I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions.  The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a ...

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter. The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way ...

I spotted a colleague (Thanks Neil!) using this with a class the other day and it looked brilliant and so investigated – it is really impressive work! Turns out Neil spotted this on Larry Ferlazzo’s site. The Curfew game is aimed at young adults / older teenagers and is set in a dystopian Britain, some 16 years in our future.  It aims to raise ...

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Habitat for Humanity.  I’m mentioning them here because they posted a comment under one of the blog posts and I just went and took a quick look at their site. They have quite a wealth of lessons (detailed plans, learning outcomes, materials etc), categorised by age ranges.  The bad news is that these ...

The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource. But….  I’ve tended not to use it because ...

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook….. There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, ...

The Guardian newspaper recently ran a series of short stories related to oil, as part of a project to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster – (see BBC story for background). Called “Oil Stories“, the Guardian project contains eight short stories from different authors that seek to examine our relationship with ...

Thanks to Tommy Holt for spotting this and mentioning it on facebook! Primary pad is an online synchronous editing tool – learners can access and edit the same document at the same time. This is the first tool I’ve come across that allows synchronous editing and as such is quite an exciting development!  It’s free and requires no registration, ...

This website has the potential to be an invaluable online teaching tool and is worth checking out! I only came across this the other day, but they’ve been around for a while and further research reveals that Larry Ferlazzo mentions this site in a post from 2009! Kubbu offers a “free account” to teachers who register, which allows you to create ...