In this first instalment of a four-part guest series, David Dodgson talks about some of the misconceptions of GBL and the culture of gaming in general. Dave Dodgson is an EFL teacher working with young learners in Turkey. He has always had an interest in the use of technology to enhance the learning experience and … Read more
Last week, Karen White from ELTTeacher2Writer shared a great article from Digiday, in which they asked digital and print media editors to share the best career advice they’d ever received. One item that jumped out at me was this, from Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic magazine: the best general career advice I’ve heard — but have … Read more
Following on from our post on LangApp’s Vocabla platform earlier this month, we thought we’d get a few words from the company’s CEO to learn more about how the company operates. Michal Dyrda is the CEO and founder of Vocabla. He is an entrepreneur with eight years experience in online business and management and focuses primarily … Read more
In our previous post on busuu.com we took a preliminary walk through the platform in order to get better acquainted with the learner experience and how the platform presents learning opportunities to its members. In this post we want to to think about how busuu manages to leverage such effective appeal. How do you get to … Read more
busuu.com is inconceivably big. It is in fact the largest social network for language learning in the world with over 30,000,000 users from 200 countries. That’s more than the population of Uzbekistan. It’s more than the populations of the Czech Republic, Sweden and Austria combined. It’s more than 800 times the size of Liechtenstein, the homeland … Read more
The folks over at Polish startup LangApp have come up with something rather special; a heady mix of vocabulary tutor, social network and shareable media library. It’s a potent brew. Vocabla is a powerful demonstration of how addictive language learning can be whilst also being both effective and entirely free. Its premise is a simple … Read more
More interesting news from adaptive learning technology provider Knewton today, as they announced their latest publisher partnership, this time with Cambridge University Press, and the opening of a new office in London. The partnership will see the Knewton API integrated with the Cambridge LMS platform, which currently serves over 250,000 students and teachers globally. The move … Read more
It’s a common occurrence; as the projects and deadlines start to stack up it gets increasingly difficult to get to the bottom of your inbox let alone move ahead with organising the work that actually needs to be done. Keeping on top of the correspondence and coordinating a team has a knack of becoming an … Read more
We at eltjam are always looking for a more innovative, intuitive way of doing things. One such ‘life hack’ that works incredibly well for managing or collaborating on ELT projects is good ol’ twitter. It can be used as a very slick (and free) platform for communicating and coordinating with your project team. As any … Read more
Back in June, Laurie wrote a piece on crowdfunding in ELT, which lamented the fact that nothing much ELT-related was happening on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. Well, there’s one recently launched project that’s definitely worth a look. Atama-ii Books is the brainchild of, amongst others, Marcos Benevides, a Japan-based teacher, publisher and author. Marcos is well … Read more
I don’t know what it is but we at eltjam are feeling a little nostalgic. It might be that we’ve met our 500th follower on twitter this week. It might be the spate of glorious weather that the UK is revelling in. Who knows? Either way, it’s at times like this that it makes sense … Read more
We understood that our role was to provide good teaching and uplift motivation, within the bounds of a Turk’s experience, understanding and expectation.
‘Brain storming’ solutions in a caffeine-fuelled idea-binge will help the company to realise it has potential, whereas opening your doors to the latest and brightest risk-takers on the scene will help your business to actually realise it’s potential.
Our idea was simple: the goal of almost any adult student over the age of 25 was to be able to speak English effectively. We decided to build a product to address that need and that need alone.
In Part 1 of this post, we had a quick look at the current state of the ELT self-publishing market. If that didn’t scare you off — and I hope it didn’t — here are five tips to help make sure your own self-publishing venture is a success.
Byron Russell is a Director of Woodstock Publishing and Pete Sharma Associates, as well as being the Joint Coordinator of the IATEFL Materials Writing SIG (MaWSIG). You can follow him on Twitter at @byronofcombe. A publishing friend called me up the other day, full of concern – “Cengage!” she said. “It’s bankrupt, you know!” Formerly known … Read more
In case you missed it, last week the UK publishing industry was jolted out of its early-summer slumber when the news broke that Charlie Redmayne was to replace Victoria Barnsley as CEO of Harper Collins UK. In a piece last Friday for The Guardian, entitled Bad week for women in publishing as two giants step down, which also covered the news that Gail Rebuck would be replaced as chief executive of Random House UK (now Penguin Random House, of course) by Penguin’s Tom Weldon, the following caught my eye (my emphasis):
Though both Barnsley, who is 59, and Rebuck, 61, could be as tough as anyone when required, they have been author-centred. “What they’ve done is to enable editors. It’s not that they necessarily are those editors. Authors feel the most enormous respect for them and faith in them,” said the source.
To some extent, the whole concept of EdTech is based on the possibilities for disruption engendered by online and mobile tech. The belief is that the “education space” (ugh) is ripe for disruption, and the “factory model” of education we currently impose on our youth is rightly about to be swept away by an EdTech revolution. But what does EdTech disruption mean for ELT?
So, you think gamification is only for the tech savvy? You think you couldn’t incorporate it into your classroom without having all the latest tech tools? Well, think again! Here are 3 ways to gamify your classroom with and without tech.
The debate over whether royalties for ELT authors are on the way out is raging on the conference circuit and in various corners of the Web. It’s clear that some kind of change is afoot within the industry, but it’s unclear yet just how extensive that change will be, especially for established authors. Here at eltjam, we thought now would be a good time to look at a couple of important issues related to fee-based ELT materials writing, especially on digital projects.
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