edtech Archives - Page 2 of 6

Selecting and Implementing Vocabulary Tools for Mainstream Classes

January 31, 2020February 3, 2015 by Nina Berler

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.

What is it you do again? Four new jobs in ELT

January 30, 2020January 30, 2015 by Blog Editor

As ELT goes digital and expands into multi-faceted, multi-platform products (but with books not set to disappear anytime soon) and publishers restructuring all over the place, you might find yourself, as an author or editor, dealing with people with a whole array of unfamiliar job titles. Most of the people who do these jobs find themselves constantly answering the question “What is it exactly you do?” — if their blogs are anything to go by. To save you being that person at the coffee machine, here’s a rundown of some of the more common roles.

To app or not to app?

January 30, 2020January 27, 2015 by Blog Editor

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.

Geoff Jordan vs. Duolingo

January 31, 2020January 14, 2015 by Geoff Jordan

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.

AR we there yet?

January 30, 2020January 8, 2015 by Tim Gifford

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 …

ELT Entrepreneurs – Marcos Benevides

January 30, 2020November 3, 2014 by Blog Editor

We’ve been watching Marcos Benevides and his team at Atama-ii Books for over a year as their series of Choose Your Own Adventure Graded Readers went from an idea to a crowdfunding success to an actual out-now-and-buyable books. This is the first in what we hope to be a series of posts looking at what happens behind the scenes to ELT Entrepreneurs during their journey.

Brainly: Can ELT learn from social learning?

January 30, 2020October 29, 2014 by Nicola Prentis

I wasn’t brilliant at physics at secondary school. I managed in class, though, with the help of my peers which you could call social learning. Pre-internet, that social network was confined to the real world – and occasional phone calls. Homework wasn’t generally a topic of conversation but I don’t think I had anything like the 2-3 hours school children can have today. On one occasion, my homework included a question about light refraction and where a fish would appear to be to an observer from the surface as opposed to where it actually was. I couldn’t answer, so I just wrote “Don’t know” and handed it in.

Exploring the British Council MOOC

January 30, 2020October 15, 2014 by Nicola Prentis

Either ELTjam and its community of commenters can see the future, or the British Council closely followed this post from January 2013 when they created their 6-week course Exploring English Language and Culture in partnership with FutureLearn.

There’s one critical difference, though. ELTjam thought an ELT MOOC probably wouldn’t work. The British Council made sure that it did. Although, as we’ll see, that does depend on your definition of ‘work’.

Learning on Rails

January 30, 2020August 22, 2014 by Brian Anderson

It’s possible that we’ll discover that providing the student with highly relevant, engaging content will be more effective than crafting learning experiences on rails (à la our current, item-response-theory-influenced “adaptive learning”).

I Talked Tech with my Students

January 31, 2020August 6, 2014 by David Harbinson

Today sees a guest post from David Harbinson. David has been an English language teacher in Daegu, South Korea, since 2007. He is currently a freelance teacher working mainly for a private language academy catering to adults in Daegu. He can be found on Twitter (@DavidHarbinson) and his blog is http://davidharbinson.com. Over to you, David… Korea … Read more

Learnification

January 30, 2020July 30, 2014 by Philip Kerr

We now have young learners and very young learners, learner differences and learner profiles, learning styles, learner training, learner independence and autonomy, learning technologies, life-long learning, learning management systems, virtual learning environments, learning outcomes, learning analytics and adaptive learning. Much, but not perhaps all, of this is to the good, but it’s easy to forget … Read more

Why it's OK for Facebook to manipulate us, but not EdTech companies

Why it’s OK for Facebook to manipulate us (but not for EdTech companies?)

January 30, 2020July 18, 2014 by Lindsay Rattray

Is adaptive learning ethical? Is it OK to experiment on one set of learners to improve results for another? Do EdTech companies have a higher duty of care to their users than regular businesses?

Developing our own MVP – Flovoco

January 30, 2020July 9, 2014 by Jo Sayers

On my first day at ELTjam, I was pitched at. Tim, Laurie and Nick (the ELTjam founders) sat me down and tried to sell me their product ideas. This week, we take the first step towards testing whether one of these ideas can become a viable ELT product. Today sees the launch of the flovo.co landing page, our own MVP, a little litmus test. But how did we get to this point and why have we made a webpage before the app is ready?

5 things we need to know about BIG data

January 30, 2020July 1, 2014 by Tim Gifford

When it comes to buzzwords you don’t get much bigger than ‘big data’. Here are a few notes that might help us navigate the topic …

What students want from EdTech

January 30, 2020June 26, 2014 by Lindsay Rattray

When I suggested we need an ongoing discussion with our students about EdTech, the responses varied. Some comments were made about the validity of the questions, and what inferences could be drawn from them. They were mostly fair, but I wonder if we’re learning as much as we can from the way the startup world does user feedback.

Interview with a publisher Pt. 3/3

January 30, 2020June 25, 2014 by Tim Gifford

And so my interview with John Tuttle draws to a close with this final instalment. So far we’ve covered the evolution of the ELT industry and the how the role of publisher will continue to develop, and what the future may hold for ‘guru’ authors and the new generation of content writers. Now our conversation turns to adaptive learning and what lies ahead in the world of EdTech …

Review: Lingua.ly

January 30, 2020June 23, 2014 by Jo Sayers

Lingua.ly offers learners an opportunity to look up and save words they come across when reading online articles in another language and then recommends relevant texts for the learners to read in order to extend their vocabulary and improve their reading skills. Users can click on any word in an article they are reading online and, after … Read more

The Sirius Programme

January 30, 2020June 19, 2014 by Tim Gifford

We’ve looked at a few publisher-backed incubators and accelerators on the blog, but this is the first time we’ve encountered one that is backed by the UK Government itself.

Interview with a publisher Pt. 2/3

January 30, 2020June 18, 2014 by Tim Gifford

In the previous instalment of our interview with former Deputy MD of Cambridge University Press, John Tuttle we talked about how the ELT publishing industry has evolved and some of the factors that have contributed to that evolution. In this post, our conversation turns to the role of the author in ELT publishing and how that might change over time.

How could SLA research inform EdTech?

January 31, 2020June 16, 2014 by Scott Thornbury

The criteria for evaluating the worth of any language learning software must include some assessment of its fitness for purpose. That is to say, does it facilitate learning? But how do you measure this? Short of empirically testing the software on a representative cross-section of learners, we need a rubric according to which the learning power of the item can be estimated. And this rubric should, ideally, be informed by our current understandings of how second languages are best learned, understandings which are in turn derived from the findings of researchers of second language acquisition (SLA).