Watching Young Learners at Work: From Practice to Principle
This post is based on three activities on video with a young class in their first year of English videotaped as part of a training project for a course on […]
The Giant Storymaker – Ideas for a Hundred Million Stories
<![CDATA[Storytelling is one of the most important acts of communication. Every day, in our contacts with friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances we share stories, anecdotes – things that happened to […]
Thinking about Discipline – Part 2
In the first blog post of this series on discipline, I looked at some of the causes of unruly behaviour in the classroom and got started on the path of what teachers can do proactively! I think that one of the best quotes I always remember, is one by my […]
Thinking about Discipline – Part 1
Having discipline problems? Which of these learners are your learners? Made with wordle.net – the words in the word cloud have been taken from http://www.disciplinehelp.com/ But why do students behave […]
How not to teach English
Here are some of the things that still happen in many classrooms in Greece – do they also happen in other parts of the world? The teacher and the students talk to each other mainly using the students’ mother tongue. The teacher asks the students to read a text aloud. […]
The Art of Being Creative
What is involved in the creative process? It has been suggested that creativity (or, as it is also termed, divergent production) is not a single unifying ability but it is […]
Tech Tools & Pedagogy I – ReadtheWords, Voki & Xtranormal
<![CDATA[My first post in the series is about three applications ReadtheWords in which an avatar speaks out a text you have pasted into a text box Voki which does the same but which also allows you to record your voice not xtranormal which allows only text to speech but which […]
Yes, and…..
<![CDATA[There is a specific activity I often use in creative thinking skills workshops which works wonderfully well. I learnt it from T.Richards, during a lecture in Athens some years ago (pls see note at end). It's called the “Yes, and…” activity In this activity, one person, or the teacher even, […]
The power of play for education and language development
R.F.Dearden’s (1967) definition of play, ‘a non-serious and self-contained activity which we engage in just for the satisfaction involved in it’, suggests that any activity that takes the mind of the […]