Best Articles Circulating The ELT Blogosphere - May 09

The sheer amount of great articles I've been reading recently has been almost overwhelming: a lot of very talented English teachers, authors and teacher trainers from the far-flung corners of the globe have been let lose via their blogs and their fingers are literally flying over keyboards to share knowledge and experiences, democratize education and talk to you.

I've picked a few of my fave's here...


Teaching English

Diamondfingerz has been musing about vocabulary learning - a very well thought out and articulated piece which had me thinking for about a week.

Lindsay Clandfield uncovered six deep dark secrets about the ELT world... while revealing six deep secrets of his own to Sandy McManus. Sandy then went on to write an outrageous post decrying student-centered learning... he scares me sometimes, his blog's a bit like that really popular, well-written, British magazine... Private Eye?

Alex Case has stopped being the world's greatest ELT blogger and has decided to retire and become an economist. The reason EFL classes are so cheap is that they are lemons.

Gavin Dudeney's been polishing up the guns and raised a clarion call regarding teaching, training and educating in 2nd Life. This is a blog to follow if you're interested in investigating this area of teaching, alongwith KipYellowJacket's and Nergiz Kern's excellent adventure and EFL lesson plans.



Tech tips

Simon Bourne's found 5 useful websites for learning with the news and Jamie Keddie - via Carl Dowse have created a webinar (teacher-training seminar) on teaching English with youtube, very worth watching, and Inma Alcázar has been investigating YouTube Edu.

Janet Abruzzo's post on slang dialogue turned me on to making videos using Xtranormal and I've now made 3 so far for the blog I write for ESL language learners!

Such fun, although Anne Hodgson has warned me that the robot voices get old quick... hmmm. What do you think? If you make /made one too - don't hesitate to let me know.

Burcu has written an awesome posting on tools that can help you get organized. One of these is my all-time-fave, however she also has pointed me in the direction of Evernote and MyStickies - hmm... I think I'll delicious these links she gave for now - my physical desk is so cluttered with posties I don't dare start that online ROFL!

After writing a post about what twitter was doing to the English vocabulary, I noticed a great piece on Elena Ruiz's page on txtspeak and saw that Nik Peachey wrote a learning activity based on a poster shown in the UK. He doesn't have students to try it out on at the moment so if you're teaching teens, do download it and let him know what you think.

And speaking of Twitter, if you tried out the lesson plan on figuring out the Business Model of Twitter, then you should enjoy Neal Chambers' list of easy tools to help manage your experience there.

AcademHack have also written an indepth posting on using Twitter in Academia and Aniya Adly has been working with 2 other musketeers to organize an easy system to track all teachers using a #teachertuesday hashtag while Blair on Digital Spaces has written a post about an article that Social Networking is in fact, bad for you!

Blogging with students

Susana Canelo on her DelValle blog took a simpler approach to the lesson I did on Susan Boyle and got her students highly motivated and joining in the conversation and Nastasa came up with a beautiful and original idea of using the other track by Susan, Cry me a River.

Darren Elliot has set up a tumblr blog with his students, read through his objectives and perhaps consider doing the same with your own?


Lesson Plans

Meg Englemann at Business Spotlight has a decent lesson tip using the T-mobile flash mob, perfect for your ESP:advertising classes.

Dave at ESL etc. was a great find: loads of activities with a particular focus on global issues and activism.

And if you somehow managed to miss Claudio's movie segments to assess grammar, check out his Sex & the City posting on the 3rd conditional and to extend my posting on the 2nd conditional use Jumper.

Methodology

Marxist Elf is managing without managers and talking about the politics of peer observation and did you know that Vicki Hollet - yeah, yeah the Vicki Hollet of Business Objectives, Business Opportunities, TechTalk has entered the blogosphere?

A heavyweight contender - she's written a very interesting piece on how right brainers will be ruling the future, for sure (and she introduced me to a new source of authentic videos, via VodPod, one to add to the previous list!).


Misc

As a final note, a posting from HollySuel in Finland caught my eye with its simplicity and surest message: The words we say.


What have you been reading?

Did you enjoy these articles? I sure hope so. Don't hesitate to tell me what you liked and let me know if I missed a super post that we should all read too... (& of course, don't hesitate to email me if you've written something yourself that I should include in the next round-up!)

Best,
Karenne