Thank you Portuguese teachers for making my first trip to Lisbon an APPI one. I really enjoyed the day and wish I could have stayed longer. You’ll just have to invite me again next year! Congratulations to Isabel and everyone else on the team for a great job. Enjoy the weekend :) As promised, here [...]

Really good day in Pamplona at la Escuela Oficial de Idiomas conference. Thank you to all the teachers, the organisation, and Silvia and Duncan at OUP. As promised, here is the handout: EOI handout Hope to see you again Jamie :)

As promised, here is the handout for my BBELT presentations in Mexico City last weekend (click on the link below). It was a great weekend. Congratulations and thank you very much to Pilar and everyone else at the British Council. And thank you all for being such nice people – Mexican English teachers are great! [...]

On a number of occasions I’ve seen teachers share, with apparent enthusiasm, a site called Copyright Kids. I’ve never liked it. And I really can’t imagine that kids do either, even if the mascot is a cool-looking cat who wears sunglasses. Larry Lessig (second last video on the page) asserts that outdated copyright laws have [...]

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 [...]