English UK Management Conference, Birmingham March 2009

I've just returned from the English UK Management Conference in Birmingham where I gave a presentation on the Practical Uses of Technology in the EFL Classroom to a large audience of School Directors and Directors of Studies. Although a little rushed towards the end, the presentation seemed to be well received and hopefully gave everyone there a few ideas of how technology can be used nowadays. If you would like to download the PowerPoint presentation slides, please click here (1.3MB PDF).

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this training further, please do not hesitate to contact me at richard@tefltech.com.

Take part in Cardiff Online!

With only a couple of months to go before this year's IATEFL conference, the online presence is already starting to grow. Click on the image to go through to the official IATEFL website.

This year promises to be even bigger and better with more abstracts, audio and video of the conference plus the chance to contribute to the debate.

If you're going, be sure to drop by to my presentation on the Thursday to say hi. If not, I'll see you online!

Obama's Inauguration Speech Word Cloud

From wordle.net.

Windows Live Writer

Just trying out Windows Live Writer... a slightly easier way to publish blog posts.  As it is a downloaded piece of software, adding images, videos etc is a lot quicker than having to wait for them to upload before publishing.  Another nice advantage is that it can download any customised styles/templates you have set up on your blog, so you get a "live preview" - you're writing as it will appear on the blog.

Free and compatible with most blog services, might be worth a look...

SMART Master Certification

Well, happy new year to everyone and it has certainly started well for TEFLTech! I can now proudly announce I am a certified SMART Master Trainer!

This has come as a result of attending a rigorous training course at Steljes (the sole UK importer of SMARTBoards) last year and successfully completing the post-training assignment. I am now one of a handful of companies (and the sole company involved with TEFL) that are fully qualified to train anyone involved in education on the functions of a SMARTBoard. This is particularly relevant as I am trained in the latest version of the software, version 10, which is radically new and enables teachers to produce some really motivating lesson material.

Please do get in touch if you would like further information.

Sussex DOSA Presentation

Last night, I gave a presentation to around 30 teachers in Brighton on the topic of Using Technology in the Classroom. As it was only an hour, it was tricky to squeeze so much information in, but hopefully everyone went away with an idea or two.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation:

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Using Powerpoint in the Classroom

Please find below a Powerpoint presentation that I created for a recent lesson on authentic reading. This lesson looked at the collocations involved in describing famous places for a Pre-Intermediate class. It was projected on to the whiteboard and the students came forward to take part in the reading races, providing some healthy competition and motivation to win!

| View | Upload your own

The students really responded well to the stimulus and it made for a very useful lesson. I think Powerpoint is an exceptionally useful tool to master not only with the introduction of Interactive White Boards in the classroom, but also for online teaching. Most web conferencing tools such as WiZiQ, Adobe Connect, and Elluminate all have the capacity to present PPT files.