Teaching Diary: English Communication Scavenger Hunt
Once more a hands on post about something I tried in class this term. The first time ever that somebody over here tried to pull an ‘interactive’ game off so it wasn’t that easy to get the people involved but in the end it worked out. Not perfectly, but still funny and with the desired...
Social Media & Education: Twitter for Teaching
After already talking about the biggest of all social networks, facebook, and its potential for teaching purposes and the article on how to use a self hosted website for educational matters, it is now time to focus on another big player in the social media hemisphere. Twitter. For those of you who don’t know Twitter...
Social Media & Education: Brief guide to jump-start your social media efforts
After my blog post about Facebook & Teaching I received quite a lot of mails asking for more examples and advice on how to use Social Media for teaching purposes. While I am currently writing on further in depth posts on how to use some of the well known social media platforms I thought it...
Social Media & Education: Using Facebook for Teaching
Social Media is definitely a huge field with numerous possibilities to interact or getting started. However facebook somehow simply is the one network which is widely known as ‘the social network’ or even ‘the internet’. So it seemed quite reasonable for me to start my series ‘Using Social Media for Education‘ with facebook as first...
The Fun(k) in teaching
First of: This is no self-adulation post! It might sound a little like it (at least some people on facebook told me that it sounds like that) but it totally isn’t meant like that. In fact it took me quite some time to write this since I usually prefer to do stuff and not to...
Head-fake Learning
The term head-fake learning is one of my favorites when it comes to discussions about teaching methodologies. The credit for this term goes unfortunately not to me but to one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to teaching and advice in all terms of mastering ones life, Randy Pausch. Randy considered head-fake learning as...
Send a student to school – vittana
There are trendy and hip startups, there are startups that simply make sense and then there are a bunch of crappy startups or copy cats (heello and others). Once in a while you come across a startup that simply lets you say ‘yes, that’s great’. That just happened the other day when I came across...
the winning and losing in teaching | often to close
When I talk about teaching I usually talk about how much I like teaching and that it is a wonderful experience and the best decision I ever made. That is still my opinion and I am still very happy but today it is time to talk about some things that can drive you crazy and...
Mobile English Learning – Cambridge Apps
This is only a quick tip for everybody who tries to improve his English while being on the run. Mobile applications for your smartphone can help you to use your time on the bus, the train or wherever to improve your language skills. Cambridge offers quite a lot of useful applications for almost everybody. Just...
NNES – why non native English teachers even might have advantages
Oooooh yeah. I just had a looooong discussion with a fellow English teacher over here in Thailand. He, born and raised Brit – from London to be precise – told me that he considers it as quite nice and amusing that a German like me teaches English to those who can not speak but he...
secret teaching ingredient: trust
During the last days I had a lot of time (thanks to my dislocated knee) to think about my teaching style, compare it, think about changes and try to figure out what the ‘best’ way to teach our students could be. Difference as advantage While there is obviously not ‘the one and only right’ way...
Learnable – Ordinary people, extraordinary knowledge | Review
A few days ago I stumbled upon an interesting e-learning platform. On learnable.com there are “ordinary people” giving courses in things they are good in and for what they have a passion. So learnable turns the everyday normal guy into a teacher. Right now I did not take a course so I am not sure...
