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regular online chats on various ELT topics.

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Tweets by ELTchat

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This page is where you can find resources related to my presentations about creating effective blogs and websites to complement instruction.

How to create a Blogger blog.

How to turn on comment moderation in Blogger.

How to add or subtract contributors to your Blogger blog.

How to create an Edublogs blog.

How to create a Wordpress.com blog.

Creating a Google Sites website.
Step 1.

See more Google Sites tutorials here, here, and here.

Using Google Forms to give an online quiz.

Tools for online quizzes, polls, and surveys.
MyStudiyo, multimedia online quizzes - Example in action.
ProProfs - Online Quizzes, Flashcards, and Polls.
Obsurvey, Custom Online Surveys. - How-to Video.
Survey Monkey
Poll Daddy
Skribit for Gathering Suggestions - How to.
Google Moderator

How to Edit the Size of Videos Embedded in Your Blog.

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Learning Technologies Special Interest Group

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Welcome to the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group.

We are an international community of educators who promote action research and best practice in the creative applications of educational technology in practical learning situations. We are classroom teachers who share, speak and write to inspire more of you to do the same. This website is our interactive home where we'll feature cutting-edge leaders in the field as well as grass-roots teachers who are making a difference in all kinds of classrooms all over the world.

From chat shows and podcasts to guest blogs, scholarships, conferences and personal learning networks, we've got our fingers on the pulse of edtech trends around the world. It's easy to join us and it's inspiring to contribute. Now would be a good time to find and refine your teaching voice on line with the

To learn more about this established IATEFL Special Interest Group please check out our mission statement.

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Welcome to the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group. We are an international community of educators who promote action research and best practice in the creative applications of educational technology in practical learning situations. We are classroom teachers who share, speak and write to inspire more of you to do the same.

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Collection of resources on scoop.it

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Scoop.it enables professionals and businesses to research and publish content through its content curation tool.

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Sharing and embedding your slides

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Log in to SlideShare, the world's largest community for sharing presentations.

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Blogs and websites

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La classe inversée

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Classe inversée -- Expérimentation -- Recherches

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SoundCloud

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There is no better resource for learning superlative adjectives than the Guinness World Records . This time, we started with an article about the tallest man in the world, watched a film about him, brainstormed ideas what is more challenging and what is easier for him to do in his daily life. Our objective was to interview him, so we prepared questions that we can ask from him. Thanks to Skype, we could set up an interview with him and he was very kind to accept our invitation. You can listen to this interview below.

The exercise focused on grammar (superlative adjectives), reading comprehension, question formation, interviewing.

What can you say about this man in the picture?
Where do you think he lives?
How old do you think he is?
What job do you think he has?
What are the advantages of being so tall?
What are the disadvantages of being so tall?

Here is a short film about his daily life.

Download the Worksheet to read about him.

The Tallest Man Short Version by Csilla Jaray-Benn

Ninon has made an interview with the tallest man in the world through Skype.

You can listen to it below.

She will also write an article that will be published in TeensVoice.

You can find more records in the famous Guinness World Records books, published every year, or on the GWR website.

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There is no better resource for learning superlative adjectives than the Guinness World Records . This time, we started with an article about the tallest man in the world, watched a film about him, brainstormed ideas what is more challenging and what is easier for him to do in his daily life.

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Voice recording

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A tool for making notes on videos

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En la actualidad existen herramientas y diferentes plataformas para editar videos, los videos son una...

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video for GS section farm animals

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Quizlet is a lightning fast way to learn vocabulary.

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QR Code Generator for URL, vCard, and more. Add logo, colors, frames, and download in high print quality. Get your free QR Codes now!

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PB WORKS

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digitaltools [licensed for non-commercial use only]

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Collaborative and Creative Digital Tools for language education. Course at Université Grenoble Alpes, "DU Formation des Formateurs" run by Csilla Jaray-Benn, www.bes-grenoble.com. This workspace is licensed for non-commercial use only. Learn More

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Linguistics as a window to understanding the brain 

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Linguistics as a window to understanding the brain 

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Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain | Big Think

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Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | Amy Cuddy | TED

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Rule 1: Follow directions quickly.

Rule 2: Raise your hand for permission to speak.

Rule 3: Raise your hand for permission to leave your seat

Rule 4: Make smart choices: Kindness, Leadership, Courage, Invincible Grit, Creativity

Rule 5: Keep your dear teacher happy!

The Diamond Rule: Keep your eyes on the target, please!

Check out the Character Education page for more info on Rule 4!
Coming Soon: Rules Posters for you to download!

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Rule 1: Follow directions quickly. Rule 2: Raise your hand for permission to speak. Rule 3: Raise your hand for permission to leave your seat Rule 4: Make smart choices: Kindness, Leadership, Courage, Invincible Grit, Creativity Rule 5: Keep your dear teacher happy! The Diamond Rule: Keep your eyes on the target, please!

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The Kirkpatrick Model, or four levels of training evaluation, consists of Reaction, Learning, Behavior & Results. Read on for a description of each level.

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'Cascade Training' (CT) is a term rapidly gaining currency in English Language Teaching (ELT) and more generally in teacher development via the wider field of Human Resources. However in the ELT field it appears to be widely misunderstood and overused to represent training situations that are very far from what the term actually means.
Cascading is meant to symbolise the free, unencumbered flow of ideas, skills and knowledge from one level of, in this case education, to another. The principle being that if you train a trainer to train other trainers who then train others, the exponential multiplication of learning, aids developmental processes and cuts training time which preserves training resources and maximises skill distribution.

While this is a very interesting idea in theory, in practise there are many barriers to enabling the cascade process. This article attempts to clarify under what practical conditions CT can be successful and offers alternative water metaphors for situations that do not meet those conditions.

Successful CT depends on equipping participants with the ability to run training sessions for themselves, by providing formats, activities and ideas for doing so and enabling them to develop, or use and adapt materials already developed for specific training purposes. The exact nature of the training will depend on whether training aims to (in increasing complexity):

Impart information

Change attitudes

Develop skills

Typically one or two people are trained off-site in a new central message or approach. These individuals then have the task of training a larger number of staff to be either trainers or, more usually to implement the new approach or materials in class.

Success of the cascade model, then, depends on a number of factors:

The audiences for the training need to be clearly defined and their needs targeted

Manageable training objectives should be defined and made explicit in the training materials.

Materials should:

Be used by trainers

Be common across training sessions

Be clearly and appropriately targetted to the audiences,

Be professionally constructed: logical, consistent, credible and of high quality

Have clear instructions and associated trainer manuals

Trainers should:

Believe in the aims of the program

Be capable of implementing the program

Be monitored to ensure consistency of training

Individual diversion from training aims can be minimised by

setting the training in a solid structure

minimising ambiguity in objectives or training materials

(adapted from Craft, 2001; pp. 23-4)

This involves a number of separate but interdependent stages:

Planning

Often a quite lengthy process including needs analysis, intervention design, materials development and piloting, trainer training, trainee selection, logistical arrangements, resource provision, form and design of monitoring and evaluation framework.

First-Stage implementation

Trainers train trainees. In a true cascade, this is actually trainer training as the trainees will be trained to carry out second stage implementation.

Second-Stage implementation

Trainers trained in first stage train trainees. This is where the multiplier effect kicks in. One trainer in first stage trains twenty trainers. each of those twenty trainers trains a further twenty trainees in second stage so that 400 people are trained for each original trainer. If each of the trainees is resposible for 40 learners, total impact will be on 16,000 children. This is the appeal of cascade training: large scale, cheap, efficient.

Ongoing monitoring, evaluation and quality assurance

Outcomes of first and second stage implementation are evaluated to ensure they are actually being met. Trainer and trainee quality and performance are observed to ensure they are acheiving the outcomes. Learner performance is evaluated to measure actual changes in proficiency based on the intervention. This can result in identification of further needs that leads into future intervention design.

The above is a development cycle that, if implemented carefully and fully, should lead to ongoing improvements in the capabilities of the participants and increased learning gains among their learners. Unfortunately, many so-called cascade training programmes do not have monitoring and evaluation systems built in from the beginning, have no quality assurance system and tend to break down between the implementation stages.

What is not Cascade Training?

The term Cascade is often used inappropriately for situations that do not foster a flow of information or skills beyond the first stage implementation and even when they do, the flow through to the second stage implementation can be incomplete. The following describes situations that although termed cascade training, do not actually warrant the label:

The Occasional Splash

Sporadic workshops aimed at teaching teachers how to teach.

May be set up (even as an ongoing program although more usually discontinuous) with the intention of participants taking information back to tell others but is not explicitly set up to develop teacher trainers.

Often use 'outsiders', usually native English speakers as guest presenters.

The Sponge

A teacher goes to a workshop or series of workshops and learns a great deal from them. However, the skills and information learned are not passed on but remain held in the experience of the first-stage participant. There can be a number of reasons for this:

1. How the cascade would flow was not worked out in advance.

2. The cascade flow was worked out in advance but not concretely.

3. Planning for the cascade flow was detailed but was not imparted clearly enough to the participants.

4. Participants were made aware of how the cascade should work but for individual reasons did/could not follow up on the plan. These reasons might include:

Lack of individual confidence to take on the role of trainer

Lack of financial support

Lack of time due to regular workload burden

Lack of local communication resources

Lack of local support due to political pressure in the workplace

5. Participants feel able to take on the role of trainer and have enough local resources and time to be able to do it, but the local teacher population is reluctant to take part in the training program. This can happen for a number of reasons:

Feelings of being over-burdened

Lack of a desire to change current operation principles

Lack of respect for the trainer.

Even if the first-stage implementation is deemed successful: the first-stage participants feel able to train at the local level and the second-stage participants are willing and able to take part in the training; a number of factors may prevent the second stage from being successful. These generally fall into two groups which overlap, those depending on the training ability of the first-stage participants and those depending on the reactions of the second-stage participants.

Trickle-Down Training

Information and skills transfer are necessarily lossy processes, meaning that bits get lost when they are transferred between two points. In other words, parts of stage one training can be omitted completely when being delivered to stage two trainees.

1. Despite the first-stage participant feeling confident about their abilities, they are actually not able to train second-stage participants to the required standard.

2. Parts of the training received by stage one participants can be over or under-emphasised depending on the trainers personal biases and interpretations of what is, or is not important.

The Flood

Second-stage participants may feel overwhelmed by the information they receive for a number of reasons:

They may have a generally lower level of academic experience.

The material used to train them may be of a very high academic level.

The responsibilities of becoming trainers, if that is the aim, may be too much.

The Drought

Second-stage participants may feel under-challenged by the training received.

They may have a higher academic level than the stage one participant

They may have been well prepared for ongoing training but be disappointed by the level of training provided

1. Both of the above may result in sponging.

2. They may resent not being the trainer themselves.

Clearly, CT has a specific meaning with specific conditions attached to it. It needs to be carefully planned and carried out, monitored and evaluated before it can be said to succeed. Success is the recursive training of trainers to train teachers or other teacher-trainers with as little loss of information and as much skill-building as possible. Essentially CT should develop into a sustainable self-replicating system of trainers creating trainers. Calling something that is not CT, CT not only weakens general understanding of the term, but over-hypes non-cascading methods and may in the end give CT itself a bad name as a method that does not work. Like any method, however, it only works if it is implemented appropriately. As Craft (2001, p. 24) notes, "Where it has a central message to convey (the cascade approach to training) can be useful. However, the model would be less appropriate for a more developmental focus for professional learning."

CT may be best suited to information transmission rather than skills or attitude development as these need more support over extended periods of time, a purpose for which the cascade model is not intended. Information and knowledge are necessary, but insufficient for a practising teacher. ELT is primarily a skills-based profession. Curriculum and lesson planning, materials and activity development. classroom management and counselling skills, all require extensive periods of reflective practise in order to develop. Because of this, any professional development program that seeks to rely on CT as its central training paradigm must examine whether this is actually the best model for the purposes defined in the training targets.

Cascade Training Projects in ELT available online:

(insert if you can find them!)
PEELI: Punjab Education and English Language Initiative BLISS: Bihar Language Initiative for Secondary Schools
Craft, A. (2001). Continuing Professional Development: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Schools. Routledge: London.

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'Cascade Training' (CT) is a term rapidly gaining currency in English Language Teaching (ELT) and more generally in teacher development via the wider field of Human Resources. However in the ELT field it appears to be widely misunderstood and overused to represent training situations that are very far from what the term actually means.

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IATEFL video : relationship between teacher and learner.

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IATEFL video : relationship between teacher and learner.

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Here you will find a selection of plenaries and talks from the annual international IATEFL conference. Watch recordings from previous IATEFL conferences and be sure not to miss talks streamed here live from the next. Presented by English language teaching professionals from around the world, the talks will inform and inspire your teaching and give you ideas to take away, whatever your professional interests.

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Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED

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TO open a new room