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.
In the lesson students will find out about the different things people usually have for breakfast in different countries and they will develop an awareness of the importance of having a good breakfast.
Aims:
To develop students’ abilities to think critically and form informed opinions.
To develop students’ abilities to understand statistical information.
To develop students’ abilities to check the credibility of online information.
To develop students’ abilities to carry out and create 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.
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.
When I first started hearing and reading about ChatGPT and all the marvellous things it could do, I was very excited, but my first impressions weren’t that great. Good, but not great.
I found it frustrating. I was reading articles about all the marvellous things it could do, but when I tried to get ChatGPT to do those things for me, the results were a bit disappointing. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.
The reality is that in order to get the best from ChatGPT, you have to learn to understand a little bit about it, the way it thinks and the way it understands language. I soon found that the more I studied this, the better the results were and the more things it would do for me.
What I’ll be sharing in this book are some of the ideas and insights I’ve developed from my time working with it. Along with the prompts and prompt templates, you can use to get the same or better results for your students.
Contents
Chapter 1 - An introduction to ChatGPT where we look at some of the basics such as parts of the interface, what they do and how ChatGPT works.
Chapter 2 - We look at what ChatGPT can do to help us prepare engaging materials and how students can interact with ChatGPT. This section will focus on exploiting ChatGPT in the classroom and for homework activities. This includes example materials, ideas and lesson plans that you can try along with the prompts that I used to create the materials.
Chapter 3 - We look at some of the ways you can learn more about teaching and ways that you can use ChatGPT to make your workload a little easier to deal with, especially lesson planning and language research.
Chapter 4 - We look at a collection of tips for helping you construct prompts. Prompts enable you to get responses from ChatGPT and the better your prompt writing is the better the results you will get.
Chapter 5 - We look at some examples of other AI tools that can be used alongside ChatGPT to do various tasks like creating images, audio and video, as well as creating quizzes, presentations and lesson plans.
Chapter 6 - We look at some of the various different issues and controversies that ChatGPT raises.
256 pages
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
In the lesson students will learn some amazing facts about hair and the historical significance it has had in different cultures around the world. They will also learn to challenge and question the accuracy of information they find online.
This lesson contains seven tasks:
A discussion task which gets students thinking around the topic.
A reading task which develops students’ abilities to use text to check information.
A reading task which encourages students to develop deeper comprehension.
A discussion task which gives students the opportunity to formulate a personal response to the information they have studied.
An online research task which guides students through the process of researching and corroborating the credibility of online information.
An online research task which guides students through the process of creating research and disseminating the results.
A research task which develops students’ abilities to use social media to carry out research.
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 class.
The last three tasks are research tasks. These are the tasks that push students to develop their digital literacies most. It’s not necessary to use all the tasks. These tasks are likely to take longer and could be set as homework, independent study tasks or as projects and followed up in the classroom. The research tasks will all require internet access.
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 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.
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.
This book was the winner of the 2016 British Council Innovations Award (ELTon) for Innovations in Teacher Resources
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.
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 ebook was designed with English language teachers in mind but should have some value for any teacher who is interested in developing their students’ digital literacy and critical thinking skills.
The book contains a wide range of suggested activities for both the creation and exploitation of infographics in the classroom.
It also helps teachers with tips and advice on how to plan and create infographics and suggestions for which tools to use to produce different types of infographic.
Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy, which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students.
The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet.
Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills.
In this lesson students will find out about body language and its impact on communications. They will have the opportunity to try to use body language and they will carry out online research to find out how well people consciously understand body language.
The materials in this plan can be used in different ways. The first three tasks of the plan can be used independently as a simple reading and discussion class.
The last two research tasks can be used independently as follow up tasks or you could use both. These tasks are likely to take longer and could be set as homework, independent study tasks or as projects. Both of these tasks will require internet access.
This lesson contains five tasks:
-: A discussion task which encourages students to think about their existing understanding of body language.
-: A reading task which develops students' abilities to understand visual information.
-: A discussion task which gives students the opportunity to formulate a personal response to the information they have studied.
-: An online research task which guides students through the process of researching and corroborating the credibility of online information.
-: An online research task which guides students through the process of creating research and disseminating the results.
The input for the lesson is based around an infographic on body language.
This book has been designed to act as a practical resource that should help you to get a better understanding of the kinds of AI tools that are available and how to use them in the English language classroom.
The book does this through a series of chapters focusing on tools for teachers, tools for students and a collection of background reading.
All of the tools and reading texts in this book have tasks to accompany them that will help you orientate yourself to the materials and think more deeply and actively about how they can be used.
These tasks have been adapted from the online course version of the book, in which participants can share opinions, reflections and materials with each other. I would encourage you to do the same even if you aren’t part of the course.
Keep a journal and make notes as you work through the book and try the tasks.
Find another colleague you can talk to about the tasks and the example plans
Seek out opportunities to interact with and discuss what you are learning with other teachers and with your students.
Use what you are learning to run formal or informal development sessions for other teachers.
The book also includes a link to download a free copy of The Digital Toolbox.
The Digital Toolbox is regularly updated, and should help to keep you up to date with new developments and apps that are becoming available.
I hope you enjoy the book.
This book has been designed to act as a practical resource that should help you to get a better understanding of the kinds of AI tools that are available and how to use them in the English language classroom.
The book does this through a series of chapters focusing on tools for teachers, tools for students and a collection of background reading.
All of the tools and reading texts in this book have tasks to accompany them that will help you orientate yourself to the materials and think more deeply and actively about how they can be used.
These tasks have been adapted from the online course version of the book, in which participants can share opinions, reflections and materials with each other. I would encourage you to do the same even if you aren’t part of the course.
Keep a journal and make notes as you work through the book and try the tasks.
Find another colleague you can talk to about the tasks and the example plans
Seek out opportunities to interact with and discuss what you are learning with other teachers and with your students.
Use what you are learning to run formal or informal development sessions for other teachers.
The book also includes a link to download a free copy of The Digital Toolbox.
The Digital Toolbox
The Digital Toolbox is regularly updated, and should help to keep you up to date with new developments and apps that are becoming available.
I hope you enjoy the book.
This book is a wonderful collection of 20 stories from teachers around the world. Each one describes how they try to be genuine in their interactions with their students and how they try to model the practices they promote.
The stories come from teachers of all levels, ages and grades. The book displays the wide range of diversity that exists in both the classrooms and the way teachers approach their profession around the world.
Edited by
Adelina binte Asmawi
George M Jacobs
Guo Qingli
Willy A Renandya
Foreword by Alan Maley
This ebook is 53 pages long and was originally published in 2009 so some of thetools are a bit out of date, but the ideas can still be used.
This document is intended as simple introduction to some free Web 2.0 type tools that can be used by teachers who are interested in using technology in language teaching. The tools presented here are just the tip of the iceberg and this should not be considered in anyway conclusive or even the ʻbest ofʼ Web 2.0 tools. New tools are emerging all the time, many not originally intended for education, but which can be put to good use by students and teachers alike to extent opportunities, enhance learning potential and develop the level of digital literacy that students will need for the 21st century.
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.
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 ebook is 53 pages long and was originally published in 2009 so some of thetools are a bit out of date, but the ideas can still be used.
This document is intended as simple introduction to some free Web 2.0 type tools that can be used by teachers who are interested in using technology in language teaching. The tools presented here are just the tip of the iceberg and this should not be considered in anyway conclusive or even the ʻbest ofʼ Web 2.0 tools. New tools are emerging all the time, many not originally intended for education, but which can be put to good use by students and teachers alike to extent opportunities, enhance learning potential and develop the level of digital literacy that students will need for the 21st century.