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Film English is the brainchild of teacher, trainer and author Kieran Donaghy ( Kieran's LinkedIn profile). Kieran teaches at UAB Idiomes Barcelona, part of the Univiersitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The site promotes the innovative and creative use of film in English language teaching and learning. All of the lesson plans revolve around the use of video and film to teach English. The site promotes cineliteracy, the ability to analyse moving images, and considers cineliteracy as a 21st century skill which our students need to learn. In addition, the lessons promote critical thinking in the language classroom, and  encourage learners to reflect on values while learning a  language. PrintFilm English has become a very popular resource English Teaching bank and is visited by over 80,000  teachers every month and there are over 2.5 million page views a year. It has received critical acclaim winning various awards, including winner of Best Individual Blog and Runner-up in The Best Use of Video in the 2011 Edublog Awards; the 2011 TEFL.net  Site of the Year; and British Council Teaching English Featured Blog of the Month.

Here you are finding over one hundred great ideas from teachers across the world. We could develop their critical and creative thinking. So, let's try one!

This site goes over the general facts about NSA surveillance programs. It describes the basic metadata that is collected for US phone calls:"the telephone number of the phones making and receiving the call, and how long the call lasted." It mentions the NSA program PRISM which collects emails, instant messages, and both private and public facebook data. It also mentions the program XKEYSCORE which gathers massive amounts of data from internet traffic. This FAQ also mentions what sort of things can be revealed by metadata and why critics of these programs find them alarming and illegal. This is a great article that covers the basic issues and concerns associated with NSA and mass surveillance. You could have students read it as a way to prep them for a project or discussion on this topic.

This is a video from the "What would you do?" program. It is a social experiment in which there is a racism situation performed by some actors. This role play was created in order to analize people's reactions on such a case. This can be food for thought in order to open a classroom discussion on human rights and the way we act to make them be respected and taken into consideration.

In this article the author presents 3 levels of racism described in order to promote and foster the creation of new theories on this concept. Moreover, the writer created a didactic allegory on a gardener's tale that illustrates her points and gives a clear and easy to understand perspective about racism. This can be used as a taxonomy to describe the different types of racism and promote the reflection upon it.