And now for something completely different

glass of red wine

I really enjoyed writing and discussing last week’s educational reform posts. You can see my thoughts on elementary school English, on junior high school English, on senior high school English, and on university English here.

I will probably return to the topic (it’s one of my deep interests) but for now we are going to go back to the usual eclectic mix of teaching topics. Next up (hopefully on Monday) I will be posting a video of the first session of my extensive reading class at Tohoku University. It will include all the orientation material as well as an explanation of what ER is and how we approach it in our program.

Should be useful to teachers using ER in their classes and especially for teachers that are considering it. Stay tuned 🙂

VIDEO Oxford Teaching Workshop Series 2013: Creating a Reading Program for Young Learners

This year I was very fortunate to be invited to be part of the Oxford Teaching Workshop Series, presenting in four cities in Japan this spring. This video is from the Okayama session:

Please tell me about your reading program in the comments.

Kyushu (Fukuoka) ETJ Expo: Sunday December 9th, 2012

I’ll be presenting at the last ETJ Expo this Sunday, in my second-favourite city in Japan, Fukuoka.

The schedule for the event is here.

Directions to the venue are here.

Hope to see you there!

Tohoku (Sendai) ETJ Expo -Sunday December 2 at Tohoku Bunka Gakuen University

I’ll be presenting at the ETJ Expo in Sendai this weekend, talking about useful online resources to help students study more effectively.

The schedule for the event is here, and the map/directions are here.

My workshop is at 12:30 -hope to see you there!

Annotated list of websites from the “SRS, RSS, LMS: Online Tools to Boost Learner Efficiency” presentations

Hi everyone

A friend from Sendai reminded me that I promised to post the list of websites from my presentation on the blog. Here it is:

Anki is a spaced-repetition program

elllo.org is an amazing listening resource: over 1200 short conversations with transcripts

EnglishCentral.com has short videos with interactive subtitles as well as vocab and pronunciation practice

Facebook needs no introduction

Google search settings have some interesting tools, like reading level

Google translate is partially useful

iTunesUniversity great content for advanced students and teachers can now use it to show their classes

Network (Oxford University Press textbook) new series based around social media

OxfordOwl incredible resources including Oxford Reading Tree ebooks with sound

pikifriends a closed social network for junior high schools

popjisyo.com amazing resource for reading online content

readthekanji.com a simple (paid) system for learning kanji

renshuu.org a very powerful site for learning kanji and vocabulary -freemium but most of it is free

rikaikun for Chrome/rikaichan browser extension Firefox gives popup translations within the browser

skype for video calls

starfall.com phonics and reading practice for children

TED.com great content for teachers and advanced learners

youtube.com you know this

Hope you find something useful in there.

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