material (and...
I just spent a few weeks with my incomparable Mom. Missing her and today thought of this video based lesson that is fantastic for the topic of “Thanking Moms”. I know Mother’s Day is still a month or more away – but really this lesson...
Dear EFL Classroom members, Our regular mid – month update, just in time for St. Paddy’s Day! Wishing everyone a good one. Make sure to access our two magazines to get full updates to all that’s new on the community and our profession at large....
Further to my last post here, I didn’t think this was a good enough presentation. So I spent the weekend designing a player loaded with what I consider all the “best” videos for teaching ELT. – http://eflclassroom.com/videolessons/ In the player, you can click through and view the...
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