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

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

Just found this site that has some pretty good images. Eyehook.com hosts a small set of pretty good free images that can be used on sites or in class. The holiday and love ones are pretty good. In case you were looking for a free Xmas or Thanksgiving image for your blog or handout.
They only ask that you give credit where credit is due. So note the alt text and the link back to eyehook.com for that champagne image.

It seems like Jason Renshaw’s blog is on every ESL/EFL teachers list of blogs to read but in case you’ve missed it, I really recommend it. Generally when I look for lesson plans and activity ideas I look for ways to use them in the class and Jason does a great job of providing concrete ways, often through videos, of how he uses his materials. Often when I search for lesson plans or activity ideas on the Internet I find a lot of worksheets or exercises but not necessarily guides …Continue

I just thought I’d put this up in case anyone is looking for printable fake money to use in the classroom. Here in Kazakhstan, I can’t find a copy of Monopoly to steal money from. And if you google “play money” or “fake money”, you’ll find lots of realistic looking dollars and euros. My problem with them was that they were too detailed and would use up a lot of ink. So I made up these extremely simple but still vaguely decorative bills to use in the classroom.
Another cool …Continue

This is an article that’s being posted around the Interwebs from the New York Times: Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.
Interesting points in it for teachers and students to keep in mind. Like Wikipedia (besides not being a serious academic source) is not common knowledge. You do have to cite it.
While reading this article I was thinking of how we teach students not to plagiarize. Usually we focus on rules and citing styles and the penalties for plagiarizing. Maybe we should focus more on why plagiarizing …Continue

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

I got this comment recently on a post here and I get the question from students all the time, Where can I practice English? How can I improve my English outside of class? Basically any exposure to English is going to help you. So try as much as possible to read, listen to and speak English.
Some resources for reading in English include news websites like:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Boston Globe
The Economist Magazine
CNN television channel
BBC
Some great resources for books online include:
The Gutenberg Project and The Burgomeister’s Books
Also reading blogs, …Continue

I’ve been planning a conversation lesson around the 2008 US presidential election and I thought I would share some resources I found.
With any conversation class, you want to make sure you have lots of background information. When dealing with something as complicated as the US election for president, the class is going to have a lot of questions. So you either need to read up and bring materials to look up anything you didn’t memorize. Or you need resources that the students can read and research themselves.
Here is some great …Continue

I occasionally get asked by my fellow teachers how I organize my teaching materials and what kinds of tools I use. I’m not sure I am the perfect organizer but for what it’s worth, I’m putting down my method here.
First, I keep big folders of material sorted by kind of lesson. Every Xerox, every print-out, every article I clip from the newspaper is in a 3-hole punch binder and organized into the following categories:Conversation LessonVocab LessonGrammarListeningReadingTOEFLGRESAT
You may have your own categories or organizational system.
I also have seperators in with the …Continue

Valentine’s Day was the 14th of February as it is every year and I had meant to post something about it in terms of learning English and American culture. But it was a crazy time for me. Oh well, at least I’m early for next year.
First, some cultural information in case you end up in the US wondering what the heck is going on:
Cultural Notes
Valentine’s Day is a day we celebrate romantic love. It falls on the 14th every year and typically couples celebrate it by going out to dinner …Continue

You may or may not realize that you need health insurance if you plan to study in the US, the UK, or most other Western countries. It’s the law. At the same time, if you’re an American planning to study abroad your program or host university will probably want you to have insurance too.
Already have insurance? Or you’re on your parent’s plan? Chances are that’s not going to help you when you leave the country. And being sick is much worse in a foreign country–the language may be a …Continue