Hot Potatoes has been around for quite a while in the field of educational technology. Yes, the design is a little archaic and drab, but that just goes to show that its functions and user-friendliness withstand the test of time. If you're looking to generate quizzes and all sorts of exercises, ranging from cloze, matching, to crossword on a computer program without having...

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Tag or word clouds are known to be crowd favourites in the education world, both for the purposes of lexical development or literacy and for decoration (they're just so pretty to look at!). A word cloud is literally a group of frequently occurring words from a text clumped together into a cloud-like shape with the most frequent words appearing larger,  while tag clouds...

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It's said that people's number one fear is not actually dying; it's public speaking! I, myself, break out in cold sweat when having to speak in L1 in front of an audience - imagine how daunting it is for students to have to speak publicly in a language they don't usually communicate in. This is what is referred to as foreign language apprehension,...

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Mobile-Assisted-Language Learning (MALL) has been rather favourable since its first appearance in 2009 with language learning mobile apps, such as those from the British Council and popular English video search engines and podcasts like FluentU and Podbean. It's great that these apps enable learners to practice independently in their own time, but MALL also fosters learning and exploration inside the classroom just as...

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EduCanon is such a straightforward and effective tool for making listening practice within and outside the classroom more interactive. If I had a pound each time I hear a classmate or tutor say the words "use authentic materials", I would be pretty loaded (I'm currently taking an MA in ELT if you don't already know). Yes, I'm on board with the whole idea...

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I have tingles for Thinglink! As they say "a picture speaks a thousand words", I can't stress enough how great this tool is. This website lets you upload pictures and make them interactive by adding tags (just like Facebook I suppose) and linking them to web pages or videos.  Thinglink will get your students to brush up on their reading and listening -...

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In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I thought I might share with you a fantastic online tool for Blended Learning called Blendspace. Flipping classrooms with blended learning has been quite a hot topic in the last few years, but not just because it's the hot new thing in education. It really does shake things up because with blended learning, you can balance out...

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A common doubt that we, language teachers, often have is whether our lessons allow enough production time for our students to produce meaningful output. For novice teachers like me, it's easy to fall into the trap of stuffing down exercises or "testing" previous knowledge. Collaborative learning seems like the doable way-out since it shifts the focus onto the learners and promotes features of...

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A tutor of mine once told me that for a student to internalise or completely "acquire" a word correctly, s/he would need to read the word 11 times! Now we can't expect our students to be that committed in reviewing their vocabulary list, and we certainly don't have time in class to keep reinforcing the same words for that many times. How can...

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At times lesson planning can become a tedious chore for teachers, especially if we keep recycling the same materials over and over again. How do we make sure our lessons are dynamic, exciting and memorable for our students? I think it's always good to look for new materials and incorporate different approaches, one of which is benefitting from ICT.  A particularly good blog...

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