Making youtubes interactive

Using youtube's annotations app you can add text and links to video. You need a) a youtube account and b) to upload the video into your account (ie use your own videos or upload ones you've downloaded). And then: in your account open ´My videos´ and the dropdown menu besides whichever audiovisual delight you wish to teflise:

More info on how to do it:
here and here
A couple of examples of how it could be exploited in class
Magic trick
Choose your own adventure

#ELTchat - great for professional development

A bit sniffy of the value of twitter? That was my opinion until I came across #ELTchat. Every Wednesday ELT tweeters meet up on twitter to discuss a particular topic related to language teaching and learning such as, how do you teach writing, ways to develop learner autonomy, convincing colleagues that online professional development is as effective as face-to-face (recent chats). And the beauty of it all is that someone volunteers to produce a summary of all the tips (as in the previous links) and advice that ELT chatters came up with that week, so that even if you couldn't make the Wednesday chat you can still benefit from the wisdom and experience of ELT teachers from all over the world. You can also follow what everyone actually said by doing a search on twitter for #ELTchat. Up-lifting stuff!

Learning beyond walls

This is the title of Shelly Terrell's blog post on the TeachingEnglish website. It's full of good tips on how to use different online tools and new technology and puts forward a really strong argument about how exploiting them engages students and enriches the learning experience. Worth the read.

Qwiki for quick, informational features in class

Qwiki  is a good resource for quick interest features in class - and for some topics an alternative to Wikipedia. Whereas on Wikepdia you're faced with a mass of text and very few images meaning it can take time to find the information you want , Qwiki is the opposite.

Use is to search for public figures, places, natural wonders etc and it comes up with a shortish, simple spoken text and lots of images of great images, pretty much like a presentation.

Also, have you come across SimpleWikipedia which consciously uses much simpler language than Wikipedia and therefore is often a better choice for language learners?

Glogster for interactive posters

Glogster is a great resource for all ages of students (the link is to eduglogster which enables you to have the same login for your whole class). Give your students a quick how to video to watch on youtube and they'll be well away making interactive posters that can serve for presentations and all types of project work. Well worth a whirl!

English Central revamped!

EnglishCentral is a website which provides videos you can speak along with, record your voice and see how well you match the original speaker - a great resource for practising pronunciation.

It's now been revamped and is really teacher-friendly. If you register as a teacher you can access tools to monitor how well your students are doing with the tasks you set them.

The videos also now come with an online dictionary so that students can check any words they're not sure about.

Jamie Keddie's new site

LessonStream is Jamie Keddie's new site and an improvement on his highly popular TEFLclips. It's much easier to find things - lesson plans are listed by age, level and topic.

A great site with good ideas and a useful source for interesting, short video material to use in class.

Want to make fun worksheets?

Teacher's Pet is free software you can download to make fun worksheets: crossword puzzles, word searches, gap-fills etc. At the moment it's only available for Windows but the creators say it will soon be ready for Mac.