I have started to build up my professional development skills using Mooc-list.com. When you are teaching, you are taught to make every lesson relevant to every learner – which is a great idea. So why is this not also followed for teacher professional development? Instead of tailored, specific learning for teachers, most schools choose to […]
I have found another teaching resource I really need to share with everyone else. This teaching resource is simply called BlendSpace (https://www.tes.com/lessons) . It makes preparing for a lesson simpler as all you need to do is simply take all the teaching resources you were going to use anyway and place them all together in […]
I have been exploring a number of different YouTube channels this month to discover which channels give my students the best learning experience. I first use http://www.classtools.net/random-name-picker/ in each lesson to choose who will answer each question. I sometimes put the list of student’s names two times if the class is small. This is great […]
It seems that every month, I am finding something new to get excited about. In January it was suggested I try to give my lessons a little bit more of an international feel. Get the children to link learning in other schools all over Europe. I found this great website called https://live.etwinning.net which does exactly […]
The students in the second term are now becoming more confident in speaking English. I am now spending a lot more time focusing on making sure they are confident with English phonics, a topic which is tricky for anyone learning English. English is not a nice language for phonics, as the same sounding word can […]
This Christmas break I have been thinking long and hard about the different ways of getting the parents a lot more involved in their child’s learning. I also wanted to explore different ways of being able to show the parents what we are teaching in the classroom. Here are a few of my tried and […]
These ideas are taken from this fabulous new teaching resource: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/eal-toolkit-6040879 Buddy Up – a really simple concept but an idea not done nearly often enough. You take a student who is a confident reader or speaker and you buddy them up with a less confident reader and speaker. It may sound like you are […]
I recently came across a really wonderful website called http://englishbanana.com/ and I thought I would share it with everyone else. The first most notable feature of this website is that everything is in the public domain, which means you are free to do absolutely anything with it. If you want, you can even re-cover the […]
Students love to connect their learning to what they see around them. I am in the fortunate position of being the conversation teacher, which of course lets me float and drift around the curriculum, picking out the most interesting and exciting parts of English to further discuss. I have discovered that there are lots of […]
This month I have found a new art form and I am in love. I have discovered an app for the phone which lets you to make 6 second long videos to share with the class and the world. Six seconds may not seem like a lot of time to use for a teaching point, […]
Students love to learn. All that needs to be done is to find different ways of helping them learn, while having a lot of fun in the process. My latest attempt at motivating students over the summer has to been to use Minecraft as an interesting teaching tool. Minecraft is a wonderful piece of software, […]
I have discovered a completely new way of teaching English by using Minecraft. Kids love Minecraft, there are over 20 million copies of Minecraft on PC alone. The big question is how do you take this and make it into a real educational tool. If you visit http://www.DrFog.co.uk, you will see that there are so […]