Welcome to my blog! I'm an ESOL teacher and teacher trainer in the UK, and you'll find some of the websites I know about in this blog, and some suggestions on how to use them. Hope it's helpful.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Voki

Vki is a really cute tool that will make your learners smile!  It's a website on which you can make your own 'voki' avatar and record messages for it to say, taking messages via e-mail or you can embed them on your website (like this!). In all honesty, the fun is in making the avatar, and the messaging is a bit secondary, so it's not all that applicable for language learning, but it's a bit of fun!

Thursday, May 26, 2011

My Website- ELT-Training.com

I haven't been blogging very much over the past few weeks as I've been madly busy with other things, not least trying to get my website off the ground!  It is now airbourne and I'm quite pleased with it!
This is what it looks like and I will be running on-line grammar courses and FREE monthly teacher training webinars from it. Have a look - any feedback gratefully received.

Scoop it!

Scoop it is  brilliant tool that I just discovered through Nik Peachy (another winner!). I've already loaded up three different pages and it's a quick and easy way to put all of your internet 'goodies' in an easily accessible basket for people (learners/ trainees/ fellow teachers etc) to view.  In some ways this is like an on-line noticeboard.  You can add links to sites that you like and readers can follow the page (and get new links as they are posted) and/ or comment on the ones that are there. 
Here's a peek at one of my pages that has lots of ideas for lesson plans and materials to use in class.
I've also made pages with ideas for teacher development and with useful sites for learners - have a look and see what you think.

One of the best things about the tool is that it makes it so easy to share informatin in an attractie way.  All you need to do is add the url to the site you like and all of the text/ pics etc come up automatically, so it takes no time at all to do.  I particularly like the idea of having one for each class you teach with sites customised to their needs on it.  It searches the net for sites that might be useful to you, too, if you put in some key words.  The only problem with this is that there is a bit of information overload, so you need to be able to scan through and sift!

To get started, you have to send an e-mail to get registered.  You are then given an access url and you can put up as many different pages as you like.  Simple!