Today’s question for the Q: Skills for Success authors: What can I do to improve my relationship with difficult students who do not like to study English? Tamara Jones 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 - Could you recommend useful tips for teaching writing skills? #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, Difficult students, EAP, English for Academic Purposes, English Language, Q Skills for Success, Questions for Q authors, Tamara Jones

I’ve written before about the amazing potential of Google Hangouts in classrooms. Last week, however, I was actually able to experience that "awesomeness" first hand. My students were able to take part in a Google Hangout with our Congressman, who was in Washington DC at the time. Students were able to ask our Congressman basically […] The post Using Google Hangouts in the Classroom appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

One of the best things about using the WordPress platform is the plugins. You anyways get great functionality with the base system, but you can enhance it using plugins, and the comment system. These wordpress plugins for comments can be such a smart way to attract visitors to check out more of your content. 1. Jetpack Jetpack is a wordpress plugins for comments that boosts your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com. * Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server. Previously provided byWordPress.com Stats. * Email subscriptions for your blog’s posts and your post’s comments. * Social networking enabled comment system. * Likes, allowing your readers to show their appreciation of your posts. * Monitor and manage your site’s activity with Notifications in your Toolbar and on WordPress.com. * Simple, Akismet-backed contact forms. Some individual features that Jetpack provides will be free, but others in the future may require payment. 2. Disqus Comments Disqus is a popular wordpress comment plugins systems. It helps you to start a fully featured discussion board on your blog. Vote for any comment, share any comment or reply to any comment easily. * Uses the Disqus API * Comments indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly) * Support for importing existing comments * Auto-sync (backup) of comments * Threaded comments and replies * Notifications and reply by email * Connected with a large discussion community * Increased exposure and readership This plugin is free of cost. 3. Google Plus Comments The stylish Google Plus comments can be seamlessly added to your blog. Now your visitors can easily leave comments to your posts using their Google Plus profile. It allows your commentators to connect with each other through Google Plus. Commentators can easily + any comment and reply to any other comment.

Tamas Lorincz will be presenting a webinar on Thursday 27th February at 11AM and at 2PM GMT. Here he talks about what he’ll be covering in the webinar. You can sign up now. Many teachers and students believe that a strong grammar syllabus and a well-constructed step-by-step approach to recognising, practising and using a grammar point is the best way to become proficient users of English. Headway is the tried and tested course that follows this recipe. In this webinar we are going to examine how grammar is presented in Headway, how teachers can help students to familiarise themselves with new grammar points and what we can do to make the grammar useful and relevant to our students. We are going to look at activities that introduce and demonstrate new grammar in meaningful and interesting contexts, then share ideas and activities that help students practise and use the new grammar. The activities will concentrate on ways in which we can exploit the materials in the coursebook to engage students and support their learning. In the first part of the webinar we will look at the way grammar is presented in the coursebook. We will discuss ways in which we can demonstrate grammar in meaningful and engaging contexts by incorporating new techniques and the resources presented in the course. The second part of the session will focus on meaningful practice. We will look at platforms and activities that encourage students to use the new grammar points. In the final part of the webinar we will share ideas about encouraging independent authentic usage. We will look at a whole unit in the course and see how the presentation and practice of a grammar point is incorporated into the unit and we’ll discuss ways in which we can enhance the learning opportunities the materials represent. Headway is proud to follow a grammar-based syllabus which we believe helps students understand and use English effectively in a variety of settings. During the webinar, participants will be encouraged to share best practices and discuss areas of special interest and/or difficulty. We will also look at ways in which we can adapt the activities to offer a variety of learning and practice opportunities for classes where students are at different levels and for students with different learning needs and abilities. We will also introduce some ways in which technology can support our students’ learning and independent practice. If you are already an active user of Headway you will find new ways in which you can approach the material and we would love you to share your experiences, ideas and teaching tips. For those who are new to Headway, this webinar will offer a unique window on the course and some tips, ideas and tools you can use to make the most of this popular coursebook. Do you use Headway? Do you have a favourite grammar activity? Share it with us by leaving a comment in the ‘Leave a reply’ box at the bottom of this page. We would love to hear how you used it and why you liked it! We hope to see you see you at the webinar on 27th February at 11AM and at 2PM GMT. Sign up now.Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Grammar & Vocabulary Tagged: adult learning, Grammar, Headway, Tamás Lőrincz, Webinar

Wow! It has been too long since my last post! The reason I’ve been MIA, you ask? I’ve discovered Netflix. And Once Upon a Time. I may be obsessed. Anyway,… I was recently chosen to join the Remind Connected Educators program, and I am so glad I did! In joining this program, I learned more […] The post Remind Chat! appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

Instructional design, also referred to as Instructional Systems Design (ISD), is the process of creating instructional experiences that make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient and effective.  With the key definitions now out of the way, let us examine instructional design models. First, a model is a representation of a complex entity or phenomenon, whose purpose is to objective understanding of what it represents. Models help the instructional designer to visualize the problem at hand, and to then to break it down into smaller, more manageable units.  It then follows that an instructional design model are frameworks for developing instruction that enhance learning outcomes and also encourages learners to gain a deeper level of understanding. In other words, instructional design model tells instructional designers how to organize pedagogical situations in order to achieve instructional goals. It is important to note that effective instructional models are based on learning and instructional theories. Models are classified into prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive models provide guidelines to organize and structure instructional activities while descriptive models describe the learning environment and how it affects variables at play. There are many instructional models that have been developed over the years, and most are based on the ADDIE model. ADDIE stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. This systematic instructional design model consists of five generic phases, which have been refined over the years in other models like the Dick and Carey Design Model and the Rapid Prototyping Model. Common examples of these instructional models include: 1) Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction 2) Bloom’s Learning Taxonomy 3) Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Training Evaluation 4) Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction 5) Kemp’s Instructional Design Model 6) Keller’s ARCS Model of Motivational Design (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) 7) ASSURE Model (Analyze Learners, State Objectives, Select Methods, Media, and Materials, Utilize Media and Materials, Require Learner Participation, and Evaluate and Revise) 8) Smith and Ragan Design Model 9) Rapid Prototyping Design Model.

Are your students excited to learn new vocabulary? Do they relish in the fact that many words with which they are unfamiliar will most likely make their way onto important tests, like the ACT and SAT? Many students, at least in my teaching experience, are less than excited to learn new words. If students encounter […] The post How to Teach Vocabulary with Flashcard Monkey appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

Olha Madylus, a teacher and teacher trainer specialising in both primary and secondary education, introduces her upcoming webinar entitled ‘Leading a horse to water and making it drink‘ on 5th and 7th March, where she will explore ways to motivate students to read and enjoy doing so. How do we motivate our students to read long texts in course books and how do we ensure that students understand and enjoy what they read? To our students a long text in a course book can be very off-putting. Not only does the length put them off but it may contain a lot of vocabulary they are not acquainted with and the tasks they need to do, e.g. answer comprehension questions, may seem too difficult. Using examples from the Insight series, my webinar on reading aims to address these issues by answering the following questions: What is reading? What makes a text difficult and off-putting for students? What can we do before looking at the text to increase motivation to read and to prepare students for potential difficulties like a lot of new vocabulary What strategies can students employ to get a ‘feel’ of the text when they first meet it, putting into to context, to make reading easier How can skimming a text effectively help students understand text organisation in order to better navigate it What do students need to know about syntax, discourse markers and cohesive devices that will make reading easier How can students deal with new vocabulary within a text? How can students be encouraged to ‘read between the lines’, identifying implications in order to make inferences How can we personalise response to texts, to ensure that students do really think about its meaning, rather than just try to get to the end of the activity.  How can reading be more rewarding and more fun? So, if you teach reading skills and want some ideas on how to make your teaching more effective and reading lessons more motivating for students, do join me in this webinar.Filed under: Professional Development, Skills, Teenagers Tagged: #insightwebinar, Extensive reading, insight, Motivation, Olha Madylus, Reading for pleasure, Reading in English, Reading skills, Secondary, Vocabulary, Webinar

I’ve been using Google Docs for quite a while. I love Google Docs. It’s easy to use. I can collaborate with any other "Googler" without being in the same room. I can create and share grocery lists with my husband. (Ok, this may not be vital, but it is great for me!) One complaint I […] The post How to Add Backgrounds in Google Docs: A Workaround appeared first on Teaching with Technology.