learning technologies in EAP

example of a Padlet board from a class (student pictures removed) — All teachers know that the new year really starts in September, not January as the rest of the world seems to think. That’s when we make our resolutions to be better people, better colleagues and better teachers. We tell ourselves that we are going to finally get organised, read those […]

Integrating tech for the new term: getting to know students

scrivener-512 — For as long as I can remember, Microsoft Word has been the King of Word Processing. As a teacher I’ve created countless handouts, gap-fills and rubrics and marked countless student essays with it. When I did my Masters and various teaching certificates, everything was done in Word. But I don’t think anyone would say […]

EAP App Review: Scrivener

you can store your favourite journals on the attractive bookshelf — Browzine is a free app for accessing articles from your university’s library. Available for both iOS and Android on tablet and phone, it’s an attractive way for students (and teachers) to look for and read articles. To give you a quick overview, I’ve made a short video. I think the […]

EAP App Review: Browzine

this is an ordering quiz template built into Storyline — One thing we experimented with on this summer school was creating interactive online content for students using a special software programme called Articulate Storyline 2. Over the last year we’ve begun to develop a bank of materials that could be used either to integrate directly with classroom materials, supplement as […]

Using Technology to manage a pre-sessional: part 4 – creating ...

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In a previous post I gave an overview of the various options available for creating portfolios for EAP students. I concluded that while there are many tools out there that allowed for summative assessment of students’ work – basically collecting everything into one place at the end of the course […]

Using technology to manage a pre-sessional: part 3 – managing ...

image 12 copy — In the previous post about managing the summer school, I talked about how we used a WordPress site to manage information flow on our pre-sessional summer school. Let’s look a little more closely how we handle the classes themselves and specifically the day to day communication between the teachers and […]

Using Technology to manage a pre-sessional: part 2 – using ...

full site home page — Every year I like to do a round up of how we’re using tech to help us manage our pre-sessional courses here at the University of Sheffield. The size of the programme here in the summer and the number of sites and teachers we have to manage mean that we […]

Using technology to manage a pre-sessional: part 1 – managing ...

google slides q and a — For most EAP teachers, presentations and PowerPoint are synonymous. Certainly for some students they are exactly the same thing. But Microsoft and Office are no longer quite the ubiquitous tools that they once were, students carry around a range of different devices and many of them may not even have Powerpoint […]

Alternatives to Powerpoint for EAP students

audionotetaker_02_LRG — A few years back a rep from a company called Sonocent came to see me to demo a software programme they had developed called Audio Notetaker. With this, you could record audio from, say, a lecture and the speech would be represented as coloured blocks with spaces in-between representing the […]

EAP Tech Tool: Audio Notetaker

One of the best decisions I’ve made as the learning technologist at our school was to persuade my boss to buy a class set of Chromebooks a few years back. Now, before I get on to explaining why it was such a good idea, a quick word about what a […]

EAP Tech Tool: the Chromebook

Pebble Pad's interface can be very confusing. Can you work out what everything means? — Portfolios can be used for a variety of purposes in EAP. They can be used to assess students’ knowledge, showcase exemplary work, give students a sense of progress throughout the term or year or even as a feature of a CV or application for a job or higher degree. Portfolios […]

E-portfolios in EAP

Ok, so my last day of IATEFL (not the last day of the conference by the way, but I had to get back for work reasons) and I saw a few more sessions that touched on both technology and EAP and were worth reporting back on. First up was a […]

IATEFL Day Two

I’ve just finished day one of IATEFL here in Birmingham and just wanted to share a few notes from a couple of the sessions I went to that are relevant for both technology and EAP. First off was Supporting postgraduate EAP students: teaching tips and technology tools by Angela Smith, […]

IATEFL Day One

I’m in Birmingham for IATEFL for a few days so hope to blog a little about some of the sessions I see here with a particular focus on any connected to technology and EAP (ideally both!) Gloriously bad weather as I arrived here today, torrential rain and a nice long […]

IATEFL 2016

featured image diary of an online course — In my previous post, I talked about how we set up our online course in learning technologies for EAP teachers and the thought processes we went through in choosing our participants, deciding on the platform and selecting the course content. In this post I’d like to talk about the nitty […]

Diary of an online course: part 2

lt in eap site — A few months ago I wrote about an online course we were planning for EAP teachers in learning technologies. As the course is just about to finish, I thought it might be useful to write a short summary of the process of setting up and running the course over a […]

Diary of an online course: part 1

office lens options — As EAP teachers our main job is to help students to improve their language skills, but we also often end up giving advice on studying generally that don’t strictly relate to English. Things such as note taking or Powerpoint skills are not strictly language issues but many of us address […]

Four web tools for smarter studying

yellow embed rectangle blackboard — A vague title for something quite specific. Embedding is when you take media from one website or source and put it into another website. So, when you go to a website and it has a YouTube video on the page, that’s embedding. Or when you take a posterboard from a site […]

How to embed stuff in your VLE

lextutor1 — There, I’ve said it…not sure if I’ll keep my job or not, but I felt I needed to get this off my chest. Now, let’s just qualify this to start with, I’m not sure I actually hate corpus linguistics per se. What I think I hate is this cloud of […]

I’m an EAP teacher and I hate Corpus Linguistics

zaption image — By now, most people have heard – however tangentially – the expression ‘flipping the classroom’ and the idea of providing out of the class input or activities that will then feed into what happens in the class. For most EFL/EAP teachers, this doesn’t seem strikingly new or revolutionary. Perhaps for […]

EAP tech tool of the week: Zaption