ESL etc.

mp3 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, a 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 a [...]

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mp3 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 [...]

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mp3 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 asked [...]

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mp3 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 the [...]

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mp3 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 [...]

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mp3 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 Beijing [...]

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mp3 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. Check out [...]

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mp3 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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mp3 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 [...]

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mp3 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. [...]

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