At ELTjam, we’re always interested in hearing from teachers working with technology at the coal face. In this post, UK-based teacher and CELTA trainer, Sam Shepherd, reflects on the case for and against blended learning.
One of the great things about running ELTjam HQ from a co-working space is the different people and businesses working alongside you. We were amazed the other week to find that, unbeknownst to us, fellow co-worker and entrepreneur Marcel Goya has been working away on LinguSocial, a platform for voice translation that could change everything.
We invited speakers at the Innovate ELT conference to submit write-ups of their talks and this is the first. Here, materials writer Claire Hart reflects on an increasingly common role for writers: adapting print content for digital delivery.
ELT Entrepreneur Mark Holmwood of Holmwood Online got in touch with us to tell us about his transition from the classroom to the cutting room, making videos for his online publishing site which produces courses for schools and individuals in English and Chinese.
ELTjam blog reader and app-developer-in-training, Damien Herlihy, tells us about how he approached his app as a learning experience rather than a business and his attempts at crowdsourcing input and feedback from teachers.
At IATEFL 2014, ELTjam argued that the ELT community needed to engage more with the world of educational technology (EdTech) in order to continue to thrive. One year on, we looked at what that engagement might actually look like, examining how teachers, institutions, publishers and materials writers can best position themselves in the new ELT landscape.
John Pettigrew has gone from working for publishers to bring his expertise to his own company, Futureproofs, a web-based platform that helps teams of authors, editors and designers to make sure that the books they work on are correct before they’re published.
When this blog was brand new (nearly two years ago), I stumbled across a post by a French indie app developer called Pierre Abel who was having great success by focussing on educational iPad apps for young learners. As someone who had spent quite a lot of time and effort trying to develop successful ELT apps while working in-house at an ELT publisher, I was interested in how an independent developer had approached it, and whether I could find any useful lessons that ELT app publishers could apply. I thought it would be interesting to see how he’s done since then and whether the same lessons still apply.
Founded by Karen Spiller, Karen White and best-selling ELT author Sue Kay (Inside Out, Reward Resource Packs, Focus) to help connect writers with publishers. It also publishes training ebooks.
In 2013, we ran two posts where Lindsay Rattray explained the opportunity he saw in bringing together the pedagogy of ELT and the power of inter-connected mobile technology. His startup, ClassWired, was a way to do student-centred ELT activities in class. It was web-based to work on any device. It gave you information about your class, like how fast your students are working, and what they are finding difficult. In fact, Lindsay was an early ELT Entrepreneur, asking questions and looking for answers from an ELT teaching and EdTech perspective. Picking up his story almost two years on, it’s interesting to see how the questions have changed, fundamentally.
We’ve been featuring ELT Entrepreneurs and EdTech start-ups for a few months now and we have tended to focus on those who are quite far down the line in terms of their business and product. But what do they look like at the beginning of the journey? Last May, ELTjam co-organised an EdTech Start Up Weekend with the Judge Business School. At the time we commented on how few educators there were in the room and it was no surprise that it took educational insight more than tech to come up with the idea that won: Bright Stream.
Jonathan Dykes runs a group of language schools in Barcelona as well as one of the first Web-based schools, Net Languages, which makes for a unique perspective on the merits and shortcomings of both.
Teachers in mainstream education in English-speaking countries increasingly have to plan lessons to help integrate students whose first language isn’t English. That’s quite a challenge and we’ve asked Nina Berler, who teaches in the US to tell us about some of the tools she uses. It wasn’t so long ago that teachers of mainstream classes were instructed to “teach to the middle.” Of course, when it comes to learning vocabulary, that methodology can’t possibly benefit students on either end of the spectrum. Fortunately, in this era of digital learning, teachers have tools to boost vocabulary and reduce gaps in their classes.
Next in our series on people who’ve made the break into ELT Entrepreneurship is the three man team behind StudyBundles, an English language teaching and learning digital product provider specialising in preparatory pre-arrival courses for learners who want to study in English medium Higher Education.
You’ve got an idea but what is the first step of building an app? Is it sharing a great idea with someone you think has the expertise or resources to make it happen? What’s going to get them on board if it is? Or is it working on the app idea yourself? And if so, how much should you do before approaching someone else? Here are ten steps to start you on the right track.
Philip Kerr takes a look at the video-based language learning platform, FluentU.
More than a million people a day connect to Duolingo, an app which causes much derision in ELT circles with attacks on its pedagogical validity. But what happens if you judge it through the prism of research into Second Language Acquisition? Geoff Jordan finds out.
The latest in our series looking at ELT-ers who’ve ventured out into business alone looks at the recent winners of the David Riley Award, Simple English Videos run by husband and wife team Vicki Hollett and Jay Silber. And, in keeping with their business, they offered to do their interview in video format.
We thought it might be worth taking a look to see if our predictions regarding Augmented Reality turned out to be accurate, or if we were jumping any number of guns …
In the latest in our series spotlighting entrepreneurs from within the ELT community, we talk to Robert Hanley about English Bubble and his journey from teacher to businessman.
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