TEFL links of the month March 2009
Macmillan Interactive Webinars- registration from the 23 March and sessions starting from the 8 April with perhaps the most interesting looking one, a criticial look at teaching technology with Pete Sharma
The Dutch, of all people, get neurotic about the use of English in universities, in this news story here- maybe something relevant to the upcoming CLIL debate?
Psychologists find out that people who are good at remembering sequences are also good at learning languages- here.
The Marxist TEFL group continue their scattergun attack on all things TEFL.
More critical analysis- this time on the use of RP accents in IELTS and City and Guilds exams.
And finally, there’s ELT Publishing Review, a promising-looking blog on the rarely covered topic by someone with inside info, which in its latest post mentions what I always forget when I am writing up the freebie review copies I get- is it actually worth the price?
All the links above brought to you exclusively by TEFLtastic, and not yet available on the new (I assume) onestopblogs page, the most comprehensive TEFL blogs aggregator (right word?) so far
March 21st, 2009 at 2:51 am
Hmmm, onestopblogs must be new, because when you click on “set up your own blog” sends you back to that same main page without letting you do anything of the sort
March 21st, 2009 at 9:35 am
Great Alex, thanks for these (how do you find out all this stuff?). The Marxist folk I had never heard of, although I see they are using the same wordpress template as Mr Trouble of ELT publishing. Any relation?
Anyway, thanks again!
March 21st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
As I owe you one or ten, will let you into my one and only blogging secret- by email!
Here’s another great looking link that I just stole off someone’s delicious page:
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LAJH.htm
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 am
If TEFL news is your thing, the always excellent TESall.com ticker is active again after a bit of a rest:
http://tesall.com/
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Although TEFL Marxist appears to be the latest resting place of Private Eye’s late Dave Spart, it does have a sense of humour and occasionally publishes something really worth reading.
However, their latest “Open letter to the TEFL Blacklist” seems to be another case of token gesturing, seeing as the TEFL Blacklist hasn’t published a thing since last December (the author may even be in hiding or behind bars!) and the ’story’, concerning the BNP’s language school in London, is hardly as fresh as this morning’s bread.
Actually, I was always more attracted to the Trotsyite faction than the pure Marxists, even the Marxist-Lenininsts … but I do hope they don’t hold that against me! Anyway, now I’m officially an Agnostic, so there.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:52 am
Here’s the best TEFL related journalism in ages:
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/life-times/article/13960.html
March 25th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
[...] like to thank Mr. Alex Case, Review Editor from TEFL.net, for putting my new blog into his links of the month post. This post is a nice collection of hyperlinks he writes in order to help teachers find interesting [...]
March 26th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Here’s another original way of using/ topic for blogs- a whole blog on conditionals!
http://conditionals-equipo19itesm.blogspot.com/
March 28th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Here’s another good one- CHina’s love hate relationship with English:
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/6623808.html
April 1st, 2009 at 10:21 am
From an email from Onestop:
“Thanks for noticing onestopblogs and blogging about it! As you can see, the site is live. It is a blog aggregator and it’s based on a bit of technology developed by one of our colleagues. It does cool things with blogs and is quite clever as long as it has plenty of content to play with. For example, if it spots the same terms and tags and keywords in several blog titles, it will aggregate them as a Top Story – but we’ll need lots of blogs in the aggregator to make this happen.
We started with 47 blogs and will continue to add ETS-specific blogs over the coming weeks. If anyone objects to having their blog listed, we will of course take it down immediately. This is a service to complement onestopenglish and should help individual bloggers to increase traffic to their blogs and to reach the wider TEFL community.
So, today we’ve done another round of testing and fixing. The site is looking better by the minute. If anyone in the TEFL community notices anything, we’re hugely grateful for comments and suggestions, which can be sent to the onestopenglish team. [mailto:webeditor@macmillan.com]. You can also send your blogs to this address.”
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:24 am
Reminder to self- check this out as looks like lots of good links:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/live-sessions
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:43 am
And from the IATEFL 2009 Conference Programme, here are my votes:
A presentation to see:
Ten reasons to love lists
Lindsay Clandfield (Freelance)
A presentation to miss:
Online training courses for pre-service teachers
Jenny Johnson (Cactus TEFL)
And a presentation that I actually haven’t seen before:
Teaching culture using tap dance
Jung-min Lee (Seoul Global High School)
This presentation will show how to motivate learners of English by introducing the target culture in enjoyable ways. Tap dance is the main topic and the students were involved in a variety of activities using four skills, after-school tap dance class, and online interaction. The result shows interests in culture, cultural
background knowledge and confidence in English generally increased
——————————
Alex, can you tap?
April 4th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Actually, I can. Two certificates in it
Link to the best article on Good Dave’s for a long time:
http://www.eltworld.net/times/2009/03/is-teaching-english-in-china-really-for-you/
April 11th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Interesting blog entry on how the Macmillan Webinars went:
http://slife.dudeney.com/?p=172
October 8th, 2009 at 1:52 am
What DO you have against Jennifer Jenkins, Alex?
http://pigstyave.blogspot.com/2009/03/module-5-assignment.html
Email me?