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At the college where I teach, professors have the unique opportunity every May to develop a course outside of their typical curriculum. Teachers get to explore their interests in new courses as diverse as "The Chemistry of Cooking" and "Writing a Film Short."

I just found this article about redesigning the syllabus. Since my students hardly every really read the syllabus, I have to come up with something new. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/creative-approaches-to-the-syllabus/35621

Thanks for the link from the Chronicle!

The Babson Survey Research Group has done yearly reports of online learning.

Word of the Week from DW.de. Highlighting & annotating for creating a lesson based on this material.

Although this article is about British language education and it's two years old, my interest was piqued when I read it: ""Languages cannot be taught, they can only be learnt. The best way is to tell students right away that they are responsible for their own learning process, and the teacher is just a guide who has to motivate them."" Made me think about relevancy and how Tech is only one part of that.

Really interesting. I wonder if we changed the setting to the U.S. if the same difficulties would apply. I never really thought about grammar being discarded simply because students don't know it well enough. While I've found that most students we teach don't understand their mother tongue, I still think that the shift to task-based work had as much to do with the lack of real communication skills. Just teaching them grammar and relying on them to go abroad to learn to speak wasn't doing it. That being said, I think the mixture of methods is best, and by mixture I mean the integration of many methods into accomplishing a task. And I agree that the meta-learning is key.

I remember getting a comment from a student once, many years ago, that she had learned more about English grammar in my Spanish class than anywhere else... (sigh)

"they" would say no without even reading/listening to my reasons. Better to ask forgiveness than permission but it may not be worth your job and it's definitely not worth the safety of students.

perfectly applicable to language learning

This is a fabulous site! Read high-quality picture books from all over the world in different languages-page by page-illustrations included!

This is a review of palabea which provides a good start to those who want to try it. 

Good, succinct info about Palabea. thanks

This article addresses the issue of 'noise' on Twitter, which has come up often in the discussion boards about his weeks experiences. I thought you all might find it interesting!

I've read enough this about Google+ and its positive aspects to make me want to be able to use it. Just waiting for their email... @Alyssa - thanks, since I wrote this, I got in. Now I just need time to explore.

Jan- send me your email and I can "invite" you.

Using Twitter for a 10 minute verb activity.

This is so cool! I know it would keep my students more engaged and focused on what could potentially be boring grammatical exercises. I do not currently use an on-line notebook and want to use Google docs more often. Lots to think about!

interesting article -just read it myself!

An article about using Twitter in an English class to train communicative and cultural competence at a Distant College in China.

There are a lot of ideas here....of course need time to explore

Experiences of a Spanish teacher.

A little overwhelming in terms of the number of resources, but really great resources nonetheless!

A lot of great ideas and resources all gathered in this one resource. I look forward to having an afternoon to read through this more carefully.