Word Clouds for Kids! ABCya is the leader in free educational computer games and mobile apps for kids. The innovation of a grade school teacher, ABCya is an award-winning destination for elementary students that offers hundreds of fun, engaging learning activities. Millions of kids, parents, and teachers visit ABCya.com each month, playing over 1 billion games last year. Apple, The New York Times, USA Today, Parents Magazine and Scholastic, to name just a few, have featured ABCya’s popular educational games. ABCya’s award-winning Preschool computer games and apps are conceived and realized under the direction of a certified technology education teacher, and have been trusted by parents and teachers for ten years. Our educational games are easy to use and classroom friendly, with a focus on the alphabet, numbers, shapes, storybooks, art, music, holidays and much more!
ProjectBritain.com - A resource of British Life and Culture in the UK by Woodlands Junior About me What do you need to know about me? Well, if you're interested in this blog, odds are you work in EFL or education so let's start there. :) I've been working as an EFL teacher in Turkey for since 2000. I initially did my teacher training in Barcelona, Spain and Turkey was the first stop on an international adventure of language teaching and travelling. 11 years on, I'm still here as over the years, the desire to teach language has overtaken the desire to travel. I currently work with children in a private primary school but I have worked with adult learners as well, teaching both general English and prep classes for exams like IELTS, TOEFL and FCE. Beyond that, I have a growing interest in drama in class and I have a growing ambition to work in teacher training (check out the Presentations & Workshops page to see what I've done so far).
Tagxedo - Word Cloud with Styles Principles of Plain English by Mark Nichol Perspicuous written communication is fundamental in every aspect of human interaction — or should I say, “Clear writing is important whenever people interact”? If I support the triumph of plain English over byzantine jargon and sesquipedalianism, I should. Here are five areas in which plain English is, fortunately, making inroads: Business Remember when you saw a delivery truck or a repair van and could tell which products or services it carried or facilitated? Freight companies used to do “trucking,” then they provided “delivery solutions”; now, they’re all about “logistics.” Stationary corporate communications, including Web site copy, press releases, and mission statements, frequently fail to enlighten the target audience as well. Government Law Law Enforcement You’ve seen it time and time again: The chief of police, or a spokesperson, drones on about how an investigation was carried out or how a crisis is being handled. Academia and Scholarship 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Twitter for Professional Development Today I’m doing another introduction to the world of Twitter and blogs, this time for students following the DELTA at IH Newcastle. For those of you who follow my blog, you’ll know that I’ve done a few of these now, and I’m trying to refine the presentation to make it as useful as possible. This time I decided to create a post, then talk teachers through everything referring back to the post so that they can see where to find the information again (while attempting to avoid Death by Blogpost). All feedback appreciated! P.S. How do I find out about what I’m interested in? The amount of information available on Twitter can be a bit overwhelming. Go to Tweetchat and type in a hashtag you’re interested in to find out what kind of information is being shared at the moment. What are all of these strange symbols? Looks interesting. Watch Russell Stannard‘s excellent step-by-step introduction to Twitter and follow his instructions. There are so many people on Twitter. There’s so much stuff here.
Vocabulary revision activities One of the things we do for professional development in the school where I work are so-called ‘experimentation cycles’, where the team chooses a topic, we pool resources (books, resource packs and blog posts with all sorts of activities on the topic), after which everyone who is interested in the topic picks a few activities and tries them out in class. Finally, we organize a workshop to share the activities we liked. This post is a summary of one of these workshops, which was focused on Vocabulary revision activities. As I mentioned above, the activities mostly came from books and the Internet, and I’m sure you’ll see here quite a few ideas that you’ve tried too – so if you have a variation that you love, could you share it? ‘Vocabulary revision’ is a very broad term and activities could be very different in terms of what the learners need to do with the words: am I given something or do I need to retrieve something from memory? Recalling the meaning of an item Test-teach-test Tip. Tip.
Free Trade For more than two centuries economists have steadfastly promoted free trade among nations as the best trade policy. Despite this intellectual barrage, many “practical” men and women continue to view the case for free trade skeptically, as an abstract argument made by ivory tower economists with, at most, one foot on terra firma. These practical people “know” that our vital industries must be protected from foreign competition. The divergence between economists’ beliefs and those of (even well-educated) men and women on the street seems to arise in making the leap from individuals to nations. Adam Smith ’s insight was that precisely the same logic applies to nations. It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.. . . Spain, South Korea, and a variety of other countries manufacture shoes more cheaply than America can. Most people accept this argument. The same idea applies to nations. About the Author