| 1 Set students a 28-day challenge for their English learning: Students make a pledge of something they’re going to do in the next 28 days to improve their vocabulary or a particular skill. In pairs, they make short videos outlining their pledge and, if possible, share the videos with you. 28 days later, ask students to review the video and discuss their experiences with the class, e.g. What did they try? Was it successful? Will they continue to do it? Oddly, the videoing of their promise seems to give them more impetus to keep it.
| 2 Lecture summary: Students either attend a lecture or watch a TED talk online. They then use their mobile phone to record themselves trying to summarise the key points in no more than a minute and share the video or audio with you. This allows you to give targeted feedback on both their summary skills and their spoken English.
| 3 ***Evernote or Google Keep to record vocabulary*** Ask students to use one of these tools to record new vocabulary they learn over the course of a week. After a week, ask them to consider the benefits and disadvantages of this method. This can be made more collaborative by asking students to share their notes with other students electronically.
| 4 Photos for speculation (warmer): Take some close-up photos of everyday objects. Email them to yourself or post them on your VLE. Show them on the projector screen and get students to speculate what the objects are. Students then go and take their own photos of different objects, come back and show their photos to a partner or group and repeat the speculation. Alternatively, students upload their photos to the VLE and the whole class speculates together.
| 5 Number dictation: Dictate equations to students, making sure you include plenty of problem pairs like 16 & 60, and ask the students to enter it in their mobile phone calculators. Do they get the same result as you? Students can then dictate their own equations to each other in pairs. If your students have smartphones, this can be adapted to take in more complex mathematical equations as most smartphones now incorporate a scientific calculator (to access this on both IOS and Android devices, open the calculator and turn the screen to landscape orientation).
| 6 Am I saying it right? Most phones today allow the user to dictate text. This can be a great way to check clarity of pronunciation. At a simple level, you can write words on the board and ask students to voice search for it on Google by clicking the microphone icon. Do they get the required result?If students have a note-taking function that allows them to dictate text, this activity can be made more challenging by asking them to dictate a whole text and then compare their version with the original.
| 7 Memorable photos: Most students (and teachers) have some photos on their phones that they are loath to erase (have I assailed you with photos of my daughter yet?). Most teachers are also aware that students struggle with question forms. Put the two together by showing two or three photos of your own on the projector screen and asking students to ask any questions they like about them. Only answer a question when it’s been correctly formulated. After students have asked you questions, ask them to choose three significant photos on their phones. They should show them to a partner and answer their partner’s questions.
| 8 ***Tweet a concept*** Elicit from students the maximum character limit in twitter (140 characters, for now, but they’re trialling 280). Ask students to summarise a key concept from their discipline so that it can be tweeted. If students are connected to twitter, they can tweet them with a hashtag that identifies your class, e.g. #AEPC05. Searching for this hashtag would then allow the teacher to show a collated list of the concepts on the projector screen for discussion, comparison, etc.A possible follow-up here is to ask students to search for key academics and/or academic journals related to their discipline on twitter. Following them can be a good way to keep abreast of new developments and publications.
| 9 ***Explain the process*** Students show an app they use regularly to a partner and explain how they use it and/or how the app works. Useful practice for students for Part 1 of IELTS writing.
| 10 ***Dictionary comparison*** One of the hardest challenges facing an EAP teacher can be weaning students off reliance on the bilingual dictionaries they often have installed on their phones. Probably the only way to do this is to show them there are better monolingual dictionaries out there. Although it’s often expensive to download apps such as the Cambridge Dictionary app, the web versions give the same functionality. So, if students have access to the web, ask them to look up five to ten words on their bilingual dictionary (choose words they often get wrong) and then to look the same words up on a site like dictionary.cambridge.org or www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ and compare the information the monolingual dictionaries give. What differences do they note?
| 11 ***QR codes*** If you know how to create QR codes, you can get students moving around the classroom and learning at the same time. Before class, create a set of QR codes that link to a series of online documents. The documents can contain anything from single items of lexis you will be focussing on in class to short passages of texts or even images. Pin the QR codes around the class (preferably in places students might not immediately guess, e.g. the side of your desk) and challenge them to work in pairs to find the QR codes and collate lexis, scan texts, correct sentences, etc.
| 12 A selfie tour: The Kardashians aren’t the only ones who can use selfies. Give students a document (or a link to one) with instructions that require them to move around your city and/or campus. The instructions can be as mundane or as cryptic as you think your students can cope with, but they should always have the end result of getting them to a place where they need to take a picture of themselves, e.g. ‘Take a picture of yourself in front of the Student Accommodation Office’; ‘Take a picture of yourself with the book you find at Western Bank Library PEARCE 2478.’ Students bring the selfies in to class as their homework answers. This tour can then be followed up with discussion questions about the buildings, the experience, the range of facilities on offer to them on campus, etc. Although particularly useful for disciplines such as architecture and geography, this activity can also be a helpful way for students to get to know the campus/city. The word ‘selfie’ itself can lead into a useful discussion/study of neologisms and linguistic fashions in English, while it also links nicely to discussions of celebrity culture and/or privacy. See this lesson on Film English for another way to exploit selfies as a concept.

Timmis, Ivor. Corpus Linguistics for ELT : Research and Practice. Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides. 2015.

Weisser, Martin. Practical Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction to Corpus-Based Language Analysis. John Wiley. 2016.

As a result of using Padlet, I have overcome some of the problems previously encountered with paper-based portfolios. One of the issues that I used to face was that some of my students would forget to bring their portfolios to class. However, as Padlet is a live online document, this is no longer an issue/excuse that they can use. A second benefit of using Padlet is that I have been able to view and mark my students' work without having to take their portfolios from them. As such, they have not been prevented from adding to their portfolios, whilst waiting for me to mark and return them. Another positive is that Padlets can be made to look professional and presentable, whereas my students paper-based portfolios used to be quite tatty and poorly maintained. This means that the students have taken greater pride in their work. Further to this, students are able to take ownership of their portfolios, as they can personalise their Padlets by choosing their own background images and layout.