Twittering in ELT

What are people in ELT twittering about? Is it useful to me and/or my learners...?

According to TIME magazine, "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app..." (as Twitter is proud to proclaim on its home page).

From long experience, I would suggest that a healthy dose of scepticism is always called for whenever the words "next killer app" are used, be it Twitter or Second Life or interactive whiteboards, or any new bit of technology.

"Are my learners actually going to learn more, if I use this?" -- that would be the first question I think you should ask yourself as an English teacher. What are they (as opposed to me, the teacher) actually going to use the technology for, to do what, that will ensure that they learn more...?

If you can't see answers to those questions, I'd suggest you hold on before you jump on the latest digital bandwaggon.

Twitter is big at this moment, whatever people are using it for. They're also Using Twitter as an Education Tool, in a number of ways, says Search Engine Watch, such as using it to set assignments.

I'm not a Twitter user myself, either personally, or for use with my classes: I just can't see the answers to those questions...

>> 7 things you should know about Twitter
>> More on Twitter

Download lessons? Or get ideas...?

Print out, photocopy and cut up... But is that what you really want?

On the support group we have for our CELTA course trainees, someone recently asked where they could find sites from which they could download lesson plans.

You can find such things at sites like TEFL.net, ESL-kids.com and Splendid-Speaking.com.

Some of the publishers also have excellent resources sites, such as OneStopEnglish and BusinessEnglishOnline.net (both from MacMillan)

What would my tutor think...?
Remember, however, that there's an awful lot of rubbish out there in cyberspace. I'd suggest, before you download material, that you should ask yourself (among other questions) what your CELTA course tutor would have thought of it?

You might also consider the source of the material. The publishers give you some guarantee of quality lesson plans, as does the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk, and the British Council kids site.

Whether or not the site carries Google-is-Evil ads is another consideration I might make. It does? It may be that its primary interest is to make money, not to improve your teaching...

Don't search, have things come to you
Personally, as I prefer to have things come to me, rather than having to search for them, I'd really recommend the free materials by email the ELT publishers will send out to you (in the image above, materials in my mailbox from OUP).

Is it lesson plans you really want...?
My doubt about such things is whether or not downloadable lesson plans are actually what you should be looking for.

It would be nice just to be able to get free, ready-to-print, ready-to-use stuff and not have to think further about the lessons we are teaching. But I think there is -- or there ought to be! -- a lot more to good language teaching than that.

Do you want to print and photocopy vocabulary worksheets -- or is really the ideas, how to teach vocabulary that you really need...?

Online courses for English teachers

Online learning: to get the most out of it, you need to enjoy participating in (and learning from) the discussion...

Someone on our support group for our ex-CELTA course trainees asked me the other day about one of our online ELT courses, particularly about the teaching young learners course: "How do they work?" and "Do you need experience or to actually be teaching young learners?" were two of the doubts.

In the case of these particular IH courses, you don't have to have any experience of teaching young learners or actually be teaching them at the time -- though both will help. In a number of the modules there are things for you to "try out" with your learners and then "report back" to the online forum. So, if you do have some experience and can do that, then you'll probably get more out of our courses.

On these and just about any other online course worth the name, the forums are important. The more you (and your classmates) participate in them, the more you learn...

Is online learning for you...?
Online learning probably isn't for everyone (I've done online learning myself as a student, and loved it -- but I certainly had classmates who hated the experience).

You've probably got to be the sort of person who prefers not to be spoon-fed in ordered fashion by a teacher, who enjoys arguing a point and feels that you can actually learn from that process...

Day One: "Getting to know each other"

It's getting round to that time of year again: the start of the new school year and thinking about what you are going to go on the first day of class. Here's a really simple activity a collegue (Kim?) on a course once showed me...

Draw a rough star on the board (example, right) and for each point of the star, include a name, a date, etc. that is important to you personally (so that, for example, Toni and Isabel are the names of my own children), label your diagram "Me" and tell your class all of the things on the board are special to you for one reason or another.

What your learners then have to do is, quite simply, ask you questions to which those are the answers. Once they've got them (and learnt quite a bit about you in the process), you should have them each draw their own diagram, which they should share with at least one partner.

It's simple, it's easy, it breaks the ice, it gets people to know each other...

Wikipedia -- in simple English

One of the problems that your learners are going to have when they go online is that most of what is on the Internet was just not designed to be read by language learners.

If you take them to Wikipedia, for example (or just about any other site, for that matter), they are inevitably going to come across words that are unfamiliar to them. It is therefore going to be vital that you help your learners with reading comprehension skills -- particularly dealing with unfamiliar words in context.

But did you know that there is also a Simple English Wikipedia, which is one site you can find articles on; take your lower-level learners to during class; and recommend to them for their own use, outside class...

Change the default start page of your browser

One of the suggestions made in the sessions yesterday on our Celta course was that you could change the default start page on your browser to something more useful to you as a teacher. Among my own default start pages are various sources of texts: with a quick glance, and without having to waste time trawling the Web for them, articles which I might be able to use in class come to me.

Also suggested was that your students should change their home pages on their computers at home/work to something of interest -- a page on which they would stop and read or listen to some English. I liked the idea of that being a class blog, if you have one, and here's another that site that you might recommend, Nik Peachey's Daily English Activities. Designed for students, every day it has "a new simple online activity to help you improve your English".

Personally, I always recommend my learners to set their home page to the BBC World Service; to stop when they get there; to pick the most interesting looking headline; then to spend 2-3 minutes reading (or listening); and -- because a lot of exposure is necessary for learning a language -- to do that every day.

It doesn't have to be the BBC: it could be any site on any topic that interests them. Someone in one of our workshops yesterday argued that if you didn't set them a task or an exercise to do with it, then they wouldn't bother to do it. My counter-argument would be that they don't need more tasks or exercises: what they need, as learners, is to get themselves into good habits.