Early EFL: Leahn is located in Spain, where she works as a freelance language assistant teacher and as a teacher trainer in workshops for primary and secondary school teachers.
Box of Chocolates: Join this EFL teacher from Recife, Brazil, who is very passionate about teaching
Neslihan Durmusoglu: This blog reflects on the world of EFL and about being a 21st-century learner and teacher.
Reflections of a Teacher and Learner: David teaches kids at a private college in Turkey and he also is a distance student on the University of Manchester’s MA in EdTech & TESOL programme
An A-Z of ELT: This blog is managed by the man who wrote An A-Z of ELT in 2006, Scott Thornbury.
Authentic Teaching: This blogger has taught EFL in Brazil, and taught ELT for several years as well. He now is earning an MA in Education in London
Jeremy Harmer’s Blog: Jeremy is a writer and teacher/teacher-trainer for English to speakers of other languages, and he blogs about presentation.
Marisa Constantinides — TEFL Matters: This blogger runs CELT Athens, a teacher development center based in Greece.
Shaun Wilden’s Blog: Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for almost twenty years. He also maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net.
So this is English… This blog is filled with ideas, thoughts, discoveries, feedback and more about the teaching and learning of English.
Teaching Village: Barbara is an English teacher currently living in Kitakyushu, Japan, and using Web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds.
Technology and teaching - two words that seem to fit together perfectly today for most teachers and learners. So much so that a slew of new blogs have come on board to talk about education technology - or, edTech. This list of the 50 best education technology blogs are not inclusive, as there are so many new blogs available; however, if you look at links provided by many of these blogs to other edTech blogs, you may learn about even more blog that you aren't reading yet.
Over 42,000 spelling words with customizable sentences and
definitions
A REAL person who says each word and sentence
Free home pages for teachers and parents to save lists
Teacher
training videos
Free printable handwriting worksheets
Free teaching resources with lists and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print such as
Over
Over
42,000
spelling
words with customizable sentences and
definitions
A
REAL
person
who says each word and sentence
Free home pages
for
teachers and parents to save lists
Teacher
training
videos
Free printable
handwriting worksheets
Free teaching
resources
with lists
and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print such
as
:Alphabetical
Order, Unscramble, Parts of Speech, HangMouse, Crossword Puzzle, WordSearch, and Vocabulary Test.
A free forum and newsletters
Over
42,000
spelling
words with
customizable sentences and
definitions
A
REAL
person
who says
each word and sentence
Free home pages
for
teachers and parents to save
lists
Teacher
training
videos
Free printable
handwriting worksheets
Free teaching
resources
with
lists
and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print
such
as
:
Alphabetical
Order
,
Unscramble
,
Parts of
Speech
,
HangMouse
,
Crossword Puzzle
,
WordSearch
,
and
Vocabulary
Test
.
A free
forum
and
newsletters
SpellingCity.com has:
- Over 42,000 spelling words and ten learning games!
- A REAL person who says each word and sentence.
- Free home pages for teachers and parents to save lists.
- How To Videos to explain to teachers and parents how to use SpellingCity.com.
- A free forum and newsletter with more vocabulary and spelling resources!
- Ten spelling and vocabulary games to play online or to print.
- Free printables for handwriting practice with your saved lists.
- A Resources Section which highlights features and existing lists for Dolch words, compound words, sound-alikes (their, there, they're), contractions, possessives, and more.
After taking the online spelling test, students can print out a report, retake the entire test, or get tested only on spelling words that they got wrong the first time.
TeachMe spells and displays the word in ways that stimulate memory for visual and verbal learners.
Printable Games include WordSearch, UnScramble, WhichWord?, Sentence UnScramble and MissingLetter.
Printable Handwriting Worksheets for combined spelling and handwriting practice can be created from any saved list (this feature only works if the list is saved). Choices includes three sizes of lines, capitals or small letters, script or cursive, and with directional arrows on or off. How cool is that?
All you have to do is type in the list of words and bam! at least 10 games are generated for the students! It also teaches and tests the students on the words. You can save the lists as a teacher and have students search for your lists or you can have students input their own lists without saving them.
A superb resource where teachers can sign in and input spelling lists for pupils to learn by playing games. Give pupils the link and they don't need to sign in to use it. Site only recognises US spelling when generating example sentences, but you can input your own easily. Free option should be enough for most users, but 'paid for' option is available.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
If you are fearful of Facebook and MySpace then you need to create an Edmodo account. Edmodo was designed specifically for educational purposes. You must be a teacher, student, or parent to gain access. It allows you all the amenities of those other social networking sites but with a lot more security/privacy.
Yes, it is free and you can manage student accounts. It is only open to those you invite in and only educators may obtain an account. You may monitor and moderate all conversations, administer quizes, embed media, etc. The groups feature is very effective and you may grant access to your group to other classes. We just had 700+ students interacting in a global collaboration project, Digiteen.
Students do not need an email address to use Edmodo, so under 13 is OK for CIPA. It looks much like Facebook, so kids love it and parents need some education on it as they fear it at first. Parents can get monitoring access so they may monitor their child's activity. It is a great tool to show parents how social media is used in education.
The National Council of Teachers of English is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. This mission statement was adopted in 1990:
"The Council promotes the development of literacy, the use of language to construct personal and public worlds and to achieve full participation in society, through the learning and teaching of English and the related arts and sciences of language."
Powerful interactive resources designed for whole-class teaching. Online educational games, classroom resources and lesson activities for interactive whiteboards and data projectors. Put some fun into your lessons with our exceptional science, maths, English language, literature, history, music physical education and modern foreign languages software." />/css/resourceList.css
This is a powerful quote. Thinking back to my schooling, it could probably be said that I thought of knowledge as finite, only limited to what my teacher and textbook said.
Too bad it took an economic crises to spur this movement.
“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
Wow! He is absolutely right on. Why take a course with based on a rigid time and place when one can learn at a place and pace that makes sense to them?
“We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
This is where I think textbooks companies need to lead. Customers typically only want more of the same, more of what has worked in the past, more of what has a track record. They dont' necessarily think beyond and/or have the luxury of being visionaries.
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Ideally, she said, teachers are working in cross-disciplinary teams to decide how to balance those shared responsibilities in a solid curriculum.
And Ms. Highfill has not found the guidance on shared, cross-curricular responsibility to be translating into classroom reality. In her district, she said, "there still seems to be more of a focus on English teachers' using nonfiction in classrooms than the other content areas stepping up to the plate."
such titles are meant for classes other than English, and seeing them as texts that displace works like The Catcher in the Rye takes titles out of context and ignores the messages of the standards document as a whole.
teachers and local administrators are the ones who must decide how to share responsibility for the increased emphasis on nonfiction. "If a lot of good, close reading of high-quality, challenging texts is going on in science and history classes," she said, "then English/language arts teachers need to carry less of that responsibility."
It is English/language arts teachers who will be held accountable for the results, which will drive what happens in their classrooms week to week, he said.
The National Council of Teachers of English is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.
Does Edmodo's Digital Citizen Starter Kit handle the challenge of educating kids to be good digital citizens? The answer is "Yes!" according to Bianca Hewes, a high school English teacher in Sydney, Australia who's also been doing awesome things with Edmodo since 2009 (including connecting 30 of her students with registered Edmodo teachers in the US, South America and England to mentor their individual writing projects). "Edmodo is a social network with training wheels," says Bianca. "By introducing it at a young age, teachers are able to develop the habits of the mind that are essential for students to be good digital citizens. Students learn to use appropriate language, to speak kindly and with compassion, to be supportive rather than critical, and to ask thoughtful questions."
After four years at the charter school, eighth-graders showed average test score gains in math equal to an additional year and a half of school, compared with district students.
an extra half-year in science and almost an extra half-year in English
the charter has a lean administrative staff and slightly larger classes—31 students compared with an average of about 26 or 27 in district schools—so it can pour resources into teacher pay and training.
Teachers are observed by colleagues and get feedback weekly, and they have four weeks of full-day professional development each year.
Days are long, with teachers at work from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and students attending from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Many teachers don’t last. Of 43 hired during the four years studied, 47% didn’t return for a second year, in most cases because they weren’t asked back.
I wonder why - performance, or too much stress due to longer hours and out of work expectations? Regardless, this high turnover rate has got to impact the kids in the end.
Critics of charter schools say, among other complaints, that they drain money from regular public schools, skim talented students and nudge out disruptive ones.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
A thriving community of teachers and others involved in teaching English Language Arts. Has abundant support, resources, a several thousand members who offer encouragement, job news, curriculum, and community. A great place to be.
Social network for English teachers: "Where English teachers meet to help each other." Created and maintained by Jim Burke. See also www.englishcompanion.com, his other website for his own work.
Quizzes, tests, exercises and puzzles to help you learn English as a Second Language (ESL)
This project of The Internet TESL Journal (iteslj.org) has thousands of contributions by many teachers.
Quizzes, tests, exercises and puzzles to help you learn English as a Second Language (ESL)
This project of The Internet TESL Journal (iteslj.org) has thousands of contributions by many teachers.
NCTE's Student/Instructor Program helps introduce pre-service teachers to the networking, resources, professional development, and collegiality of our profession. This member service allows teacher educators to share the latest developments and newest resources in English language arts with their students.
Jennifer Roberts, a veteran English teacher in San Diego, and a Google Certified teacher, shares how she approaches plagiarism with her students and uses the tools in Google Apps & Google Search to help curb intentional and unintentional plagiarism.
Catlin Tucker clarifies what "Complex Text" is and shares a link for teachers to see what the Lexile Measure is. Read the comments on her post, as a few teachers respond with additional resources.
Technology and teaching - two words that seem to fit together perfectly today for most teachers and learners. So much so that a slew of new blogs have come on board to talk about education technology - or, edTech. This list of the 50 best education technology blogs are not inclusive, as there are so many new blogs available; however, if you look at links provided by many of these blogs to other edTech blogs, you may learn about even more blog that you aren't reading yet.
Account
