Organize this!

A good follow on to my last post is this list of ten tips and tools to keep yourself organized as a teacher. It is written by Shelly Terrell who is always worth reading and is on the ESL Library site which is worth visiting or re-visiting if, like me, you had forgotten about it for a while. http://tinyurl.com/86a4eok

Digitalize this

Many of these have been mentioned on this blog before but here are 36 tools all in one place (thanks to Nik Peachey) which can be used to “digitalize” your coursebooks or your classrooms. A great resource! http://es.scribd.com/doc/53030128/36-Tools-for-Digitising-your-ELT-Course-Book

Dead poets: bureaucracy, innovation and profits

Thinking as always about the impact of IT in education and in terms of teaching practice as a whole (I keep returning to Dogme!) the following quotes rang bells:

“Educational changes have endured when they have not altered the core tasks of the classroom teacher and have faltered or disappeared when they have required a major change in these core tasks.  … Classroom teachers did not have to change what they were doing when a school decided to … serve school lunches or set up new classes to help pupils with learning difficulties … They did have to change what they were doing when they were told to teach math in a new way, teach together with another instructor, use computers or provide individualized instruction … True innovation – that is, refining core tasks – may be especially difficult in schools because teaching cannot be observed easily nor its effects readily measured.” (James Q. Wilson: Bureaucracy 1989)

A lot to think about there and a lot that is familiar, a lot that marks the difference between reality and what Prensky foresees in terms of IT use.  It is also why coursebooks remain so popular and the plank we are all too happy to work from (see an entertaining discussion of this from Scott Thornbury (http://tinyurl.com/c3ttbr7)

The argument, however, may be placing too much emphasis on the teacher and neglecting other factors. I think many educational institutions (even smaller ones) are also very afraid of touching those core issues and particularly so if working in the private sector where superficial change looks good (we have IWBs in all our classrooms) but real change (we are learning to teach in different, unexpected ways) can threaten to affect finance. There are many teachers who do genuinely innovate but think of the Dead Poets Society: it is difficult to make a profit in your own land.

On a high

Well, tripping in fact. Here is website which allows you to plan, review, remember, invent a trip and add photos and comments to the adventure. Sign in with your facebook account is the easiest.

This could be interesting as a class exercise on the IWB and then students could plan their own trips, online or on good old pen and paper.

http://www.tripline.net/