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Posts tagged ict
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.
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.
Best of the BETT – Part 3
04 months ago
In this second in our series of interviews from the BETT 2012 interviews, we hear form Simon Lee, the UK Head of Sales for Livescribe, the manufacturer of the incredible SmartPen.
I use a Livescribe SmartPen myself, and I can attest to how useful they are for helping you to concentrate on what is being said, not taking notes and so on in meetings. More importantly though, at least for this blog, they’re invaluable in 1to1 language lessons, where the teacher will be able to quickly and simply play back errors to the learner, so that can correct themselves, whether it be pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar mistakes. Without fail, after every single sales meeting I do for English360, the people I’m talking to ask “what’s that amazing pen?” or something along those lines!
In this interview, Simon tells us why Livescribe came to BETT and what teachers have been hearing from him this year:
The next interview in this series will be with Gareth Davies, the CEO of an amazing virtual learning environment that I’d never heard of before, Frog. Great name – and not a bad looking VLE either 
Best of the BETT – Part 1
04 months ago
by Seth
in Educational Technology
The BETT 2012 Educational Technology Show just came to a close last weekend. It was four days packed full of back-to-back training opportunities, dazzling technology demonstrations, a thousand and one machine-gun sales pitches and teachers, thousands upon thousands of them. I’ve wanted to go there for years; ever since the late, great, David Eastment told me about it. Well, this year I was lucky enough to go there myself. What’s more, I brought a little bit of BETT 2012 back for you guys, too!
The picture above doesn’t do the show justice at all. There are two halls this size and two levels to each hall. It’s just enormous! The Show is absolutely mind-blowing, as you might imagine with so many exhibitors there. I quite literally spent the first 6 hours I was there in a daze wandering around from one amazing stand’s software, to another incredible stand’s hardware. To be honest I should have planned my first day much better, but I now know for next time and will do a better job! As might have guessed then, I really enjoyed BETT and I’ll definitely be going back there again next year.
For all those of you who weren’t able to make it this year however, I had a brainwave on the final day. I had spoken to almost everyone I wanted to about matters for Digitalang, so to bring BETT to you, I did a series of short interviews with five of the exhibitors who I found most interesting. And I actually was very lucky to get some really interesting people to speak on camera. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting and interview per day, starting off tomorrow, with Chris Klein, the Education Consultant and Macintosh Specialist for SMART Technologies, probably the world’s largest Interactive White Board (IWB) Manufacturer.
EFL Learner-Blog – A Rubric
11 year ago
Last year, collaboratively with some great colleagues from Twitter and Posterous, I wrote a blogging rubric for my EFL students, based on the excellent work by Andrew Churches. The idea of the rubric was to help them gauge what they should aim for in a “great” blog post. Although I didn’t continually refer back to the rubric all year, it did give my students an idea of what I considered, and is considered, “excellence” in blogging. I think that a mix of my students’ enthusiasm, their talent, and the clear nature of the goals in the rubric helped many of them to achieve the excellent results they did last year.
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/
Below, there’s a copy of the rubric if you’d like to try it out with your students, but before you look, there’s a link to a Google docs version beloiw, too. So if you are feeling in the mood, you can improve the rubric / alter it etc and of course USE it with your own students, too!
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYJvrliG5l6WZGhxNXpjajNfMzNnY3NndjhmdA&hl=en_GB
Again, please, please do feel free to add, remove, alter or in any other way you feel fit improve this EFL blogging rubric. If you’d rather just print it, or browse it, here it is
Quality Blogging for Language Learners – A Rubric
All the best, and happy blogging!
Seth.
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