ESL etc.

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In this podcast I talk about what I’ve been doing for the past several months. I talk a bit about my time at Dancing Rabbit, an community based around environmental sustainability with a website full of photos and articles. I also talk about two online jobs, as a tutor for TalkBean.com and as […]

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In this podcast I talk about how I’m doing debates with my classes. I broke it into three main parts:

finding a group and choosing a topic
brainstorming pros and cons
presenting the debate

I also talk briefly about a photograph based activity that I’m planning to do where my students will take each other on virtual […]

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I start by introducing a roleplay in which students were asked to imagine what they would do if their boss pressured them to do something illegal or dishonest. As an example, I told them a story about a student at another university who worked as a tour guide over the summer. His boss […]

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This week, I talk about the K12 Online Conference, primarily giving some of my thoughts on the pre-conference keynote. Keynote speaker David Warlick talks about how Web 2.0-type technology is changing how we should approach our students, and I reflect on how this applies to language teaching. I also make some comments about […]

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This week I discuss four global issues video games: Stop Disasters, What Would You Do?, Food Force, and Darfur is Dying. I reviewed Stop Disasters a few days ago and plan to review the others in more detail soon.
In the meantime, here’s a brief rundown:
Stop Disasters - Students attempt to protect a village from […]

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I start by talking about how last week’s headline activity ended up going differently than I’d planned. I discuss some of the difficulties of looking critically at current events here in China and also talk about some of the uncomfortable issues that came up. In doing so, I refer to this article from […]

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I start right off talking about my teaching. I discuss how last week’s classes went, and then I describe what I’m doing this week. I explain the headline activity (see below) and talk about how my new approach focuses more on doing a variety of tasks than covering a lot of content. […]

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First, I answer a listener’s request for ideas on getting larger classes to speak. Specifically, I talk about a pronunciation activity, pair/groupwork and roleplays.
Next, I talk about week two of my sophomore English for Tourism conversation classes. I’m trying to improve students acquisition of vocabulary and sentence patterns by covering the same content […]

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I spend most of this podcast talking about my plans for the first day of class. Feel free to look at my notes if you’d like.
I briefly mention roleplays, which I talked about at length in podcast #2.
I then mention a couple of new email lists:
Larry Ferlazzo offers a subscription to his blog. […]

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This week, I begin by talking about some of my plans for the upcoming semester. While doing so, I refer to this earlier podcast about planning a project based course.
I also talk about the new features on the website, including the blog, the collection of article excerpts and the page of China links.
I mention […]

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