Facebook makes you stupid?

An unnamed US study reckons 68% of school pupils using Facebook got "significantly lower" exam marks than those who didn't, according to The Week, the study referred to probably being that of Ohio State, according to TIME.

What it doesn't say -- though I haven't personally read the actual report -- is whether or not the exams themselves were actually testing what the learners know, or were relevant to their learning styles or actual real-world needs, and I suspect that quite possibly they weren't.

I might just be tempted to use Facebook rather than e-mail as a means of communication with learners as -- says my daughter (13) -- no-one ever uses e-mail now, at least not young learners.

What would put me off would be the privacy issues. While creating a new Facebook profile recently, I got asked did I want to be friends with these 25 people -- all of whom looked suspiciously young, and none of whom I recognised...

Hold on, I did recognise them: they were all 13, all girls, and all my daughter's friends. If you're going to use technology with young learners, you want a network that is a whole lot more secure than that...

Marc Prensky on the 21st Century Digital Learner

Don't bother me, Mom, I'm playing with my phone...

A (fairly) new article by Marc Prensky: Young Minds, Fast Times: The Twenty-First-Century Digital Learner.

On Nik Peachey's excellent Quick Shout blog, you can see Marc Prensky being interviewed by Gavin Dudeney at IATEFL 2009.

If you are not familiar with Marc Prensky [website | Wikipedia], his 2001 Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives article has been very influential.

New Learning English site

The BBC's excellent Learning English site has had a makeover.

Among the changes is a new option to download the audio for the Words in the News section, the archives for which go back to 1999. You also have the 190+ episodes of The Flatmates, a section on pronunciation, plus a section for teachers.

It's definitely a site to recommend to your learners (and perhaps suggest that they make it their default home page) but it also has things you could use in class.

Interactive Whiteboards are useless. Discuss.

It's not about the board...

This slideshow by Chris Bletcher I found in a link included in the debate on whether or not "IWBs are useless" on Cardiff Online, the online coverage of the 43rd Annual International IATEFL Conference.

IWBs are not (obviously) useless, provided that you use them well, whatever that means [discussion]. In that sense they're like any other technology.

At IH Barcelona we're at the stage of having got the boards but are still wondering (a) what we're supposed to be doing with them; (b) how to persuade teachers to use them and (c) what training we should be providing.

I'm personally a great believer "learning by quotation", "learning by soundbite" if you prefer, and particularly like the quotation shown in the image, above. It's tough to wade through all the information, the partisan debates and so on. It helps if you can cut out some of the noise.

Learning to use an IWB is a question of "learning by doing"; in attempting to learning to use one well, it probably helps to do some "learning by quotation" first.

See also >> The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution

The (unstoppable) progression of IT

One from YouTube on the progression of information technology, researched (and presumably created) by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Jeff Bronman, and which I picked up in my RSS feed for Tyson William's superb blog.

Does it worry you, as a teacher -- and as a person? You might show it to you learners, and ask them.

"So what does it all mean?" it asks at the end. Apart from anything else, it means that -- as a teacher -- you can't just bury your head in the sand, not use technology and hope that it will go away. It won't. You don't have a choice any longer.

Free resources for learning languages

One that came from one of my favourite RSS feeds -- the excellent Lifehacker.com -- free (mostly podcast) resources for learning languages (37 of them, including English). Useful to your students, useful to you too if you're heading off to teach English somewhere exotic...

"Don't search, have stuff come to you," I always say, and RSS is a great way to make that happen, whether you're a teacher or a learner.

>> RSS feeds for ELT