The key to successful time management is planning and then protecting the planned time. Time management starts with the commitment to change. Time management is easy as long as you commit to action. Here are a few time management techniques, tools and tips: Find out where you’re wasting time. Many of us are prey to time-wasters that steal time we could be using much more productively. What are your time-bandits? Do you spend too much time ‘Net surfing, reading email, or making personal calls? Maintain a to-do list Create a to-do list and make it a habit to continually update it. Include urgent and non-urgent items so you’ll never forget or overlook anything again. Carry your list with you at all times, either in your iPhone or your daily agenda. Also, be sure to break down your projects and assignments into specific action points. Schedule it Try scheduling each to-do on your calendar as per your work. Commit a lump of time on a specific day to each item on your list and you will be amazed at how quickly you get it all done. 30 Seconds or less Not all to-do lists are created equal nor do they all take the same amount of time. Some items can be completed very quickly. When a to-do crosses your desk, ask if it can be completed in 30 seconds or less. If so, just go ahead, do it, and get it over with just one less thing to have to worry about later! Set and respect deadlines Be realistic about setting deadlines and strive to meet them. It’s true that any task takes the exact amount of time allotted to it. Although we tend to get a lot done when we’re under pressure, it is a lot less stressful and considerably more professional to establish and stick to an action plan. Write It Down If your mind can’t seem to settle down, and you keep thinking of the million OTHER things that you have to do, keep a pad of paper on your desk and write down each of these to-dos’s as they occur to you. Emptying them out of your head will allow you to stay focused on the task at hand, without fear of forgetting something important. Get organized Organize your desk, your hard-copy and computer files and your e-mail folders so you can find things easily. Far too much time is wasted searching for lost information. Some people have a hard time staying focused because the piles and stacks distract them from the task at hand. Avoid disruptions If you have a door, close it occasionally. Having an "open-door policy" for your staff is self-defeating if you don’t have the time to really listen to their questions and concerns. Technology help Technology makes it easy to work wherever you are; your tablet or smartphone will help you stay connected. You can also add alarms and make notes so that your time table is more efficient.

Nick Thorner explores the challenges of preparing Foundation-level students for IELTS, ahead of his webinars on 21 February and 7 March entitled ‘Prepare your Foundation-level students for IELTS success‘. In my experience, what really worries students about the IELTS exam isn’t their grammar or their vocabulary - it’s having nothing to say. They worry about tricky Speaking Part 3 questions such as: ‘What can governments do to promote international cooperation?’ or Writing Part 2 topics with a word they haven’t studied before, such as ‘obesity’ or ‘rehabilitation’. Often students have never thought of such questions and topics, and even if they have, they’ve never tried to discuss them in English. And of course their IELTS score suffers as a result: I find that when students are less confident or don’t have great ideas their pronunciation becomes flat and they start hesitating or repeating ideas. The fact is that knowledge itself, or at least the confidence that comes with having it, underpins a successful IELTS performance. But do we teach students knowledge, or even how to access knowledge and express it? I think too often the texts and materials we work with have arcane topics that don’t challenge our students to think, respond or engage personally. IELTS lessons should be a window on the world that will fill students’ minds with ideas and provoke them to respond at every turn, making them confident and enthusiastic candidates. In my upcoming webinar, I’ll be showing you how you can help your students to build the confidence they need to express world knowledge and discuss it. I hope you can join me. Nick Thorner is co-author of Foundation IELTS Masterclass. He lives and works in Oxford, where he has been teaching IELTS courses for several years. He is also an experienced IELTS examiner.Filed under: Exams & Testing Tagged: Exams, Foundation IELTS, Foundation-level, IELTS, Low-level, Nick Thorner, Speaking skills, Webinar, Writing skills

It’s important to monitor how many links you’re generating because you can cross-reference that information against improvements in ranking to estimate how much effort your SEO push is going to take. You can monitor how many backlinks you currently have using a variety of tools. Below is a range of options - from simple and fast to complex and expensive: • Search Google for "www.yourdomainname.com" (FREE). Google will display all the pages it can find that contain "www.yourdomainname.com". Normally this indicates a link to your site, most which will be ‘follow’ links. This is the quickest and easiest way to check, but it’s not the best for analysis. • Use Google Webmaster Tools (FREE). Go to Links > Pages with external links. This will itemize which pages are actually the target of backlinks, and will tell you how many links each page has, plus a total for all pages. • Use LinkDiagnosis (FREE). This tool takes a while to run, but it’s worth the wait. For serious backlink checking, this is definitely my pick. It reports a lot of information about each link (including the PageRank of the linking site, the anchor text used, whether the link is nofollow), your most popular pages, and the most popular anchor text. It doesn’t report the actual total number of links, because if it encounters a site-wide link, it only counts it as one link (which is pretty much what the search engines do anyway). • Or, if you’re really serious, you could subscribe for a SEOmoz membership (USD $79 per month) and get full access to Linkscape. Amongst its reports is a detailed list of URLs linking to your page or domain, ordered by their relative importance. It also provides complete lists of anchor text used by those links, including distribution of terms and relative popularity.

Sarah Philpot, Headway Academic Skills co-author, discusses the issue of addressing academic needs as early as possible in language learning. You can join Sarah for her upcoming webinar "Integrating academic study skills from A1" on 18th February. During my 30-year teaching career I have, like many of you, no doubt, taught, a range of different class types: General English, English for Exams, IELTS, Business English, English for Medics, English for Academic Purposes, etc. Obviously, during those years, a lot of things have changed. Typically in the past, adult students would do General English until they reached a certain level of competence, around B1, at which point many of them would chose a ‘special’ course to help them in their work or studies. This would entail learning different and new lexis, functions and skills. However, with English being more and more a core requisite for Higher Education and for work in multinational and trans-national companies, young adult students in particular realise that they need not only a level of linguistic competence, but also the appropriate academic or professional competencies too, and as early as possible. To a large extent, people wishing to enter the corporate world are already catered for - just look at the number of Business English course books, beginner to advanced, that are available. So, it struck me as rather strange that those with academic needs were not similarly provided for, and that those students would have to return to the old pattern. This is where the Headway Academic Skills series came in. It seemed logical, not to say fair, that students planning to go into higher education should also be in a position to learn the appropriate lexis, functions, etc. at the same time as they are learning the difference between the present simple and present continuous! In my webinar, I hope to show why this integrated approach is being adopted, and how we can do it. I will be drawing on material from Headway Academic Skills Introductory Level (A0/A1), and will be looking specifically at the importance of: context task type lexis register in making a course more relevant to students who wish to continue their studies in an English-medium college or university. Sign up for Sarah’s webinar on 18th February now.Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Skills Tagged: Academic skills, EAP, English for Academic Purposes, Headway Academic Skills, Higher education, Linguistic competence, Sarah Philpot, Teaching beginners, Webinar

Content marketing has taken many companies by storm and has given their marketing strategy quite a twist. Creating a content marketing strategy may sounds simple - create necessary content, post it online and watch your website viewer’s numbers and leads grow. Sadly, E commerce retailers find executing an inbound marketing strategy can be nerve-wracking.  E commerce retailers use a wide variety of content assets that include ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, info graphics, videos, checklists, case studies, templates and more. The secret lies in a list of free tools that these retailers can depend on to market their content and create a professional-looking product page. 1) Pocket Pocket helps people save their articles, videos and more from the web for later use. Pocket helps Content marketing as is easy to use as, you can pile content on your smartphone, start reading it on your tablet, and finish it up on your desktop or laptop computer. Once done, all you have to do is just tap the "Read" button. 2) Trendhunter Trendhunter is a website that helps Ecommerce retailers as it provides crowd sourced customer insights on the hottest trends across a range of industries, from fashion, culture and design, to tech, business and eco. For content marketing, you can find articles, blogs, and links to websites with new products, breaking news and more. 3) Alltop Alltop is a site which has answers to all the questions that you can think of. Alltop imports the stories of the topmost content websites and blogs for any given topic and displays the headlines of the five most recent stories. In short, Alltop is an information filter. 4) Übersuggest To be seen online, great content should be optimized for the long tail keywords that your onlookers is using, but ever since Google decided to encrypt keyword data, getting insight into those keywords has grown more difficult. Übersuggest takes your base term, add a letter or a digit in front of it, and extracts suggestions for it. With this free keyword tool you can instantly get thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries. 5) Slide share If you want to create a presentation or a webinar, Slideshare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations, and my go-to source for great ideas. Once your content marketing presentation is ready, load it onto Slideshare and you can share it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or embed it in your blog or company website to get more viewers.

Today’s question for the Q: Skills for Success authors: Could you recommend useful tips for teaching writing skills? Joe McVeigh responds. Do you have a question about teaching English for Academic Purposes that you’d like to ask our Q author team? Comment below or email your question to qskills@oup.com. Related articles #qskills - Would it help if I taught phonetics symbols in the mother tongue? #qskills - How can I teach a class where there is a huge gap in language proficiency among the students? #qskills - When should L1 be used in class? #qskills - Why are the four skills normally divided into listening & speaking and reading & writing? #qskills - How can I get my students to use smart devices in the classroom? #qskills - Do you have any advice for teaching technical English? #qskills - How do I motivate my students to speak English instead of their native language in class? Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Skills Tagged: Adult Learners, EAP, English for Academic Purposes, English Language, Joe McVeigh, Language proficiency, Q Skills for Success, Questions for Q authors, Writing skills

From an ecommerce perspective, it is important for retailers to get feedback and reviews about their product / brand. There are many benefits to using consumer-driven ratings and reviews as they provide assurance to the customer during the decision making process. One can make it easy to leave reviews on your website by employing the use of product review solutions such as Emerging Ecommerce Feedback, Review and Ratings Trends are: 1. UserVoice UserVoice generates a simple forum for your users to submit and vote their feedbacks and reviews. The viewers can access the forum via a widget embedded on your website or via a devoted forum page. Customers submit ideas, issues or propositions. This is helpful as it allows you to decide on which ideas your customers really want and which problems they are facing. 2. Facebook’s Open Graph Retailers can add Facebook’s Open Graph to provide their customers with the ability to share reviews and feedbacks on the social network after posting them on your ecommerce website. 3. Get Satisfaction For Ecommerce retailers, this app provides a forum-like help page for their customers to ask question, submit ideas, get and give supports. Companies are able to entitle multiple employees to provide official answers to customer questions. Via Get Satisfaction, customers are able to create a page for any company as well. 4. Bazaarvoice Bazaarvoice helps a company to collect and influence ratings & reviews, questions & answers and stories from their customers. It has proven to increase sales, build brand loyalty and also bring credible brand voices, giving shoppers important information they need before buying. 5. Reevoo Revoo helps in rating and reviewing a company / brand. It works around the line of getting the voice of your customers working for. This gives you a demonstrable competitive advantage.

Image courtesy of Jason Howie via Flickr Sarah Fudin, Community Outreach Coordinator for USC Rossier Online, shares 5 mobile apps that every teacher should be using in 2014. 2014 brings a new year and many changes in education nationwide. As innovative technology is developed, new and updated apps are making it easier for teachers and students to integrate technology in the classroom. Here’s a list of the five apps every teacher should have in 2014: 1. Evernote Platform: Android, iOS Evernote is a great platform for organizing notes, pictures, and voice memos. For teachers, it can be a great tool for collecting media. Evernote allows a person to take a photo and add a note. All information is stored in easy-to-organize tabs for simple retrieval. How can this app be used? A math teacher might catch sight of some great buildings downtown to use as examples in his geometry class, and he can quickly capture and remember it for use later in the classroom. Equally, students can use this app to collect and store data for projects or homework. 2. Socrative Platform: Android, iOS Socrative brings a spark to class assessment. It takes three minutes for teachers to set up and 30 seconds for students to download on their phones. With this app, teachers have a variety of assessment tools they can use to gauge student process. Questions are shown on a screen, and students use their phones to answer the questions. Results are automatically tallied and stored for the teacher to review. One feature, Space Race, allows students to work in teams to answer questions. For each correct answer, their team’s rocket moves up on the screen; the first team to get their rocket to the top wins. 3. Shakespeare in Bits: Hamlet Platform: iOS Shakespeare in Bits is great for English teachers. With narration and animation that accompanies the text, this app allows students to read books with greater comprehension. The app also contains an analysis section complete with a summary, discussion of themes used and descriptions of various images. 4. School Fuel Platform: Requires iOS 4.3 or later and Android 3.0 and up. School Fuel puts students, teachers and administrators within a school on the same page. This app serves as an interface that organizes all the apps that teachers are using while allowing students to access them at any time. Instead of teachers having students download apps from a variety of sources, students can simply use this app to view and access all the apps the school is using. Teachers can also look to see what other teachers are using and add apps to the database. 5. Springpad Platform: Requires iOS 4.3 or later and Android 2.2 and up. Springpad takes organization a step further; this app not only gives you access to everything you save on all your devices, but it also recommends different places and tasks to you based on what you already have. For example, if you have a list of school supplies you are working on, Springpad will give you local options of where you can buy those supplies. Every note, list or project can also be shared with other teachers and classmates to make collaboration easier. For many teachers, downloading and learning how to use new apps can be a daunting task. This list can help you discover new tools to enhance your classroom in a more efficient way to jumpstart a productive new year!Filed under: Multimedia & Digital, Professional Development Tagged: Apps, Digital, EdTech, elearning, Evernote, mlearning, Mobile apps, Sarah Fudin, School Fuel, Shakespeare in Bits, Socrative, Springpad

Google has made it easier for you to get connected with your consumers and viewers as well as promote your brand / products online via its Shopping campaign. This rationalizes how you manage and bid on your products, reports on your performance, and find openings to grow your traffic from Google. Ways to set up Google shopping Campaign: Create product targets Product targets allow you to select which products are eligible to show on Product Listing Ads, and they also allow you to bid differently on different sets of products. You’ll need at least one product target in order to run Product Listing Ads since they tell us what products you want to promote. Depending on your Google Shopping Campaign goals, including your bidding strategy and promotional messaging needs, it might help to set up your regular Product Listing Ads campaigns according to certain guidelines. * Understanding product targets and keywords Instead of keywords, regular Product Listing Ads campaigns use product targets to determine when items in your Merchant Center account appear on a search results page. Defining keyword lists for proactive targeting won’t have any effect on your Product Listing Ads or product targets at this time. * Using the "All products" product target (default product target) You can create an "All products" product target, which uses all of the products in your Merchant Centre product feed to target your ads, if you don’t need to specify a particular subset of your products. * Using attributes with your product targets to define sets of products Attributes, like a product’s type or condition, define your products in a unique way. If you’d like to bid differently for separate groups of products or simply organize your campaigns with specific groups of product, then you’ll need to create product targets using the different attributes that we allow. Use product filters to restrict which products from your account can appear with your ads Product filters are a way for you to define which products in your Merchant Centre account can appear for your Product Listing Ads. However, if you create a product filter for a group of products that are in your product feed, then we’ll only show products from your product feed that match the filters you’ve created in your Product Listing Ads. Manage your Google Merchant Centre product feed Your Merchant Centre product feed contains groupings of attributes used to describe your products, such as category, product type, brand, condition, item ID, and AdWords labels. We use those attributes to determine when your Product Listing Ads are eligible to show, so it’s important that the content of your Merchant Centre feed is accurate and up-to-date. Pay only for results With Product Listing Ads you’re charged only if someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You only pay when Google directs a customer to your shopping campaign.