Technology for Business English
The latest business English e-lesson from Macmillan is on social networking and business etiquette: what do you do if your boss invites you to join his or her Facebook site?
Download the lesson now - unless you want me to write on your wall…….
Lindsay Clanfield has just started a new website dedicated to this style of presentation. Worth a visit if you didn’t see the exhilarating event at this year’s IATEFL conference in Exeter. You now have just six minutes and 40 seconds to enjoy Lindsay’s site…
There’s still time to benefit from the early bird registration fee for the next Blended Learning course!
This week, the Guardian’s technology in teaching supplement, The Link, included some very enthusiastic reviews of the newest interactive whiteboards and software from Hitachi, Promethean and Smart.
Hi to everyone from Turkey who attended last week’s session on technolgy in Oxford.
The web-sites suggsted by participants included many favourites, such as Google, OneStopEnglish, the BBC, British Council etc.
Also, some interesting sites which I have put on a Handout. The list includes a number of sites for kids. Hope it proves useful!
Good luck and hope to see you again someday! Maybe on one of the Blended Learning courses later this year?
Â
Thanks to everyone who came to the sessions in Cork and Dublin!
Many of the web-sites suggested were well-known sites such as the BBC, the search engine Google, and ELT publishers sites like OneStopEnglish.
Here is a handout with some of the participant suggestions. Hope it is useul. If you want to let other participants know about any other sites, just use the ‘Comments’ part of this blog!
Hope to see you again - maybe at the Blended Learning course in Markdorf!
The lastest e-lesson looks at a phenomenon from the world of presentations - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide.
To download the free lesson, vist the Macmillan business website.
For more on the Petra Kucha evening at IATEFL, Exeter, see the second edition of our popular newsletter - out soon!
Â
Thanks to all who cam to the session last Friday in Berlin.
Here is the link to download a list of useful websites.
Here is the link to download the handouts - Conditional conundrum and Dictionary Comparision.
Many of the sites on the participant-produced sites are well-known - BBC, OneStopEnglish etc. so I have not included them on the handout. However, if there are other sites you wish to let others who attended the session know about, please mail them over, using comments button below.
I hope you enjoyed the afternoon as much as I did and hope to see you again - maybe on the Blended Learning course in Markdorf!
Sometimes life as a reviewer is heaven. Each day, the postman brings more books. The latest book I am looking at is in the Macmillan Vocabulary Practice Series and is called Science.
It contains a word mapping tool for every topic, allowing users to create and save word maps. These are saved as a bitmap image and can be printed out by learners. Interesting software…..and easy to use.
Macmillan have started a youtube channel They will be adding videos from the IATEFL conference over the coming weeks. Video clips from various luminaries (Adrian Underhill, Scott Thornbury) have already been posted.
Yesterday, I was in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, running a session on In Company for teachers teaching in company and In Company.
Their students work in the automobile indsutry, and hopefully teachers and students will appreciate the latest business English e-lesson, on the takeover of Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata motors.
So, drive it away….
Â
Wow - just finishing the week at the IATEFL conference, where technology remains as vital and current an issue as ever….watch out for our next Newsletter which will include a conference report on the technology sessions!Â
Huge congratulations to Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly for their book on Technology, which has won the Ben Warren Trust prize!
Great news that the winner is a book on integrating technology into language teaching!
As for Barney and I….delighted to have been shortlisted and…we’ll always have Paris…:-)
I am at the moment in a break in the IATEFL Learning Technologies pre-conference event.
To listen to our attempt, please click on: Guess the city
We made this:
Barbara Gardner / Diego Rascon/ Elizabeth Mader!
Give it a listen!
Have you read about the new e-book reader from Amazon?
Don’t just read about it - download the latest Macmillan business English e-lesson about it!
Visit their web-site. Enjoy - you’ll have to print it out and read a hard copy - there is no e-book reader version……yet!
I have just accessed the EL Gazette Digital. At the moment, it comes out just after the print version, but will soon run parallel.
Click on an article to bring it up in a readable on-screen format. I managed to catch up on this article about the Ben Warren Prize shortlist! Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Thanks to the hundreds of subscribers to our Newsletter. We hope you have enjoyed the first issue!
If you have subscribed and not received your reply, check your spam!
Some e-mails have bounced back. If our reply was undeliverable, we have put your name below. Please contact us again and we will re-send the Newsletter. Thank you.
Best wishes
———————————————————————-
I’ve finally had the opportunity to sit down with a computer running Windows Vista and a pile of CD-ROMs to see whether all/any of the software we use with our learners runs happily under Microsoft’s latest operating system.
We are about to remove our faithful but tired HP PCs from the self-access room and replace them with new Dells loaded with Vista. However, the obvious question was: could we set up these computers with the same software so that the change-over would have a minimum impact for users.
So far, the answer has been “yes” to everything.
The following is a list of the programs we have become used to having at our finger tips and often integrate into our lessons. This is not an exhaustive list of all the available software on the market but represents the choices made by the staff of one busy business English language centre.
Our typical set-up includes:
The only thing I had to do to ensure everything installed and ran smoothly was to up-date to the very latest version of Flash Player.
Has anyone had any successes or failures with running their favourite CD-ROMs on a computer with Windows Vista?
Is You.Tube full of rubbish? full of interesting clips? Both?
Jamie Keddie, a teacher trainer based in Spain, has recently set up http://www.teflclips.com/ – a site dedicated to the possibilities for using YouTube and other video sharing sites in the classroom. One of the main goals of the project is to build up a bank of links to video clips which may be of use to English teachers.
Read more about using YuTube in the Spring edition of the CALL Newsletter, which will be out next month.
Happy Easter to all our readers, and those newly subscribed to the te4be Newsletter.
I am looking forward to meeting the many teachers coming to the presentations in Russia next week.
Barney and I will BOTH be at IATEFL. There’s small window of opportunity when we are there at the same time…a rare chance to get a double signature on our Blended Learning title….making it very E-Bayable some day. Please come up and say ‘hi’ if you are attending….