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 of using materials that are not originally designed for language learning or teaching purposes on the condition that their difficulty level is just high enough for students to comprehend (hence Krashen's comprehensible input theory) and contextually-relevant enough that students would be able to relate and respond personally to the content. But how do we go about tweaking these authentic resources for learners to process and deduce its linguistic patterns to be able to reproduce later on? EduCanon will take this heavy load of material design off your shoulders.

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 - perhaps more on the receptive skills than productive - and have them immersed in the topics of the lesson. Hovering over the tags and scanning through the websites is so lively and entertaining for students because it's completely innovative (if you compare to boring PowerPoint slides)! You can even set up quizzes or polls that you can link to the image on Thinglink making the learning more personal and dynamic. 

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 your guidance to reach more students, which you can't maximally do with the time and place restrictions of face-to-face interaction. Students can learn at their own pace, get greater access to knowledge and have more interaction with peers.  Of course, all these positive responses to flipped classrooms come when we design blended learning materials pedagogically and aesthetically well. Blendspace (formerly known as EdCanvas) will do just the trick. 

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 scaffolding, but as the infamous saying goes, it is easier said than done. In this post, I'll be sharing about Stormboard, originally designed for business and industry team organisation, but will do wonders in constructing a truly collaborative learning experience in the ELT classroom.