I mentioned this briefly in a tweet, but A Google a Day is a great tool for teaching ESL/EFL students how to find information on the Internet, giving them practice picking out key words, using synonyms and reading for specific information.
If you haven’t seen it yet, A Google a Day gives you a trivia question that you have to answer by googling for the answer. The questions are carefully worded to make it more difficult to search for. You won’t see questions like, “How tall is a sequoia tree?” …Continue

I’ve continued to think of different models for textbooks that can be customized by teachers or students and distributed cheaply. Flatworld has an interesting model of online textbooks. Although they only have a few titles right now of interest to ESL teachers, they offer open license textbooks for free. Teachers can register and “adopt” a book–students then can register and access it for free, and there’s even a note-taking function. Books are available for printing, which costs $35, or download in various formats (for $25). Additional study-aids also are available for a cost. The book I looked at charged $14

If you haven’t seen post by Jason Renshaw, definitely check it out for ideas on making coursebooks more flexible and giving students and teachers more choice. The comments are great as well.
I put my vision for a flexible text in the comments, but to reiterate here, I would love to have an electronic textbook (seems to me it could be a CD-ROM or a web-based service) that allowed you to plugin what you want to do for your lesson: i.e.
Level: Pre-Int
Area: Vocab
Skill: writing
Theme: Cities
and have it spit out the appropriate …Continue

This isn’t a proper lesson plan but I put together a little webquest for students on April Fools Day. The answers also make a nice set of hoaxes, jokes and pranks to talk about for an April Fools’ Day lesson.
Feel free to use it, or add comments, suggestions and crtitiques: April Fools’ Day WebQuest And I forgot to link to the Answers earlier (which are also linked to on the webquest page itself.
Or have students do their own webquests. Refer them to Hoaxipedia or the Wikipedia entry on April …Continue

Via Views from the Whiteboard, I discovered English Attack which is a cool little resource to teach English from media. It features video clips from popular TV shows and sitcoms taken from Hulu (so I don’t know if it’ll work outside the US) with vocab reviews before watching. Then after watching there are some comprehension questions and cloze exercises. Obviously you could put something like this together yourself in the classroom, but English Attack seems like a good way to get students to practice at home.
You do need to …Continue

Well, not really. I was looking for some conversation lesson plans for my English Club this evening and stumbled on this site: Turkish TEFL. I don’t think there’s much particularly Turkish about the lessons, except that the author teaches in Turkey. A number of the lesson plans are adopted from other sites–but then so are a lot of my lessons and activities.
Since I have an hour and a half of students, I’m not sure the lesson on evil coroporations will work for me, but I like the idea. I …Continue

The 2010 Edublog Award

It was hard to resist trying the I Write Like Me analyzer, which tries to match your style to famous authors.
Apparently, the latest Randy the Raccoon story is in the style of Gertrude Stein, who is most famous for her “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”. As I understand, she did try to bring simplicity to writing, so I suppose it’s logical that a story aimed at children would be compared to her.
Interestingly, most of my essays, which are probably closest to my natural writing …Continue

It can be really useful to keep your eye on news about universities in the US. It’s always good to have an idea of which universities are doing what kind of research, which faculty members are publishing and what they’re publishing on, as well as sadly, any scandals. Three great resources for keeping up with what’s going on in American universities, in no particular order, are:

Inside Higher Ed. While the site is designed more for professors and administrators than for students, it provides great articles on the big issues, trends, …Continue