Compiled by Michaela Mozolova

Just in time for the weekend 🙂

Teacher Development Opportunites

Shelly Sanchez Terrell regularly gives webinars, all of which are free. Check out what’s available this month.

Macmillan archives all its webinars – some are even available for download. All are free.

Adam Simpson gave a  webinar on getting teenagers interested and keep them interested. The recording is now available.

Barb Hoskins gave a great webinar on teaching YL to read in English. It’s available online.

International

• From the 8-12 April, the ELT world will gather in Liverpool for the IATEFL conference and you can join online! Don’t miss it!

 

 

• Business English teachers!
  Call for Papers:
  26th Annual IATEFL Business English SIG Conference
  Where: Prague
  When: 8-10 November 2013
  Deadline for submissions: 24 May 2013
• Call for Papers: IATEFL-H Annual Conference 2013 Submission deadline: April 30, 2013 When: 4-6 October 2013; Where: Budapest

National (and international)

ELTForum.sk Teacher Development Conference 2013

• Chuck Sandy will be there – what about you?
  When: 7-8 June 2013
  Where: Bratislava
  EARLY-BIRD REGISTRATION: 15 April 2013
  Check the website for more info on speakers and registration.

Oxford University Press

OUP Slovakia has lots of seminars coming up. Click the link to find out where and when. Don’t forget to register online!

Northwest

• Thursday, April 11th, Žilina: ‘An Express Way of Learning‘ with  author Steve Lever (Express Publishing and INFOA)
• 1-day FREE ELT event: Cambridge Day with Ben Knight
  Wednesday, 17 April 2013, ZILINA 13:00-16:15
  Registration: pbojo@cambridge.org or tel. 0908 614 039

West

• Wednesday, April 10th, Bratislava: ‘Blended Learning‘ (Pearson and Slovak Ventures)
• Thursday, April 11th, Bratislava: ‘An Express Way of Learning‘ with  author Steve Lever (Express Publishing and INFOA)
• 1-day FREE ELT event: Cambridge Day with Ben Knight
  Tuesday, 16 April 2013, BRATISLAVA 10:00-14:15
  Registration: pbojo@cambridge.org or tel. 0908 614 039

Activities and Lesson Plans

• April is Poetry Month there are a lot of free resources online. Here’s a great one with lots of fun stuff for your under-18 learners.
• Starfall is a free English literacy site for kids. It goes from the very simple to the more difficult. The stories can be used in class (with an interactive whiteboard) or by kids at home.

• Free lesson plan: Telling life stories

Aim: practicing past tenses
Topic: famous people’s lives

• Free lesson plan on practising telling anecdotes from Macmillan.

Age: Adults
Level: B1–C2
Time: 90 minutes
Key skills: Reading and speaking

• Adam Simpson has found some good online activities for our students to practice tenses.
• If you haven’t discovered Sean Banville’s free lesson plans yet, you need to.
  This one is on last week’s news story about the 17-yr-old Brit who now works for Yahoo.
  “Teenager makes millions with news app”
  It includes a 26-page printable lesson containing listenings and 30+ online quizzes and a 2-page mini-lesson.

Videos for Class

• A new film lesson from Film English, this time using the very funny French TV commercial you’ve probably already seen.

Language level: B1-B2
Learner type: Teens and adults
Time: 60 minutes
Activity: Speaking and writing. Topic: Paper, iPads and technology…
Language: The infinitive to express purpose, and vocabulary related to technology

• ‘Love at First Sight‘ – lesson using 3 short videos

Language level: Intermediate (B1) – Advanced (C1)
Learner type: Teens and adults
Time: 90 minutes
Activity: Writing a film narrative, predicting a film scene, creating a TV commercial, watching a short film and advertisement, and speaking.
Topic: Love and TV commercials
Language: Narrative tenses

Free Downloadable Books

This 1978 publication is helpful as an introduction to the background of self-directed learning and individualisation in teaching.

The TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Journal is available online free of charge this month only.

Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham Zoltán Dörnyei has made much of his research on motivation in second language acquisition available free for download. This is a real treasure trove of work for those studying and interested in deepening their understanding of ELT.

Stuff to ponder

• One of the best ways to facilitate learning is to encourage curiosity. But how can that be done? How do we build curiosity in learners?
• English teacher Willy C. Cardoso has a question: Why do we teach the 1st conditional before the 2nd?
• How we teach, how we educate and how learners learn is changing at an incredible speed. This article and the accompanying chart on the ‘8 Characteristics of Education 3.0′ are helpful to understand where we’re going. Slovakia might be a bit behind in some countries, but ultimately this is going to happen everywhere. Are we ready?
• The 7 things US teachers want from US parents.
• How to deal with mobile phones in the classroom. The video’s in Chinese but no translation is necessary 🙂

Helpful Tools for Teachers

• Lots and lots of links to resources and reference sites for teaching English to young learners
• Have you seen the interactive phonemic chart from the British Council yet? Very helpful. Students can learn to recognise English sounds and practise those that they struggle with.
• The University of Iowa has also put together some great animations and videos which show how to form the sounds of English.
• Johanna Stirling has an excellent blog on English spelling and teaching English spelling. Well worth the time to browse and learn.
• YouTube Photo Slideshows can be used like PowerPoint but are much easier to share with and among students and colleagues. They don’t have a time limit other than the standard 15 minute limit applied to all new YouTube accounts. YouTube Photo Slideshows allow you to specify the length of time that each image is displayed for. After uploading your images you can use the annotations tool to add as much text as you like to each frame of your video.
• Here’s a good article on how social networking can be used by schools, teachers and groups of students.
• This is a fantastic little site that lets you create front page new stories. Just fill in the title and the story, generate and print. Great tool!
• Here’s a great writing tool! It can get boring for your students (and you, their reader) if they use the same words all the time, so let them try this free visual dictionary and thesaurus! Enter any word and it will give you synonyms, antonyms, related words and phrases. Mouse over the words and you get the definition and grammatical information. Enjoy!
• All 2012 English maturita exam with keys.

Competitions

• Got a great idea for teaching writing? Submit it and perhaps you’ll win.
• ‘Cambridge English BEC – Teachers’ Competition 2013! Win a 2 week residential teacher development course in Cambridge by submitting a practical idea on how to help candidates prepare for the exam.
• Macmillan Cultural Readers competition for YOUR CLASS!
  Write your own Cultural Reader with your class. What can you tell us about your town, city or country? You can write about many topics, like history, geography, nature, culture, people, food, or sport. You can include text and drawings.
  All entries must be received by midnight (GMT) on 30^th June 2013 and winners will be notified by 31^st July 2013.