The TESOL Spain Convention next year will take place on 7th – 9th March, 2014 at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The theme is ’21st Century Teaching on the Move’, and the online submission of speaker proposals will be open from 1st September to 31st October. More information will be available from http://tesol-spain.org/
While we spend ages training our students to speak about important issues and discuss things in depth using lots of discourse markers and a wide range of linkers, we rarely focus on a speaking skill which many native speakers (myself included) find extremely difficult – making small talk. In this excellent post, Sandy Millin suggests a series of ways in which we can make our students more aware of the social conventions involved and give them practice in the art of initiating, maintaining and ending dialogues at social functions.
As educators we must always be aware of how we need to prepare our students for their lives. In this post, we are presented with seven skills which we must be ready to provide our students with.
As we reflect on the past school year, one of the questions we often ask ourselves is how we can engage our students more and make their learning more meaningful. In this post we are presented with ways in which we can engage our students through the use of projects.
I realise that most of us are just beginning to enjoy our summer holidays, indeed some may still be working, but I thought I would share this blog post which should give us something to think about when we start to plan for next year.
Earlier this week I was working as an interpreter at a conference about new approaches to education which was being held at my school. The main theme of the conference was the development of critical thinking skills in our students, shifting the focus of the class from simply acquiring knowledge to learning how to process the vast quantity of knowledge which our students are exposed to today. This shift requires us as teachers to move away from the idea that we are the primary knowedge bearer in the classroom, and although this may seem difficult for many of us, in reality it frees us up to work on higher level thinking skills as our students learn to process, filter and apply the information which they acquire outside the classroom.
It also gives us the opportunity to focus on developing the social skills our students will need in their future professional lives. The fact is that with the ever increasing pace of change today, the best way to prepare our students for their futures is not by giving them specific knowledge, since many will probably work in professions which have not yet been developed. Faced with change, it is better to equip our students with the skills they need to be adaptable enough to take full advantage of what the future has in store for them. This is the chalenge for educators in the 21st Century.
As part of the conference, we were shown a version of this extremely thought-provoking video, which I decided I would share here.
There has been a great deal of talk about the flipped classroom recently, and indeed I have published various posts on the subject here. However, there are pitfalls waiting for the unwary which make the setting up of a flipped classroom model a difficult process. In this post from http://www.teachthought.com, three such problems are examined.
This is my personal blog. I´m very interested in learning, teaching and sharing. I want to share ideas about teaching and learning, education technology and web tools to enrich my lessons as well as learn from all those who visit me here