Xtranormal for Education

In one of my previous posts, I have talked to you about the Xtranormal website, which is a very interesting tool that can give your students’ dialogs a whole new dimension.

Instead of simply writing a dialog on a piece of paper, when they have to practice the written form of any given functional situation, with Xtranormal they can create short animated movies with the same simple dialog they use to write in class.

Even though the website has not been primarily developed with education purposes, it started being used by loads of language teachers who saw in Xtranormal a nice tool to motivate students create nice and engaging dialogs.

The result is the Xtranormal new platform, designed specifically for education purposes. I must confess I’ve just got the email with the advert, and have not yet been able to browse the new Xtranormal for education platform. But I wanted to share the news with you even before being able to check it, because for what I know about the website, I’m pretty confident about the quality of their new product!

Hope you enjoy it!

Facebook for Educators

As most readers have probably noticed, I haven’t written here since last March. But this period of absence is now over! Here I am again, with the compromise of writing at least one post per week. I’ve been losing audience because of the lack of new stuff, but I’m sure I’ll get them back by constantly bringing new stuf to this blog! Here goes my first hint in the return of ELT and WEB Connections.

I’ve recently come across a very nice website devoted to help teachers enhance their teaching by using Facebook, the ever growing social network. As a teacher trainer myself, I’ve met lots of teachers in my talks who are actually Facebook members, but haven’t yet tried using it for educational purposes, and this website can really help them explore it as an instructional tool.

There are several reasons why I can easily think of using Facebook in education, the problem is most schools still tend to block access to it in their labs. And, IMHO, that’s not how you should do it. It’s like taking away all the objects from the center table at home so kids can’t reach them, just because it’s harder to teach children behave accordingly when they have access to everything.

So, if you think the way I do, but don’t have a good idea or purpose for using Facebook in your teaching, this might be a good start. Enjoy it!

Teachers TV

One of the purposes of this blog, as my readers already know, is to try and help teachers of English find web resources to use in their classes. In some previous posts you can find lots of suggestions of nice websites and activities to use with the web in the classroom of English.

As blended learning is becoming stronger and stronger and every teacher is now looking for interesting ideas to incorporate ICT into their instruction, and as my job requires, I’ve been searching for interesting web tools in the past few years. And because of the nice things one can find on the cyberspace, this search has almost become an obsession for this blogger.

In this post, I’d like to present you to a very useful website called Teachers TV. A colleague has recently sent me the link to this site and after browsing through it, I can tell you it’s surely a great resource website with ready-made video activities for you to work with your students.

The Teachers TV website offers short snippets with interesting suggestions of activities to go with them. And what’s interesting about it is that, since it’s a UK based website for all subjects, there are clips that work with lots of cross curricular activities for English language teachers to use in their classes.

Here’s a very nice example of a short functional video that might lead to a good conversation practice on a specific grammar or lexical topic if well explored. By the end of the snippet there are some questions intended to get students guessing what happens next, and right below the video box you’ll find a downloadable word file with ideas on how to best explore the clip.

Once you browse the Teachers TV website you’ll find out you can choose the cross curricular subject you want to work with. But let’s suppose you’re not interested in cross curricular subjects or videos. In that case, you can choose English and then select the skill you want to work with.

IMHO, the most interesting video-based activities you can use in class are the ones which work speaking or listening skills. But with Teachers TV you can also find interesting videos that might help you explore other skills as well, even the ones that, in principle, you’d not expect to explore with a short snippet.

Have fun!

American or British English?

Most ELT specialists nowadays insist that we should not make this clear distinction between American and British English and, instead, we should teach our students what recent trends call International English.

Honestly, I understand them and I think we should always try to teach our students more than just one version of English. On the other hand, saying that English is becoming more and more international and that we can forget about the distinction between both types of English might not be completely true.

I’ve recently come across a very interesting blog where I found a post with a short video proving that even native speakers have some problems when they have to face the differences between the American and British English.

In the video below, you’ll see Emma Watson (Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger) talking to David Letterman about those cultural differences she had to face when she started college in the US.

This is, IMHO, crucial in order not to neglect explaining those differences to our students, even if we decide our teaching is gonna be based on the so called International English.

After all, a rubber might be a simple school object in the UK, whereas in the US it might have a completely different meaning. And that’s just one very interesting example of the confusions we might create by not considering the differences in British and American English in our teaching.

We all need management skills

Once I heard a friend, who was studying to be an engineer, complaining about having to study management for a semester: “I don’t need to learn management skills, I don’t want to be a manager, anyway!”, he argued almost in despair.

Of course I laughed. It was funny the way he put it. But at that time I was around my twenties, didn’t have the same content I have now in my “life bag”, and couldn’t disagree much. Now, almost twenty years later, I reckon my friend was completely mistaken.

In fact, all professional areas I can think of, in a way or another, profit from having professionals with good management skills. Even in personal life, if you don’t have good management skills you might end up losing a lot of things.

But in the business world things are even more complicated. Once you stop looking for labels indicating whether or not you need to know about management you’ll see that, in most cases, the need for those management skills are there without being even noticed.

In an editorial department of a publishing house, for example, good editors (although some don’t know that) need very good management skills for dealing with the team of authors, providers, art staff and a lot of other people who are involved in the project they’re editing.

Besides that, if editors cannot manage their own time, they will never deliver things on time and thus, won’t be considered desirable professionals. And that applies to any job I can think of, as time management is an issue in all professional areas nowadays. After all, despite the cliché, “time is money”.

What about teachers?

I’m sorry my friend but, undoubtedly, you, teacher, must also have very good management skills in order to succeed as a teacher. Of course those skills have to come together with a lot of others I don’t need to mention here.

But teachers who cannot manage, for example, their own groups surely lack management skills and this lack of command (without having to impose fear) is certainly going to prevent them from getting good teaching jobs once their reputation is known.

So, if you’re a graduated teacher and you’re looking for a specific course on something different from what you do, but, at the same time, something you could apply in your current professional area, I suggest you go look for a management skills course.

If you take a good course on this subject, the next time you’re faced with management situations, that aren’t labeled but certainly demand a good management command from you, it’s possible that things will run smoother.

The B.C. CEFR inventory

Just a brief post to praise the work done by the British Council – EAQUALS 2010. They’ve recently launched, and are still improving, an inventory of core functions, topics, grammar items, vocabulary items and discourse markers at each CEFR level.

It’s a great help for a lot of ELT professionals who need to rely on this type of information at work. I had just finished working on the Scope and Sequence of the series I’m editing when our editorial director in the UK sent us the inventory. And, as a novice editor myself, I can sure tell you that table helped us see whether we were on the right track or not. Fortunately, it proved we were.

What you have available so far is just an extract of the full version of the inventory, which will be published by the end of this year. But even this sample extract gives you a very good view on the core things you need to cover at each level of an English course.

Another very interesting thing, which most of us already know but it’s always good to remember, is that when they say what each CEFR level has to cover, that does not mean our students need to master those topics on the levels they are covered for the first time, because they’ll be exposed to them again and again.

That’s exactly the idea of the spiralling syllabus, where students are exposed to the same topic, in different depths at different levels, throughout the whole course. And this is made clear with the paragraph under the headline: “Teaching, not testing”, by the side of the table.

So, next time you’re planning the S & S of a coursebook or, if you’re a teacher, your lesson plans, it might be a very good idea taking a look at this very helpful table developed by the British Council – EAQUALS 2010. Congrats to my friends at BC for this brilliant and helpful idea.

Interactive White Board materials

I’ve recently noticed that one of the biggest problems for some people in the editorial departments of ELT publishing houses when developing digital teaching materials is to explain to their marketing fellows what are the things that really work well on an Interactive White Board.

Usually the MKT departments come to the editors with a demand that does not reflect the most effective use of those tools. Sales people, most of the times, just collect teachers’ demands without asking why they need it that way. And, IMHO, that’s the key to developing useful IWB materials.

For example, whole books in a digital format do not work at all, but that’s usually the teachers’ first request. In that case, the consultant, who’s at the end of the chain talking to the teacher, should show examples stating why that doesn’t work and, after that, ask them why (or if) they think they really need it.

But most of the times the sales consultants just bring this “fake” need to the marketing department, who simply forwards the request to the editors. As a former consultant myself, I’m pretty confident that when teachers ask for the whole digitalized book is because they are not yet aware of the different nature of the tool (IWB) and just want something they could automatically use with it.

Anyway, when developing materials for IWBs we, editors, need to be aware that the nature of those digital tools is totally different from that of the books. Most of the activities, images and colors that work on a paper based book, won’t work at all when projected on a screen. We need to explain this to our MKT fellows in case they haven’t yet noticed that.

Reading and writing activities that work very well on the book, for example, should not be used in an IWB software for any course book. When you digitalize a reading passage, for example, the text itself becomes hard to read and the purpose of the activity is lost.

Besides that, the orientation of the book pages is the opposite of that of the screen. When you see the whole page on a screen everything becomes too little to fit in. So you have to zoom in to work with it. But if you have to zoom in, concentrating on a part of the page only, why not start by selecting those parts you could really focus in?

IMHO, instead of digitalizing everything, we have to think of images that could be used to trigger students’ previous knowledge about the topic they’ll read in the book. We could also use audio or video to do something that the book itself cannot do. We have to think differently.

As I already mentioned in a previous post, most of the activities for IWBs should be plain simple, provide a lot of interaction and be more interesting than those avaliable in the SB. And that certainly doesn’t happen when you have a complete digitalized book with some interactive features.

So, if you’re an editor, next time someone from the marketing department asks you to develop an IWB material with the whole book in a digital format, try to explain them (and show it in action if possible) that this does not work instead of just doing what you’re asked, without questioning. After all, that’s what you’re paid for!

Are we ready to go online?

In recent days, one of the main discussions in the publishing business is about ways to face the growing need to move from print materials to digital online content. Different publishers are choosing different options, but one thing is clear: all of them are aware that things have already started to change.

Students don’t like to do their homeworks in black and white workbooks anymore. They say it’s dull. A research I carried out with some big private language schools in South America indicates that homework completion rates increase at about 30% when students are asked to do their tasks online.

But then there’s the question: Is everyone ready for this change? In my opinion, the vast majority of students are already anxiously waiting for this, but there’s still much to be done regarding teacher training.

Most teachers don’t yet feel comfortable about having to work with digital online content. They say their students know more than they do about digital tools and because of that they prefer to stay away from those.

In fact, I don’t have the exact numbers, but I would assume not more than 20% of the teachers who are currently working in the ELT market are what we call the digital natives or at least close to that. This means we still have more than 80% that are the so called digital immigrants (with a lot of digital illiterates amongst them). The elder the teachers are, the more resistance they have.

That’s where the publishers could come in. We all know the future is going to be like that. Less paper, more online content. So it’s high time we worked with teachers, effectively training them to use those new technological gadgets and resources in an effective way, getting the best out of those tools.

Although they know a great deal of things about ELT, experienced teachers still need help understanding the real benefits of using tools they would not even think of when they started their careers. Those teachers will never break this paradigm until someone shows them how they can make their lives much easier by learning to use, for example, an LMS or VLE for assigning homework, tracking their students’ progress and recording their results.

And as future (or current) providers of those services, the publishers will have a growing significant role in effectively doing that. What about you? Are you ready to go online?

New challenges, great expectations!

When I first decided to move to São Paulo to work as an Editor at Richmond, I had no idea of the projects I would be involved with. Now, I have the pleasure of being involved in one of the greatest investments of the company for the next two years.

I am really pleased I can use my experience and knowledge in order to help the company achieve such important and daring goals. And most of all, I am honored to be  here, surrounded by friends and being part of such an amazing group!!

I will never forget the day Sandra, my boss, called me saying the position was mine. This is exactly what I have been looking for. It’s like a dream come true!!

An upgrade in the carreer

Hi everyone, this is just a brief note to let everyone know about the latest and biggest upgrade in my ELT carreer. I have just signed with Richmond Publishing as an Editor. And I have to say it’s a great pleasure!

For quite a long time, that’s something I have been looking for. And now, the same person who, back in the begining of 2002, took me out of the classroom (after ten years of teaching), believed me as a consultant and put me into the publishing business, has given me this amazing chance to find new paths in my carreer.

And I am sure this will be great to the company as well, since, as an Editor, I can certainly profit from my market experience and I’ll do my best to help the company produce best-selling books. That’s my main goal now, in my latest and biggest carreer upgrade.

Book: The newest media revolution

I have recently got an email from a friend with a link to a very interesting video about an “innovative product” called Book. Of course, the video is meant to be fun, but it’s really interesting to see things differently and find so many advantages in a book, in an era of digital readers, as the one we live in.

I have to say the video is not only a lot of fun, but also a very intelligent piece, considering we don’t usually see things that way. You can check it below. Since it is recorded in Spanish, I’m sorry for those who don’t speak the language. Hope you like it.

If you can type, you can make movies

That’s the slogan of one of the most interesting tools I have recently seen for teachers who are willing to increase the use of technology into their instruction. It’s the Xtranormal website.

With this website teachers can easily help their students create their own animated movies, direct scenes and, most importantly for a teacher of English, practice writing.

I have already mentioned in previous posts the DFilm websiste. This is an interesting tool, as well, but it’s not 3D and the characters don’t speak, they appear with speech bubles over their heads.

Now, with Xtranormal, students will type their lines, and the characters will say everything they write with the help of a text recognition feature that enables the characters to reproduce almost everything in a very good pronunciation and intonation.

In addition to that, you can change camera angles, character actions, faces, moods, sounds, pauses, etc. In fact, I have just met the website and am still learning how to use all its features. Here you can check my first experience with Xtranormal.

And you can be sure this tool is gonna be included in my blended learning workshop as I’m confident both teachers and students will simply love it.

Welcome to the jungle

In recent days, experienced teachers and educators are facing a new, and difficult, challenge. Catch up with new technology and use them effectively in their classes.

The problem, for most of the teachers who are more than 50 years old, for example, is that they were not used to use computers until they were around their forties. And besides that, it’s really hard to catch up with new stuff coming up every second.

Teachers often say that, once they think they know what’s going on, there’s always a new gadget, plugin, software or WEB 2.0 platform for them to use. And their students all use them.

In fact, the speed of changes is impressive. For example, the internet has gone effectively public in Brazil by the late nineties. I got my first email account in 1997. And it was a bit fancy at that time. Just a few people would really use it.

But within the last 13 years the tech revolution and the internet have changed the world in a way never seen before. Emails, chat rooms, ICQ, social networks, msn, YouTube, e-bay, google, blogs, flogs, vlogs, podcasts, virtual lives, Twitter, and a lot more.

Welcome to the jungle

So, teachers have been put in a tech jungle full of new stuff, and they are told they have to incorporate modern technologies into their instruction. I totally agree with this, after all, we’re teaching 21st century kids.

We’re preparing them for a future we have no idea (maybe just a rough one) of how it will be like. New jobs are coming up and techology is a constant part of the students’ daily lives. Today kids are what theoriticians call the “digital natives”. Teachers are the “digital immigrants” and have to find their way through.

That’s the idea of the post’s title. In fact, I see a very interesting analogy between the jungle and the internet. Just to stay with one good comparison, both of them are full of resources for those who go in there, but no one needs to use them all in order to survive. It’s a pick and choose task.

Teachers should not, at all, use all tech gadgets and programs available. Instead, they should select, amongst all the options, those they feel more comfortable with.

They should only use those things that would help them motivate and encourage learning, but also that make them comfortable enough to pass on their instruction. That’s how you can implement an effective blended learning program.

This might mean that a teacher could choose not to use Twitter, for example, because the students would already be using a blog in the English classes and the teacher feels it would be, in a way, a bit more of the same, but only shortened.

On the other hand, another teacher could choose to quit using blogs, because Twitter is faster and fits better to begining students who cannot say much in a blog.

In a way, what I’m trying to say is that teachers don’t need to panic about new technology and its uses in the classroom of English. All they have to do is select the thing they prefer and that will help the students most.

Once selected, look for information on how to use the chosen tools. Blogs and devoted websites are very good sources. There are a lot of nice things that could be done, all you have to do is choose.

You can check some hints in my previous posts, where you’ll find a lot of ideas for using some nice websites, blogs, small home made videos, etc.

And finally, as I already mentioned in a recent post, a must-go website for teachers who look for guidance and ideas for using technology, is the Teacher Training Videos website, by Russel Stannard.

Welcome to the jungle, my dear friends!

New Talks and Workshops tab

Just a brief note to let you know I have uploaded to this blog a list of my talks and workshops. It will certainly make things easier as you’ll now be able to choose the title that best suits your institution directly here.

You’ll also find an abstract for most of the talks. Just click on the upper tab named Talks and Workshops. Any further question or request, please, just let me know.

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IATEFL via Twitter

Some publishers are offering, at IATEFL 2010, a very interesting and innovative idea for those who could not go to the event, to stay tuned to what’s going on in Harrogate.

The Twitter platform is now giving the world the possibility to follow the event and be updated about what’s up in the IATEFL conference and in the ELT world, even after the event.

As a journalist, researcher of new media and technology uses in the classroom, I have to congratulate the publishing companies for pushing ahead such an innovative and valuable idea.

That’s ELT catching up with the digital online world.

Stories for Reading Circles

Have you ever succeeded in getting your students speaking about what they read after reading a whole book? This might be painful sometimes. Mostly because there are some many things to talk about and they simply argue they don’t know where to start from.

The Reading Circles, for native speakers, are a strong cultural thing in the US and the UK, but they had not gotten into the ELT World until recently.

Stories for Reading Circles create a reason for students to communicate about what they read in the book. They make things easier by giving students individual separate roles and targets, according to their lingusitic abilities.

The idea of the Reading Circles is that students will split in groups and read one short story per group, but each student has a different role in the reading circle and has to share the objectives of the role with the others in a discussion group.

There are six main roles, as follows:

The Discussion Leader: This student has to read the story twice (or once in detail) and has to prepare at least five questions about the story. This is also the person who will ask two or three starting questions (not from the five mentioned above) in order to get the people in the group talking. Of course, this should be the student with the best oral expression, since he/she will guide the rest through the discussion, making sure everyone has a chance to speak.

The Summarizer: This student should have a good summarizing ability, in order to read the story once and make notes about the plot and characters that can best summarize the whole thing. The Summarizer also needs a very good language command, since this is the person who will have to retell the story (with their own words), in front of the group, in two or three minutes.

The Connector: The Connector has to look for connections between the story and the world outside, and give real examples that connect real life events to the story. This student also has to stimulate the others to create their own connections.

The Word Master: That’s the student who will look for unkown or difficult words and short phrases that are important to the story. The Word Master has to choose at least five words or phrases that are important to the understanding of the story and give the rest of the group the reasons why the meaning of those phrases or words are important.

The Passage Person: This student will look for at least three interesting or difficult passages in the story that are important to the plot. The Passage Person should also ask two questions about each of the chosen passages.

The Culture Collector: All the short stories in this series have a good cultural background which students can relate to their own culture. The Culture Collector is the one who will select two or three cultural aspects that might be either different or similar to the culture of the student’s own country. This is even more interesting when you have different nationalities in the same classroom and all students in the group are stimulated to think of the differences or similarities with their culture.

Well, if you haven’t yet tried using Reading Circles with your classes, I strongly recommend you do so with any short stories you may have in your library. I’m sure you won’t regret it.

The ELTons 2010 Awards

The annual British Council ELTons Awards ceremony has taken place on the 3rd of March in London and I’d like to congratulate all the winners, but also make a special comment on two winners of the UK Award for Innovation.

First of all, the amazing book Teaching with Bear and its team: Mary Slattery, Catherine Kneafsey, Lucy Allen, Julia Bell. Teaching with Bear is an innovative OUP resource book for teachers who want to know more about the trendy theory and practice of using puppets in the young learners’ classroom. A must-read book for young learners’ teachers.

And last but not least, the Teacher Training Videos website, by Russell Stanard. This resource website for teachers has everything to do with innovation in ELT. It offers teachers different types of tutorials for using different technological tools in the classroom of English, like this one, for example, explaining how to use Twitter for ELT purposes.

As a blogger, fan of new technologies and a researcher of their use in the ELT classroom, I can only say that if you have already acknowledged you should use new tech resources, but don’t feel yet ready to go for it, TTV by Russell Stanard is a must-go website. You will not regret it.

A book for novice teachers

It’s always hard to find interesting, but easy, development books for unexperienced teachers of English. Most of them surely are wonderful teaching tools and complete resources for those who read them, but they often use very complex vocabulary and jargons which are, sometimes, a complication factor.

In spite of that, I’ve come across a very interesting piece of reading for novice teachers of English. IMHO, this book should be in every University language degree bibliography. Learning and Teaching English, by Cora Lindsay and Paul Knight, is a great book for anyone who wishes to improve their expertise in the English Language Teaching.

It covers the teaching of kids, young adults and adults, offering the essential features of both learning and teaching the English language, as well as the relationship between them.

The good thing about this book is that, due to all the theory and practice it offers, it can certainly be used as a course book for international teaching qualifications certificates such as the TKT or  the CELTA, for example, but it can also be read by those who do not wish to take any international certification and only want to improve their teaching skills, independently.

What the hell is ECL?

There’s a lot of different acronyms that surround the English Language Teaching market. ELT, ELF, ESL, EFL, etc. A particular one I learned at the Oxford University Summer Seminar for English Language Teachers specially caught my attention: ECL, or English as a Changing Language.

The term was coined, at least he claims it,  by David Baker, one of the authors of Grammar Scan (the other one is Michael Swan). His talk during the Seminar was really interesting and shocking at the same time. It showed the teachers some of the most recent changes in the language. And, interestingly, most of those are taking non-native common mistakes into account.

Some examples have been around for quite a long time already. But some of them are still a bit of a shock for those who care about the so-called formal language. I’ll give you just a bit right below. Bare in mind those changes are taking place in SPOKEN English, although you’ll find some of them already in Swan and Baker’s Grammar Scan.

1) Some short comparative adjectives are being used with MORE instead of the suffixe ER. (Oxford is MORE NICE than London)

2) Plural forms used with verbs in the singular. (Here’S your papers)

3) Use of the Reported Speech without changing the verb tense of the Direct Speech .

4) Increasing use of meaningful chunks of language.

5) LESS instead of FEWER with countable nouns. (There were less people than I expected)

6) BETWEEN is now being used in the place of AMONG in any situation.

7) ING in stative verbs. (I’m loving this party) – This one was, possibly, helped by Mc Donald’s slogan “I’m loving it” and it is now spread.

Well, those are some of the changes, in case you wish to talk a bit more about this, you can get in touch, or watch my Contemporary English workshop in some ELT event around. In any case, I’ll be pleased to indicate further reading and ideas about the topic.