Resources and webs and podcasts and screencasts, and blogs and ...argh. There's no single week that I don't find out about at least one single website worth checking for my teaching. It is becoming overwhelming and a pretty daunting task to even attempt to catch up.

As a teacher, I find myself unable to catch up with the amount of links and resources online nowadays. It's not till now, August, that I can scratch up a bit of time to do the looking into them and
All the talks from publishers this year: Macmillan, Oxford and the Tesol regional event have had the issue of technology and the moving image as their main topic.

This got me thinking. We do all the research, well, teacher trainers and some of us instructors, we put in time learning to use these tools that in theory, and surely would, will help our students enhance their learning and motivate them. Because... they love technology their hands are glued to hand-held devices like tablets and smartphones and communicate using these, don't they? And we just take for granted that they are into technology. Guess what? We are not entirely sure.
Age may be a factor here, my adults get overwhelmed when I email them their homework. When I provide video lessons and online exercises to support our lesson, either in class or some sort of flipped one. One, they struggle to find time to learn how to use them, how to exploit them, most last the autonomy to go back to them "outside" their homework and assignments, most don't know what to do with them.
Still the transition between using technolody and learning, much as it is a fact now, is slow for some.

I've also explored the idea that...I may be doing something wrong. Too many, too many different sources instead of focussing on the ones tried and tested?

Lessons in Ted Ed

My first Ted ed lesson
http://ed.ted.com/on/n4LVpfnj

Ted ed allows you create lessons using any video from youtube and their own Ted Talks.
It's not super intuitive but you'll get there eventually.

When the lesson is ready, and you are in the Think section, move to other questions with very tiny thin grey arrows on the sides of the questions box. Hard to see.
If you want to edit it, again, the Edit button is not easy to find. I'd expect it to be somewhere in the body of the lesson but it's on top of the screen, towards the left, next to the TedEd logo.

Vocabulary with audio

August is a fairly quiet month for most teachers and I am spending some time compiling material I've been using for some time and maybe doing a quick review about it.

https://www.inglespodcast.com/ fantastic for B1+ learner of English, Spanish as a mother tongue.

Vocabulary

http://www.languageguide.org/english-uk/vocabulary/
Good quality pictures covering basic topics
Just place the cursor on top of each picture and hear it pronounced. Place over the red circles for related words.
Topics are basic but language provided can be high.
American pronunciation

www.learningchocolate.com
Lots of topics and very detailed words, high level.
There are also exercises with the vocabulary (matching, filling-in under picture, dragging, dictation, etc). Very good.


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Tag clouds: wordle is the easiest to use