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.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

TED - Videos of really interesting talks.

TED bills itself as 'Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world' and it is just that.  This is one example of the kind of thing that's available, but there are talks on all kinds of things -it would be difficult to find something not to be interested in! This is one of my favourites:  (thanks to Nik Peachy for drawing my attention to this one)


In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong."
The talks are aimed at educated native speakers, and as such are high level, but the content is so nice, and they'd be perfect for listening practice for learners aiming at Higher Education in English speaking countries and wanting to do IELTS or similar exams.

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