Newsletter 2021#13

Good morning

Have you missed me? I had a short break but I'm back in the saddle again with my weekly Sunday morning newsletter and a few ELT delights to accompany your morning coffee. 'What have you been doing over the past month?' you ask - 'having some time off? Enjoying the spring sunshine?' Well yes a bit of that, but also very busy developing some new material for ELT-Training. Watch this space! So what do I have for you this week? A bit of a focus on online teaching with an inspirational story, some great ideas for using realia online and a free peek at a whole bunch of articles from English Teaching professional, too! Here we go....

Inspirational Stories
I met Tom Madeley three years ago when he did his CELTA course with me. He had been teaching in Spain and wanted to develop his teaching, expecting to continue working in language schools but, without really planning it, he has ended up setting up his own teaching business and I thought his story (told in his own, very honest and engaging style!) might be inspirational to some of you who are thinking about doing something similar and branching out on your own. I hope you enjoy it.

Sneak Preview
This week's sneak preview is a practical activity that comes from a talk I gave to teachers at the BKC International House Conference yesterday in Moscow (I wasn't in Moscow - I was in my bedroom..). The talk was about bringing realia into the online classroom and I called it 'Bringing the real in', but my partner later suggested I should have called it 'Reeling them in' which I thought was an inspired title. You can see the whole talk here if you're interested but if you just want a fillet of the good stuff, here is a great idea for teaching the causative have/ get in an authentic way.

Website
During my break, an email popped into my inbox from English Teaching professional (Etp) magazine (and yes - I have got the capitalisation right...). If you don't know it, it's a great read. It's not an academic journal and it's always a pleasure to get stuck into. It's an excellent source of professional development and has articles that are often thought provoking, but always very practical and classroom based. It's not free, but they have released a few collections of articles from back copies that ARE available for free, so I thought I'd point you in the direction of them. This collection is all about online teaching and has very practical articles from Nicky Hockly, Pete Sharma, Russell Stannard, Jason Anderson and lots of other inspirational people. Have a look and see what you think. One article with your morning coffee each day this week - I challenge you!

That's it for today - I hope that you've enjoyed my little missive and that you have a great week. See you next Sunday.

Best
Jo