Today we chat with Caroline Nixon who will be delivering a talk at The Cambridge Experience Santander

Today I have the pleasure to chat with Caroline Nixon. Caroline will be delivering the talk “Box of Tricks” at The Cambridge Experience Santander next Saturday 4th of May at Hotel Santemar.

Caroline Nixon has been teaching English since 1983 and is co-author of the Cambridge Primary course Kid’s Box. She gives teacher-training workshops in Portugal, Spain and England.

Hi Caroline, can you tell us why did you decide to go into English language teaching?

I needed a job. I started training and loved it immediately. I felt like I was doing exactly what I should be doing, and still does.

Who or what inspires you?

My pupils, and seeing their progress

What's your all time top-tip for English language teachers?

See it from your pupils' side of the table.

Do you have a favourite ELT website?

Cambridge, of course! In fact, it's the only ELT website I consult

A gadget you can't live without?

I can live without everything except my breath

And finally, why do you think teachers should see your talk?

I think teachers should decide for themselves what they should or shouldn't do. Those that wish to see my talk will be most welcome!

Thanks Caroline! A pleasure to chat with you

Today we chat with Jane Delaney who will be delivering a talk at the Cambridge Experience Gijón

Today I have the pleasure (and the time!)  to chat with my colleague Jane Delaney, member of the Cambridge English Presenters Team who will be delivering the talk "Getting it right in the Cambridge English: Preliminary for Schools Speaking Test" at the Cambridge Experience Gijón , next Saturday 27^th  of March at Hotel Tryp Rey Pelayo.

Jane Delaney is a primary school teacher, and lives in Tarragona. She is an experienced Examiner, Examiner Trainer and Teacher Trainer for Cambridge English and runs the British Council Examinations Centre in Tarragona. She has given many workshops and sessions on Teaching Younger Learners, and has written various materials. She is particularly interested in CLIL and getting children and teenagers to speak and write.

Jane Delaney, delivering a presentation at the Cambridge Experience Zaragoza 2011

Hello Jane! Can you tell us why did you decide to go into English language teaching?

Well, I was a teacher in England, and wanted to travel a little bit and see more of the world before I “settled down”. I worked in Turkey and then came to Tarragona 20 years ago, and here I still am!

Who or what inspires you?

My children, my students, the weather. Seeing learning taking place in unplanned moments.

What's your all time top-tip for English language teachers?

Be flexible. Don’t follow your lesson plan or course book slavishly. The best learning takes place in the little moments outside the plan.

Do you have a favourite ELT website?

Flo-Joe, Cambridge English Teacher and, of course, the Teaching Together blog! J

A gadget you can't live without?

My computer and mobile phone, unfortunately.

And finally, why do you think teachers should see your talk?

Hopefully you might learn a few more activities to do with your teenage PET students to help them through the Speaking Test!

Thanks Jane! It has been a pleasure to chat with you! 

I'm back!

Hello again!
I'm back home now after a busy day in Madrid yesterday.

I flew down yesterday morning and spent some time catching up with my daughters, who both study down there.

Then in the afternoon, I went to the Colegio Sagrada Familia to meet up with lots of people for the trialling of the Computer Based Young Learners Tests.

The project involves people from several parts of the world.  Project partners from Hong Kong, China and Cambridge English: Language Assessment in the UK had come to tell us about the project and we were also given the chance to see a Computer Based Movers Test in action, with a group of students from Colegio Sagrada Familia.

The Young Learners Tests are already Cambridge English Language Assessment's most visually attractive range of exams.  They use colour pictures as the stimulus for most of the tasks.  The visuals are being updated to make them even more attractive to Young Learners.

Seeing the test and the visuals in digital, interactive format makes them even more attractive, especially to school students.  The group we saw took a Movers Test.  Some of them were taking the test on a PC, others on an i-pad.  They obviously enjoyed themselves!  I had a go myself and liked the experience!

So, it's back down to work here in Cantabria before I head off to Malaga tomorrow!!!!

See you in Malaga?

Sorry I've been a bit quiet this week - it's not because I'm lounging in the sun next to the swimming pool or anything - believe me!   (Fond memories of last summer in Sardinia spring to mind!!)

I've got a lot of different projects going on at the moment.  Enrolments for the Cambridge English: Young Learners English Tests coming in thick and fast, writing a Cambridge Preliminary Writing seminar I'm giving in Santander as part of the Cambridge Experience on May 4th.  (Information and programme here).  Tomorrow, I'll be in Madrid all day, part work, partly catching up with family.

And on Friday, I'll be in Malaga at another Cambridge Experience event.

Here is the programme.  Looking forward to it!

I'll try and write a post some time soon - have a few recent discoveries to share with you......

Another great photo resource!

I was reading through some emails I'd received over the past few busy days in order to try and reduce the number of emails in my inbox.  (None of them urgent - I deal with those as they come in!)

While I was reading through one of the emails, I clicked on the link and read another of the tips submitted to the Cambridge English Language Assessment UK and Bell Teaching Ideas Competition.

The tip itself is a great one.  I've taken note and added it to my teaching resources.

And then, I tried out one of the suggested sources for photos for students to choose and compare.

I had never seen Tag Galaxy before.  I'll certainly be using it again (and again!)

Here is a description of how it works:

What it is: Tag Galaxy is a neat little tool that helps students to explore relationships between words and ideas as well as view pictures related to that word.  Type in a word to search and immediately you are transferred to a galaxy with the original word at the center and the associated ideas orbiting around it.  When you click on the word in the center, a globe populates with pictures from Flickr that are tagged with that word. Click on one of the orbiting words and tags related to that word start to orbit.  Tag Galaxy is a very neat way to view information!                    http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=3506

Here are two screenshots for the tag 'speaking'.  The first screenshot shows the original word 'speaking' with the related words around it.

The second shot shows photos 1 - 235 from flickr tagged with 'speaking'.

You can click on any of the photos to see it closer up and then you can go the original photo on flickr.  If you want to see more photos, you can choose the next batch of matches, or spin the globe to see the other side of it.

I'll DEFINITELY be using this resource a lot.

Great videos for use in class

I've mentioned the website ted.com in several of my previous posts.

Last night, I was catching up on a few emails with recommended links in them and ended up at a great site called learn.ist which itself has some great suggested sites in its article:

 Web 2.0 Tools For The Classroom.

I have bookmarked some of the recommended Tools to come back to later, but I wanted to mention one of them in this post.

I followed the link to TED-Ed.  I have just been watching a fascinating video about Why is there a 'b' in doubt?

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/beyond-the-shadow-of-a-doubt-gina-cooke

There are other potentially videos we could use in our classes on TED-Ed.  And the good thing is that they usually last around 3 minutes.  

And then, they have follow up activities.  Under 'THINK', for 'doubt', they have a mixture of multiple choice comprehension questions about the content of the video, plus some research for students to do - for example, to find other words with silent letters in them and find out about the history of them.

Next, they can click on 'DIG DEEPER' where they will find suggestions for more related activities and links to sites where they can find more information.

On the spelling theme, there is another video I'd recommend by the same educator - Gina Cooke - on 'Making sense of spelling'.   It would be useful for training students to remember words that contain similar spelling patterns - eg two and twice.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/making-sense-of-spelling-gina-cooke

Have a great week.  I've got lots of different projects to balance right now - so there's no 'doubt' that I'll be busy and challenged this week!  Hope your week is busy, challenging and fun and inspiring too!

TESOL Spain

Just over a year ago, I gave a session at the 2012 TESOL Spain Convention in Bilbao.

I didn't make it to this year's convention in Seville because I had other commitments, but I have heard a lot about it and as a reader for the TESOL Newsletter and with friends on the Board, I try and keep up with what's happening in TESOL Spain.

I receive the e-newsletter once a month by email.  You can read this month's edition online here (and also look through the previous 10 editions). The Question and Answer with Dr David Crystal (whose plenary I had the pleasure to attend in Bilbao) is well worth reading.

I've just been looking at the TESOL Spain website too and have begun downloading the handouts from the sessions in Seville.








The fact that you can access speakers' handouts even though you weren't at the Convention or were there but couldn't go to everything at once is great.  A great initiative!


I've downloaded several sets of handouts to look through in more detail.  Many of them contain your take-away-and-use-today ideas - for example Andrea Littlewood's ideas for personalisation in the YL classroom or Fiona Mauchline's Putting the Creative Back in Writing.

And of course, our very own Cambridge English Seminar Presenter, Katie Curbelo (or Katie Maunder as she appears on the programme) was in Seville.  Her session was called Speak, Write, Learn:  Fun Activities for the Adolescent Classroom.  I'm sure the session was as practical and as useful as always.

I'll be looking at the other articles in the newsletter and downloading more handouts in the coming days when I have time to come back to the site.  If you do the same, pass on recommendations to the rest of us via this blog!

And I hope to see some of you in Granada on Saturday!

Granada Cambridge Experience

On Saturday, I'll be in Granada.  I'm really looking forward to the trip and also to meeting lots of teachers and sharing ideas (as well as picking up some inspiration from Michael Tomlinson and Guy Brook-Hart.)

If you live (or will be) in the area, there is still time to sign up - see below for how to do this:

Hope some of you will come along!  I'll write about the experience next week on this blog!

Interesting Cambridge English webinar

I have just signed up to 'attend' another Cambridge English Language Assessment webinar.

On Monday, 15th or Wednesday 17th April, Jill Buggey will lead a webinar

Practice makes perfect: creating your own exam materials for the classroom

The webinar will begin by identifying the specific skills tested in different exam tasks, such as multiple choice, gap fill and sentence completion. The presenter will show how different types of task are constructed in order to test these skills effectively, using examples from Reading, Listening and Use of English papers.

The presenter will explain how distraction is used in reading and listening tasks, and there will also be examples from Use of English tasks. The strategies students are expected to use in exam tasks are real-life skills, and at this point the presenter will give some practical hints on the most effective strategies for students to use when approaching different types of exam task.

I'm sure the webinar will be enlightening and useful.  I've used materials prepared by Jill Buggey in seminars and they are always very practical.

To find out more, click here:

Do you smell a rat?

Back after a short break, I thought I'd write about some fun things that were launched on the (unsuspecting?) world yesterday.

The first - Google Nose.  Here's how Google describes this new feature on Youtube:

We're excited to announce our newest addition to Search: Google Nose. What do wet dogs smell like? Google Nose! How about victory? Google Nose! Try searching on Google for "wet dog" and explore other smells that people sniffed for, or visit google.com/nose to learn more. Happy smelling!

http://youtu.be/VFbYadm_mrw

The second story comes from the UK.

Dexter the internet crime sniffing police dog

Cyber crime is on the rise and online fraud and identity theft are major issues these days, that's why the Get Safe Online team have teamed with the City of London Police to utilise the talents of Dexter. He's a police dog that can sniff out crime through a desktop computer.

https://www.getsafeonline.org

Cute doggy!!  And clever too!

And the third story appealed to the teacher and linguist in me:

From Twitter:

"Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium 'Twitter' service which also includes vowels." it saysin a blog post. "We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream. Here’s our mockup of the most retweeted Tweet of all time as it would appear in the new Twttr.

wttr.com
Twttr will roll out slowly to a small percentage of users, growing to 100% over the next few days. We recommend that you practice using only consonants (and “y”) with the hashtag #nvwls (or if you have paid for our premium service, use#icanhasvowels).

To make the transition easier for you, we’ve built a site that automatically transforms your Tweets into a Twttr friendly format. Try it today at twttr.com.

And just in case you're wondering what the connection of the above stories is, 

They all appeared yesterday, April 1st!