It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more
The editor’s lot is not always a happy one. Do your job well and no-one notices; make a mistake and suddenly everyone’s looking right at you. But here are a couple of tips that might help.
Part 2 of a 2-part post from English360 CEO, Cleve Miller.
The value of open platforms in blended learning is not really about what happens online, it’s about what happens in the classroom …
In a previous post we heard from Kris Jagasia on how his startup EdTech company TurksLearnEnglish had recognised and acted on an opportunity they identified within the Turkish language education market. Kris returns to eltjam to tell us about another learning platform he and his team have developed to aid the private language tutor, and how 1-to-1 lessons differ to full-class teaching. Kris, it’s over to you …
Part 1 of a 2-part post from English360 CEO, Cleve Miller.
The debate over adaptive learning at eltjam, Philip Kerr’s blog, and Nicola Prentis’ Simple English has been both fascinating and instructive. It’s a fun topic because it involves our core beliefs regarding language acquisition, effective teaching, and the roles that technology can play. That said, I can’t help but feel that in some respects we’re thinking about adaptive learning in a limited way.
We don’t know if Adaptive Learning will work for students. We use methods that don’t work for everyone already.
This one’s been on my mind a while. Sometimes I wonder if we look at EdTech from a narrow perspective. The post below explains why.
Outsourcing is well established in publishing but is often poorly understood and managed. How do we get the most out of outsourcing? How do we work effectively with external partners? And how do we protect our teams from a real danger of outsourcing?
The second of a two-part series, by Scott Thornbury
Textbooks, generally speaking, don’t score high on the originality stakes. And for good reason.
The first of a two-part series, by Scott Thornbury
Learning linguistic items is not a linear process – learners do not master one item and then move on to another. In fact, the learning curve for a single item is not linear either. The curve is filled with peaks and valleys, progress and backslidings.
The world of ELT is becoming digital, and the age of the writer is over – or so we’re told. But is it? Steve Elsworth argues that publishers want to produce content on their own, but they don’t have the wherewithal. Will the future be the province of Boys With Toys? Will creativity be stifled by the Dead Hand of Publishing? And where is the small mammal that will revolutionise the teaching of ELT?
Are writers’ attitudes to royalties realistic? Or have they simply got used to a system that is actually very strange?
I feel we’re sticking to the same old ways of working, producing similar content for a similar publishing industry, thus confining learners to a similar path.
I’d go out on a limb here and suggest that the SR element of the Duolingo approach is more gimmick than gristle.
It is educational publishers, in partnership with the educators and the learners who are their customers, who are best placed to show the world how this great deluge of information can best be mediated because that is their business and always has been.
Some fundamental aspects of games should not be forgotten when an ‘educational game’ is designed, such as finding a balance between giving the player a sense of progress and the feeling of being challenged.
The problem was that no technology connected what I did in class to the rest of my life.
Way back in June we wrote about GlassLab’s partnership with Pearson and Electronic Arts and their collective efforts to develop a game-based learning product out of SimCity. Well, GlassLab launched the first edition of this hugely anticipated super game earlier in November. Called SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! The game puts learners in contact with a hugely effective … Read more
It often seems like a curious by-product of ELT ‘in action’; speaking out loud in English. Given that spoken interactions are scintillating moments of language in its most alive state, it’s remarkable how speaking (as a facet of the language learning process) is often subservient to the learning of grammar and vocabulary. As Scott Thornbury … Read more
Yudu Media have conducted an extensive review of the trends emerging across the ELT digital publishing landscape and are sharing their insightful findings in an openly available white paper.
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