I have been involved in education since 1990 and have worked all over the world as a language teacher, teacher trainer, technology trainer and educational technology consultant. In May 2012 I won a British Council ELTon for Excellence in Course Innovation for the Blended Learning in ELT course I designed for Bell Educational Services . I write and publish materials which make best use of educational technology.
I have been involved in education since 1990 and have worked all over the world as a language teacher, teacher trainer, technology trainer and educational technology consultant. In May 2012 I won a British Council ELTon for Excellence in Course Innovation for the Blended Learning in ELT course I designed for Bell Educational Services . I write and publish materials which make best use of educational technology.
TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content. It’s an ideal tool for building blended learning.
In this document you can find:
-: a step by step guide showing how to use it
-: a video tutorial that shows you how to make the activities
-: some suggestions and ideas for using it in the classroom or as part of an online course.
This lesson is based on an infographic about magnets. The infographics contains a range of facts and statistics as well as some information about magnets and how they are used.
In the lesson students will find out about the different uses of magnets and why they are so important.
The plan also includes a number of research tasks that develop students’ abilities to create and carry out online research, create online questionnaires and share their research by creating infographics, presentations and reports.
The files include a complete step by step lesson plan with printable worksheet and a presentation.
This lesson is based on an infographic about the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) and its role in our lives. In the lesson students will explore the differences between IQ and EI and develop an understanding of how they can improve their EI and how doing this can benefit them.
Aims:
To develop students’ understanding of EI and its importance.
To develop students’ abilities to study and research effectively using digital tools.
To develop students’ abilities to read and understand visual information.
To develop students’ abilities to check the credibility of online information.
To develop students’ abilities to carry out online research and to represent their findings visually.
To develop students’ abilities to extract information from research and create informative text based on their findings.
The lesson files include:
Step by step lesson plan and answer key
Presentation
Photocopiable worksheets
This lesson is based on an infographic about happiness and the factors that effect our happiness.In the lesson students will explore their views of what makes them happy and discover some of the science behind what happiness is and the factors that create and effect it.
Aims:
To develop students’ abilities to study and research effectively using digital tools.
To develop students’ abilities to read and understand visual information.
To develop students’ abilities to check the credibility of online information.
To develop students’ abilities to carry out online research and to represent their findings visually.
To develop students’ abilities to extract information from research and create informative text based on their findings.
The materials in this plan can be used in different ways. The first four tasks can be used independently as a simple reading and discussion lesson. The final five tasks can be used selectively depending on the aims of your lesson.
This lesson contains nine tasks:
A discussion task which gets students thinking around the topic.
A reading task which develops students’ abilities to check information.
A reading task which encourages students to look more carefully at the information.
A discussion task which gives students the opportunity to formulate a personal response to the information they have studied.
A research task which gets students to check and explore the authenticity of sources.
A research task which gets students to check the validity of the information in the infographic.
A research task which gets students to find out more about Maslow and the hierarchy of needs.
A social research task which gets students to create an online questionnaire to research happiness.
A writing task which gives students the opportunity to consolidate their learning in the form of a magazine article.
This lesson is based on an infographic about the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) and its role in our lives. In the lesson students will explore the differences between IQ and EI and develop an understanding of how they can improve their EI and how doing this can benefit them.
Aims:
To develop students’ understanding of EI and its importance.
To develop students’ abilities to study and research effectively using digital tools.
To develop students’ abilities to read and understand visual information.
To develop students’ abilities to check the credibility of online information.
To develop students’ abilities to carry out online research and to represent their findings visually.
To develop students’ abilities to extract information from research and create informative text based on their findings.
The lesson files include:
Step by step lesson plan and answer key
Presentation
Photocopiable worksheets
This lesson is based on a single image of a girl sitting in the forest with a tiger. The lesson includes a variety of discussion and conversation tasks that you can use to get students thinking and talking about the image.
These are followed by language focus tasks and some more creative tasks.
As well as vocabulary, the plan can be used to practice ‘present continuous’, ‘present perfect continuous’ or ‘second conditional’.
Finally, there are some suggestions for digital research and creation follow-up tasks.
It’s not necessary to use all of the tasks in the plan, you can choose to use any of the tasks individually or change the order of the tasks depending on the approach you want to take and the level of your students.
This lesson plan explores the topic of crime and motivation. It uses images and a crime story to develop students’ vocabulary around the topic of crime. It also helps to develop their understanding of narrative tenses.
Most importantly, the lesson pushes students to think more critically about the information they are being told and to think about how they can cross-check information.
At the end of the lesson, students are also encouraged to do research in preparation for a debate about various issues related to crime and punishment.
This lesson also has an interactive version of the materials that teachers can use with a data-projector or interactive whiteboard. The students can also follow the lesson and interact with the materials using a tablet, mobile phone or computer.
‘Okay Goldilocks. How do you like it?’
This lesson is based on a single image of a bear lying in bed surrounded by books. The lesson includes a variety of discussion and conversation tasks that you can use to get students thinking and talking about the image. These are followed by language focus tasks and some more creative tasks. Finally, there are some suggestions for digital research and creation follow-up tasks.
It’s not necessary to use all of the tasks in the plan, you can choose to use any of the tasks individually or change the order of the tasks depending on the approach you want to take and the level of your students.
This lesson is based on a single image of a girl standing alone at night by a shop window. Her facial expression is ambiguous and it’s not clear why she is there.
The lesson includes a variety of discussion and conversation tasks that you can use to get students thinking and talking about why she is there and how she feels. These are followed by language focus tasks and some more creative tasks. Finally, there are some suggestions for digital research and creation follow-up tasks.
It’s not necessary to use all of the tasks in the plan, you can choose to use any of the tasks individually or change the order of the tasks depending on the approach you want to take and the level of your students.
This book is a collection of fluency activities that encourage students to think creatively and which help to build their ability to empathise with others.
Each short lesson is based around a beautiful image, starts with a vocabulary building activity and has a set of questions designed to make students think more deeply about the story behind the image and encourage their curiosity and imagination.
The lessons also include creative activities that can be used for writing or speaking practice. These include role-plays, simulations and creative writing tasks.
This is an example presentation from one of the ten units: http://bit.ly/forest-demo
Each lesson also ends with some form of follow up research task that encourages students to find out more about the images and topics that the activities deal with.
These short lessons can be used in full to form the basis of a fluency lesson or they can be used in part as warmers or fillers to get students speaking and thinking in English.
Each lesson also includes a digital presentation that can either be shared using a projector or students can access the materials on their mobile devices using a short link or QR code.
The QR codes can be accessed through the teachers’ presentation.
This ebook was designed to be the first in a series of collections of the simple activities and ideas I have used over many years when delivering teaching and teacher training sessions that incorporate the use of digital technologies.
The ideas use simple free tools that have stood the test of time and remained consistently reliable. The teaching ideas and activities themselves are ones that I have adapted from my pre-technology teaching days, so they are all built on sound classroom teaching practice.
The activities are ideal for the modern connected classroom in which students come to class with a variety of devices, but they can also be used in a blended context and students can be assigned some parts of the tasks to do outside of the classroom.
I have also included a collection of 8 video tutorials to help less tech confident teachers deal with the technology side of using the materials.
I hope these materials will act as a bridge for teachers who are newer or less confident at using digital tools and materials and help them provide engaging and motivating language learning experiences for their students.
In this second version of the Trainers’ Edition of Digital Tools for Teachers I have built on the original volume of Digital Tools for Teachers by updating and extending many of the original chapters and also by adding seven additional new chapters.
In this book the first four chapters are provided as a guide for teachers who want to use the book for teacher training and development.
Using the tools, tips and activities provided in these first chapters a teacher with some basic experience of using technology in the classroom should be able to create motivating hands-on edtech training for their peers or for pre-service trainee teachers.
The fifth additional chapter is dedicated to providing a range of links to ready-made computer games that can be used for language acquisition and development.
The sixth additional chapter focuses on virtual reality and provides links to a range of tools and resources that can enable teachers to exploit this area of technology within their classroom practice.
The seventh additional chapter looks at the area of e-safety and the things that we can do to protect our students, ourselves and our computers from some of the potential threats that we can encounter online.
The remainder of the book, like the first edition, is a collection of more than 100 links to tools and resources that have been chosen and organised to enable teachers to easily find ways of applying technology to the activities they do with their students.
I sincerely hope you find this book useful and that it helps you to enhance your teaching and training and helps to make your students’ learning experience richer and more engaging.
This lesson plan is based on an infographic that reports on a survey into advertising, people’s attitudes to it and how it influences them.
Aims:
To develop students’ abilities to think critically and form informed opinions.
To develop students’ abilities to study and research effectively using digital tools.
To develop students’ abilities to read and understand visual information.
To develop students’ abilities to check the credibility of online information.
To develop students’ abilities to carry out online research and to represent their findings visually.
To develop students’ abilities to extract information from research and create informative text based on their findings.
The materials in this plan can be used in different ways. The first four tasks can be used independently as a simple reading and discussion lesson.
The final four tasks can be used selectively to develop various digital skills.
This lesson contains eight tasks:
A discussion task that gets students thinking about advertisements and how they influence their behavior.
A reading task that develops students’ abilities to scan text for specific information
A reading task that develops students’ abilities to check and confirm information.
A discussion task that gives students the opportunity to reflect on the information and apply it to their own lives.
A social research task that gets students to create an online questionnaire to find out about people’s attitudes to advertising.
A research task that gets students to check the accuracy of information
.A research task that gets students to research the advertising techniques used by various companies.
A writing task that gives students the opportunity to consolidate their learning in the form of a blog article.
In a world where anyone with an internet connection can access, create and share information, opinions and beliefs, it has become increasingly important that students are not only able to assess the credibility of sources but also to look more deeply at the underlying motivations, beliefs and bias of the creator.
Thinking Critically through Digital Media enables teachers to use authentic materials and digital tools combined with motivating communicative tasks to develop students’ abilities to function as critical and well informed digital citizens.
The book contains a wide range of tasks, activities and 10 complete lesson/project plans that teachers can use to help students understand visually presented information, how and why the information was collected, research and check the validity of the sources on which the information was based and think about and share how the materials relate to their own lives.
TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content.
It’s an ideal tool for building blended learning.
In this document you can find:
-: a step by step guide showing how to use it
-: a video tutorial that shows you how to make the activities
-: some suggestions and ideas for using it in the classroom or as part of an online course.
This e-booklet contains a collection of ten lesson plans to help you develop students' digital literacies and critical thinking skills. Based around authentic infographics the lessons start by using discussion to help students access what they already know about the topics and then move on to comprehension and a range of tasks that help students to explore the validity and authenticity of the information they find. They finish with structured research and presentation tasks that encourage students to work collaboratively and share what they have learned.
The aims of the lessons are to:
-: develop student's digital literacies
-: help them to think more critically about online information
-: develop their ability discuss and develop ideas around information and understand how it applies to their own lives.
The lessons progress through a range of tasks that engage student’s interest, encourage them to:
-: interact and share what they know
-: develop their abilities to extract information from text and graphics
-: view information critically
-: check the credibility and validity of information
-: develop online research skills
-: use web based tools to create surveys and data visualisations
The lessons cover a range of topics including:
-: Advertising and how it influences us
-: Body language and how to understand it
-: Introverts and extroverts and how they differ
-: Emotional intelligence and how it impacts on our relationships
-: Facts about hair
-: Happiness and what effects it
-: Developing study skills
-: The environment and waste caused by clothes manufacturing
-: Daily habits of the world's wealthiest people
-: The history of marriage and weddings
Each lesson includes:
-: A step by step teachers guide with advice and answer key
-: Worksheets to print for students
Digital Video is a 400 page multimedia manual for language teachers to help them build activities, courses and engaging materials for their students. From exploiting mobile apps on handheld devices to building video into blended and task based learning, Digital Video covers it all.
With detailed technical support through a range of 26 tutorial videos, illustrated step-by-step guides and more than forty lesson examples and over 300 images, teachers can use this manual to build their confidence and find some of the best free video applications and resources online.
Whether you are a novice teacher or an experienced trainer looking to develop your tech skills, this manual can help you with plain English explanations and practical online and face to face classroom suggestions.
This is a PDF ebook with links to video tutorials.
This lesson has been designed for online or face-to-face delivery.
In this lesson, students share their experiences of doing interviews for jobs or college. They discuss the kinds of questions they may be asked at a job interview and listen to some example questions and answers. They also look at some examples of good and bad body language. They finish by role playing an interview for a job they would like.
Aims:
To develop students’ ability to do job interviews in English.
To develop students’ understanding of body language.
To help students understand the types of questions they may have to answer in a job interview.
Level:
Low intermediate + (A2/B1)
Materials:
Digital presentation: Demo Copy
Pronunciation activity: https://bit.ly/interview-dict
Printable presentation (PDF)
Audio files (Zip mp3 x 2)
Techniques, Exercise and Activities for the Creative Language Classroom
This book is for any language teacher who is interested in developing their own and their students’ creative skills while teaching languages.
The book is in two sections.
-: The first part looks at a range of teaching techniques that you can use in any lesson to help develop your students’ creativity. It also includes some suggestions and easy exercises for applying these in the classroom.
-: The second part is a collection of 30 structured activities. These include step by step instructions as well as example digital materials that you can use in the classroom.
The example materials have been designed so that you can use them on any digital device with an internet connection.
Example digital presentation: Interview Images
I hope you and your students will find this book an enjoyable and useful accompaniment for your everyday teaching.
This book has been designed as a teachers’ guide to the use of the digital and interactive materials from the second 10 units of the Conversation & Listening series.
The book contains the step-by-step instructions outlining how to use the materials and presentations and implement the activities in each stage of the lesson units.
The Conversation & Listening series was designed to help and encourage young adult English language students (A2/B1 or higher) to engage in conversation and interaction around a range of common topics and in a range of situations that will be of interest to them.
Each unit contains materials for 90 -120 mins contact time and an additional 60+ mins interactive self-study materials.
Unit Topics
A Good Book - To enable students to discuss different types of books.
A Night Out - To enable students to talk about different places they like to go in the evening.
My Goals - To enable students to talk about their goals in life and their attitudes to achieving their goals.
My Sense of Humour - To enable students to discuss their sense of humour and describe different types of humour.
The Dancer - To enable students to share their opinions and experiences of dance.
The Gamer - To enable students to discuss their experiences of a range of issues around video games.
The News - To develop students’ abilities to think more critically about news and how they access it.
The Story - To develop students’ abilities to tell stories and anecdotes.
The Tattoo - To enable students to talk about body art, how it is viewed in different cultures and why people have tattoos.
The Vegan - To develop students’ ability to discuss the types of food they like and their attitudes to eating meat.