Just a quick notification to members that I did a very casual and informal voice over of my presentation - Using Video In The ELT Classroom. Find it HERE. 

Enjoy and the powerpoint below it can be used to get to the videos shown as examples in the presentation. …

It is a real honor to be awarded the Best Blog post of the month by TeachingEnglish. Especially since it was voted on by fellow teachers!  I'm not a big one for contests or competition in education but I'll take this one seeing it is from my peers and from an organization I…

Benjamin Zander asks teachers everywhere to celebrate students' mistakes. They are evidence of learning and we should applaud them and clap for them.  I know it sounds a little counter intuitive but through…

I've done a lot of sharing of my resources over the last 20 or so years. Now much easier than before, stuffing handouts into big brown envelopes and it taking days/weeks to get to a needy teacher in teachbuktu. I'm a curator at heart, a homeless librarian. 

So time to celebrate. Just got this message from Slideshare, one of the services I've used over the years. …

** Not your ordinary, endless list - just what's number 1.

                              Differentiation

I have thought about this long and hard. I'm not a big proponent of using "tech for tech's sake" or just because it is there and students like it. I sympathize with the argument that…

There is one thing that too often gets left behind in all the post it notes stuck on the door of educational reform: Teacher - student relationships.    Not enough do we hear the message that what education really is about is what invisibly transpires miraculously when a teacher and student connect, really connect.

All of us have had a teacher who really made a difference with us.…

Tomorrow, April 18th at 9:00 am EST  (see your local time) Benjamin Stewart, myself and a few others will be holding a hangout on the topic of "The Flipped Classroom".  Here's …

You got to love Dr. Seuss! Also try this "Oh The Places You'll Go" powerpoint

. …

Yesterday, exhausted after a full day of speaking with people around the world, stressed out and with lots of "life"on my mind, I stepped back and watched a TED Talk I've been meaning to watch for awhile:  The 3 A's of Awesome. 

If you have 20 minutes to spare in your life - WATCH IT!  Neil…

I'm always keeping up on what's new in the world of visual text - be it kinetic typography, wordle, tagxedo and loads of other similar applications. They are truly something valuable for us educators - allowing us to add…

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” – Fredrich Nietzsche

We could also say "Without music, teaching would be a mistake!" Music just makes any teaching job, no matter how hard, enjoyable.

We also say, “Music makes the world go ‘round” but it also makes learning happen.  Please…

Metaphors are powerful things for teachers.  They are the very building blocks of thought and allow us to see what isn't there, to connect on a higher level to hidden realities.   Cynthia Ozick in her timeless essay, "Metaphor and Memory"  talks of metaphor as

"inhabiting language in its most concrete. As the shocking extension of the unknown into our most intimate, most feeling, most…

This one is a small carnival but nonetheless a carnival. Small is beautiful, isn't it? 

Read the blog carnival entries below and a big thank you to all who participated and are helping to keep the blog carnival for ELT alive. 

Vist the ELT…

Over the last 5 to 10 years, I've been developing new ideas about how we should be teaching in our classrooms.   These ideas have changed as the possibilities and promises of educational technology have become reality.

The most fundamental of these ideas are always revolving around learning and the student. The possibility to differentiate and deliver personlized study to students is the most…

Here are some recent conversations of note with many comments and insights. Check them out!  Lots of intelligent, insightful thoughts from educators around the world. 

(not a member of the group? Please join, just takes a second.)

1.  Tell Me A Word I…

Games are wonderful to use in our classrooms, a must.  

See below, many of the well researched reasons we should be using them in our teaching.

Nowadays, with online resources and resource sharing, there is no longer any excuse for not using games. So many ways and so many options. 

Here are a few…

Now and then, I post on my twitter @ddeubel , some "tired teacher tips". Things that a teacher can just put up on a screen with a click and get students learning/producing English.

I'll post another time about these (the hashtag is #tttips) but I want…

Today I offer my Top 5 that are more "traditional".

By that I mean they are more controlled and less authentic. Quizzes, Q and A trivia, mix and match, multiple choice - you get the idea. Still, if done well, they can be really effective learning tools or even assessment tools. They are meant to be used by students at home or in a language lab but can also be used in a classroom with a large…

I spent part of the morning rereading Frank Smith, particularly his thoughts about how we learn. Delightful, insightful, thoughtful.  Here's an excerpt from his book: Comprehension and Learning but I also highly recommend his book about whole language,…

I will be travelling quite a bit this year to conferences and schools, speaking about a teaching lifelong passion - the use of video as an educational material. It is something I've promoted and developed many language learning ideas around - foremost through my work on EnglishCentral.

So enjoy these practical ideas for using this most "real"…