12 Tips for training older teachers to use technology

There is an assumption that persists in the educational community that more mature teachers are much more difficult and reluctant to be trained on the effective use of educational technology. To some degree, I think this assumption has been...

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Digital Tools for Teachers

Over the last few months I have been working on a new book project and finally have it completed.The new book is Digital Tools for Teachers.This book has been written and designed primarily with English language teachers in mind though the...

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Thinking Critically through Digital Media

Although the use of internet and digital materials in the language classroom has come a long way over the last 20 years, still the vast majority of web based material that finds its way into the language classroom is used for information input...

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Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking

This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook 'Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking'.Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy, which is a collection of lesson...

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20 + Things you can do with QR codes in your school

 QR codes are possibly one of the most underused useful features of new technology. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is that many people see them as a form of barcode and wrongly believe that they can only be produced by companies,...

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Managing the digital classroom - Using a backchannel

In my first post in this series - Getting students' attention - I mentioned the use of backchannels. This post should give you more information about the use of backchannels within the classroom.If you are working in a classroom where your...

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Managing the digital classroom - Getting students' attention

Competing with a computer or mobile screen for students' attention can be a challenge at best and at worst extremely frustrating. In this posting I will share some techniques and approaches for dealing with these problems.Ban devices Obviously...

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Creating social phrasebooks with Phraseum

I spend a lot of time looking at different web-based tools and apps and thinking about if and how they can be used for learning. Sometimes it takes some thought and at other times it’s really obvious. With Phraseum it was instantly obvious...

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Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology

I’d like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach. I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - elearning.This first one is from the early 1950’s and is about something called a ‘teaching machine’ which...

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How I use social media for my professional development

This has been a common theme to many of the presentations, workshops, webinars and seminars that I have been asked to do over the last few years, but however many times I try to present on this subject I never really feel that I get the message...

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