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language teaching
TED-ED – The Flipped Classroom Has Officially Arrived!
02 months ago
The incredible TED, purveyor of fascinating video talks on Technology Education and Development by some of the world’s most interesting people, and a personal online favourite of mine, has announced this week that they are starting up TED Ed, a series of lessons by some of the worlds best educators, which will be available online for free.
As well as a set of “powerful learning tools” that Ted has announced will be launched in April, they have a mission statement which, If the quality of their wonderful talks is anything to go by, will mean some pretty awesome teaching and learning opportunities are on their way.
TED-Ed’s mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.
Interact! Blended Teacher-Training
02 months ago
This eight-week “blended learning” course, our first to be delivered in collaboration with Pete Sharma Associates will help language teachers learn practical ways to use IWBs, apps and other technologies with their students.
- Adapted from Creative Commons Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/feverblue/
Which Technologies Should I Learn First?
We have chosen a selection of the most-effective, apps, websites and programs and designed our course to show teachers several practical, lesson-focused ideas and activities for each. This means you don’t have to do the hard work of trying to decide which technology is worth learning, and which isn’t.
Quality Assured.
We are offering this course as part of our brand-new collaboration with Pete Sharma Associates, so you can be confident that all the materials have been prepared to the highest pedagogical standards. More importantly still, you can be sure that all the activities you will learn are directly relevant to your learners, or to you as a teacher.
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Pete Sharma Associates and Digitalang – An Exciting New Collaboration!
12 months ago
We are delighted to announce that Digitalang have teamed-up with The Pete Sharma Associates, and we’ll now be “officially” offering courses on behalf of PSA in Italy. We are really excited about this, not only because such a top-quality teacher-training company has recognised the standard of the courses we offer, but also because Digitalang training material, along with the already established training material available from PSA, will now also be offered worldwide by the network of PSA trainers.
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Teacher Development Webinar – “Using Virtual Meeting Tools with Students.” #besig
22 months ago
The excellent English360 online learning platform are holding a community webinar next week, with the guest speaker Mike Hogan. (Disclosure: English 360 is one of the companies I do consultancy work for.) The webinar is on the topic of Virtual Meeting Tools and even though it’s geared towards those using, or thinking of using the English 360 platform, it will definitely be of interest to any language teachers who are using online meeting tools, or who want to, with their students.
Valentina Dodge, on the English360 blog has the following to say:
Are you using English360 in conjunction with real-time tools?
Do you have experience teaching in WebEx, Adobe Connect, or on Skype?
How can these virtual meeting environments be used with learners?
Come along to our English360 Open Community Webinar to find out more on delivering lessons in real-time when learners are geographically dispersed or unable to attend face-to-face classroom lessons.
Register now to enjoy Mike Hogan ‘s expertise and experience of using virtual meeting rooms.
Send us an email to Register for the Community Webinar 28th Feb 13.00-14.00 CET
I’ve personally spoken to Mike about e-learning quite a bit over the last few months and he certainly seems to have a good deal of practical experience of what “synchronous” e-learning requires. As it’s being organised by Valentina Dodge, too – I’m pretty sure that it will be well worth attending.
Podcasting with Language Learners
03 months ago
At the 
end of 2011 I travelled up to Innsbruck, Austria to do some teacher training for one of the top language schools there, Die Sprache. We looked at a number of handy ICT tools for language teachers, with a focus on Podcasts. I thought I would share the slides from our training session here on the blog, so that other teachers who are thinking of using pod casts with language learners can take a look through and get a few useful hints and tips.
The presentation is basically broken down into three sections:
- The first is a quick run through of what pod casts are and why they are (a really good) tool, suitable for language learners.
- In the second section we look at podcasts used for active listening practice. Personally I think the fact that there are so many different topics of podcast available, as well as those made specifically for language learners, means that there are a great way of introducing regular listening practice to your learners.
- Then the third and final part of our workshop looked at using the brilliant Open Source sound recording software, Audacity. At first sight audacity can be a bit intimidating. I don’t really mind admitting that I only ever use about 5% of Audacity’s capabilities, but the ability to edit and mix sound recordings really make your recordings sound more professional. At the end of the day I’ve used Audacity with a class full of 15-year-olds, and it went very smoothly. A surefire sign of simple software.
Please feel free to take a look through the slides, and even share them with your colleagues if you wish. If you have any questions or if anything is not quite clear, please do ask any questions in the comment section below (these slides are of course designed to be used in a face-to-face seminar with me present, online they lose something.) Of course, if you would like me to come to your school to deliver this seminar in person, just drop me a line for a quote:
Twitter: @sethdickens
email: i n f o (a t) d i g i t a l a n g . c o m
Podcasting With Language Learners
View more presentations from Seth dickens
Finally, I promised the teachers at Die Sprache who taught languages other than English, that I would find a few podcasts suitable for them. I didn’t find a great deal of sites, but here’s what I’ve found so far:
Radio Lingua Language-learning – Possibly the best group of language learning podcasts I’ve seen yet!
Schlaflos in München – der Podcast mit Annik Rubens – A very classy podcast from Munich.
http://www.andreasauwaerter.de/ – Andreas Auwerter’s Posdast
Podcasting for Learning » Zwei neue Interviewpartner im Bidcast online – Andreas Auwerter’s blog about podcasting
In addition to these links, I also have a list of links that (might) useful for teaching German and Spanish on my Delicious account:
- German http://www.delicious.com/sethdickens/german
- Spanish http://www.delicious.com/sethdickens/spanish
If you know of any more links good for teaching these languages, please do let me know in the comments.
Best of The BETT – Part 4
03 months ago
For the third in my series of Best of the BETT interviews I spoke to Anne Gilleran, from eTwinning.net. I’m happy to say that amongst the hundreds stalls at BETT, eTwinning’s area was a real breath of fresh air. Their service is a real help for language teachers who want their students to get some authentic speaking practice, it’s also huge (currently there are more than 150,000 members) and best of all it’s free. In their own words:
eTwinning is the Community for schools in Europe. Teachers from all participating countries can register and use the eTwinning online tools (the Portal and the Desktop) to find each other, meet virtually, exchange ideas and practice examples, team up in Groups, learn together in Learning Events and engage in online-based projects.
I’m a big fan of free stuff that makes teachers’ lives easier and I’ll definitely now be looking into eTwinning.net further. I’d like to see how I could work it into some of the seminars I teach at the moment.
Anyhow, over to Anne, who describes (in a very noisy BETT conference hall) exactly what eTwinning.net does:
Tomorrow’s post will be my last, but I’ve saved the “big one” or scoop until then. I was very lucky to get an interview with William Florance, the head of Education at Google for Europe The Middle East and Asia.
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