On the fifth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  FIVE FAVOURITE THINGS Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way: 12 blogs worth clutching 11 tips for writing 10 tricks for reading 9 pretty pictures 8 talks worth ...

One of the contributors to the debate on student fees in UK universities raised an interesting point the other week.  Roger Moss, in breaking down the fees students pay when compared to what they get, calculated that they paid approximately £92 per seminar.  What else, he wondered in his letter to The Independent, could they have spent the money ...

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners… ESL-Galaxy has it’s usual great selection of flashcards, crosswords, wordsearches ...

  A nice cross-curricular site for all those teachers with budding Cristiano Ronaldos in their classrooms!   But with plenty for those of us who love the game but are never going to make it on the pitch! Premier Skills English is a collaboration between the UK Premier League and the British Council and it hosts a wealth of teaching resources ...

This was the question posed the other week on my MA discussion boards:  ”Based on your teaching experience, write down the criteria you think are essential for language learning.”  And it’s a good question.  In many respects the ultimate teaching question as it really gets down to the core elements of your pedagogical belief system – what do you ...

    Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers has this excellent post:  77 Educational Games and Game Builders. If you’re involved in teaching – you need to read his post! Highlights I took away from it were: Grammar Ninja – a fun game for practicing parts of speech, though I’m not sure about some of the answers…. Parade of Games in ...

The Voxy Blog has an interesting infographic for teaching and teacher development, examining the question: “Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool?” .  I suspect most YL teachers (especially those at Primary level) are thinking “well duh” at this point. The infographic was developed at least partially in promotion of one of Voxy’s i-phone ...

If you’ve had time to look at recent posts on this blog, you’ll have noticed a series of “first lesson” ideas and activities…  after all,  it’s September, we’ve all got “back-to-school-itis”! Stepping back from the plethora of great teaching ideas to fill the class time, today our guest blogger, Dave Tucker, looks at some broader learning and ...

While visiting the UK over the summer, I was introduced to a relatively new BBC Game show – “Pointless“, in which contestants try to score as few points as possible.  Or as the BBC phrase it:  ”Quiz in which contestants try to score as few points as possible by plumbing the depths of their general knowledge to come up with the answers no-one else ...

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix: First Lesson Ideas / Warmers First Lesson: Find Nobody Who… First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last ...