Sunday 29 March 2009

Chat in the Classroom

Chat rooms often conjure up images of possible threats for our students. As Silvia Toselino demonstrates, there are also a very powerful tool to use languages for real communication purposes...

Saturday 21 March 2009

They Understand Us-But Do We Understand Them?

I would certainly use this superb presentation by Andrew Jeppesen to promote languages to students and parents. Absolutely fantastic!

Sunday 15 March 2009

Use Twitter to build your PLN


Uploaded on authorSTREAM by aSGuest12232

Thank you to Joe Dale for sharing this presentation in his blog post on how to build your PLN.

So what is a PLN?
A Professional/ Personal Leaning Network and the best way to develop one's skills by peer-to-peer learning.
The principle is simple: I find out about an idea through my PLN, I learn, I experiment, I review and I share the outcomes with my PLN. I see it as collaboration as its most effective as it can make you skip some of the initial teething problems when implementing a new project. However, the concept is certainly worth a more developed blog post...

Saturday 14 March 2009

Promoting Languages


At this time of the year, all language teachers are searching for more inspiration to convince students of the benefits of studying a language. If you happened to work in a school where languages are still compulsory, motivational materials should be welcome too - it is not because students have to study a subject that they are motivated to do so!

Thanks to fellow blogger Marie-France Perkins for this link to The French Initiative .

The French Language Initiative is a partnership between the Embassy of France in the U.S. and the American Association of Teachers of French. The website includes useful materials to promote French including, 10 top reasons to take French and promotional materials including posters, banners and postcards as well as a forum.

Of course, this blog also contains a few posts about promoting languages as well...

Wednesday 4 March 2009

Learn a language - see through the eyes of others

Thanks to Andrew Jeppesen for his ideas for languages motivational posters. This poster was designed using Flickr and the motivator http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php

Very effective!