Newsletter 2021#38

Good morning

This week finds me in Florence - what an amazing city it is. A fabulous cathedral, wonderful art, great food... It's pouring with rain, but I'm still having a great time....

Something old

For most aspects of teaching, a face to face environment is a lovely thing (I haven't been in a face to face classroom for a year and a half and I miss it), but there are some things that I'd say are better in the online environment and teaching writing to language learners is one of them. This video from my Communication Activities series gives an overview of teaching writing (if you're a trainee or novice teacher) and some thoughts on using Google docs for this (even if you're a bit more experienced). I hope it gives you some helpful ideas.

Something new

Get ready! My new video this week is a bit of a rant! I have a strong sense that time in class should be used in a way that means learners get the most learning possible from it and I sometimes come across teachers being attracted by 'shiny' new activities (often tech based, but not always) that have very low learning outcomes. In other words, not much 'Bang for the Buck'. Here are my thoughts on this! Feel free to disagree...

Something borrowed

I've mentioned English Teaching professional magazine several times over the months and this week, I want to share with you another of their free collections of past articles. These ones are all about becoming an ELT materials writer. Whether you are writing materials for your own classes (who doesn't do that?) or you feel that you'd like to branch out and try to write materials for publication, these articles will be of interest. If this is something you want to follow up, I'd also highly recommend the website ELT Teacher to Writer which has some great (and very affordable) publications to help you on your journey.

OK - back to the galleries for me! See you next week,

Best

Jo