Thank you very much to Eszter Szatmári for this great composition about Jack the bear, a bridge in the mountains and some troublesome ‘fur-stealers’. She wrote this in response to the Blob on the Bridge activity. And thank you to teacher Kati Elekes for sending it my way. Jack was wandering at his favourite place [...]

On the 2nd of April 2011, Nyan Cat was launched into (cyber)space by PRguitarman. This is the sort of thing that young people do these days. I used to make Airfix model planes. Is there much of a difference? Nyan Cat is a happy little guy. He has the the body of a cherry Pop-Tart [...]

At the moment, I’m in Norwich, working with a group of Chinese teachers of English. We are making a lot of use of video cameras and last week one of the trainees filmed this videotelling activity. The full lesson plan is on Lessonstream. Click here to see it. In the clip, James Thomas, my friend [...]

This clip demonstrates the videotelling principle. Here I videotell the Mr. W video to a fun group of English learners from China. After hearing about the clip, I replayed this recording of myself. That way my students were able to see their teacher’s spoken text a second time. Their task was then to make a [...]

I finally got around to editing the presentation I gave at IATEFL Brighton earlier this year. The talk was titled the ‘Authenticity Trap’. This was the third (and probably last) time I gave the talk and I was aware of the fact that it was suffering from an identity crisis. The problem is that there [...]

Video-sharing culture has given visual life to a number of audio interviews from yesteryear. Here are my three favourites: In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fan called Jerry Levitan sneaked into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, the recording was  edited down to 5 minutes and [...]

I got off the plane from Barcelona at London Stansted. I opened up my phone, took out my Spanish SIM card and replaced it with my British one. I turned my phone back on. Beep beep! Here is the SMS that welcomed me back to the United Kingdom (click on pictures to enlarge): It says: [...]

A clip like this allows us to make use of the greatest resource of all: other people. Human beings are fascinated by other human beings and after writing a lesson plan for this video (click here to see it), I have formed a different relationship with each of the individuals in it. The lesson plan [...]

This is Hillend Ski Centre, just outside Edinburgh. It is the longest dry ski slope in Europe and it is where I learned to ski. Richard Webb Bristle isn’t the most pleasant surface to ski on. It especially hurts when you fall over. And if you want to leave the bristle and go off piste, [...]

Hello. Welcome to the Lessonstream blog. This is a place for me to share ideas relating to the activities on Lessonstream as well as thoughts on language teaching in general. Some of the things that I’ll be posting about include: Off-piste teaching Retro learning and teaching techniques Visual materials Video recording devices in and out [...]