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Showing posts from February, 2006

I/O Brush for the IWB

The video that shows the I/O brush in use  is stunning. I don't think it would be much use in language teaching, but I'd love to have a play with it nonetheless. There is more information here  about this innovative tool.

EFL Student Webcast instructions

On Saturday 25th February at 14.00GMT , there will be the first EFL Student webcast show at World Bridges We are hoping for an interesting start to this venture, and already have students interested and due to participate this weekend from Argentina, Hungary, Spain, Taiwan, and (hopefully) other many places in the world. Please help us help students to connect to others interested in improving their English language skills and become more aware of other cultures by connecting and communicating with other English language learners during these webcasts. Here is a guide for those students who want to take part (the transcript of the slideshow is also included below): This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog 1. Welcome to everyone interested in participating in the webcast taking place at Worldbridges. This is a brief guide telling you how you can best participate in this event. The first thing you should do on if you want to listen to the live show is to go to

Bubbleshare - Photos with audio

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog The photos above were uploaded to Bubbleshare and show shots of my TV playing podcasts via the XBox360, shortly after I got the wifi connection working and figured out how to share files from my PC. Bubbleshare (currently in beta) allows you to create a slide show from photos, and lets you add an audio commentary too, and upload it to your blog! Thanks to Nick Noakes for putting me onto this one.

The IWB vs the computer in the classroom

I'm at the beginning of what promises to be a highly interesting week-long seminar, 'ICT in ELT', organised by the British Council. Those of us who are only virtually attending are participating in the seminar Moodle, posting to forums, chatting together, and watching the streamed videos of the conference presentations, etc. One of the threads that has appeared in the Moodle forums has been the role of the Interactive White Board. I suppose I could be considered a fan now, and so I had to respond to one of the particpant's comments that perhaps having a 'computer in the corner' of the classroom was better than an IWB. I thought I should post it here too: "Let's not forget, however, that the IWB needs the computer in the corner in order to work, so there's no competition in my mind. You turn the data projector (DP) off, and you have that computer in the corner that the learners can use . Turn it on, and you have a very powerful way of displaying and

Helping our Students with International English

I've already posted something about this subject on my podcasting blog, Pod-EFL , but I think it's worth duplicating it here: An interesting post by Charles Kelly on an ELT Podcasting course forum set off a chain reaction in me. He wondered about the idea of using student-created podcasts could help student listeners who needed to communicate a lot with English speakers of a particular country. The example he gave was business students, but I think it would also apply to students going to a particular country on holiday. After reflecting on this, I decided to start a new project to see how this would work in practice, setting up a channel: English by German Speakers on Gigadial . I thought it would be cool to start to collect different flavours of international English to give learners of English. I'm hoping to encourage others to add podcasts (only German speakers speaking English please) to the station, and/or set up similar Gigadial stations for other nationalities. I