Newsletter 2022#08

Good morning

This week has been a good one. Finally out of self-isolation, so some swimming in the sea (and PLEASE don’t write to me reminding me that there are sharks around here - I don’t want to think about it!) and my first Video Creation for Educators course coming to a close. It's been a fantastic 8 weeks and the participants are now looking towards how they can use their new-found video skills to promote their services and make monetised online courses. Here's a fab example from one of them with an IELTS niche (BTW he says to subscribe and watch this space if you want to know more after watching the video!). If you're feeling that you’d like more control over your teaching life and want to know how video could help achieve it, this could be for you, too. The early bird offer ends tomorrow, but if you sign up for a chat about the course  I'll honour it for another week for my newsletter subscribers :)

OK - onward to this week's offerings.

Something old

It’s always nice to have a 'take this straight to the classroom' activity and this one requires very little preparation and provides lots of practice in speaking and question formation. It works well online or face to face - try it out and let me know how you get on.
 

Something new

It's been a while since I made a Grammar Quirk video and I know that they probably give me more pleasure to make than they are useful for most people, but hey - someone's got to be a grammar nerd! This episode is based on a talk that I saw Jonathan Marks give at the IATEFL conference way back in 2019. It's all about the passive voice and there are some really fascinating thoughts in there which may surprise you!

Something borrowed

On Wednesday this week (March 2nd) I'll be live on Teachers Talk Radio (ttradio.org) with Jane Ritter on her Morning Break programme. It'd be great if you could tune in (there's a possibility to send questions or phone in, too!) but even if you can't, I thought that this was a great site to tell you about in this section.  It has a regular schedule with different presenters (and you can apply to be a host, too, if you feel inspired to do this!), you can listen live to a range of programmes all through the week and you can also go back and listen to the back catalogue of programmes - there's a wealth of interesting stuff there. Hope you find something you like and maybe see you there on Wednesday!

Right, that's me. Have a great week, and I'll see you next Sunday
 
Best
Jo