This week, we take a look back at our five most-viewed posts of 2020: most-viewed as they’ve been shared a lot, and shared a lot because teachers found them useful (I hope!). And just as we use spaced-repetition to help our learners retain vocabulary they’re learning, a quick reminder of ideas we’ve already seen can help them become a permanent piece of our teaching repertoire!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unexpected events of 2020 – which are spilling into 2021 – influence our list, as two posts on online lessons and one post on classroom activities with masks made the cut. Teachers are still on the lookout for games to use in class, with a post on guessing games finding its way into the top five too. Our list is rounded out with a post on ways to get your students to keep up their learning in the holidays. Here we go!
In this post, Harry Waters, English teacher trainer and teacher on the international Live Classes project, shares a plethora of creative activities to use in online lessons to ‘get away from an endless stream of PowerPoints and Kahoots’. Harry’s theatrical and playful side shines through in the Mannequin Challenge, Teacher Forfeit and many other great activities too. Well worth a peruse!
2. Five top tips for online lessonsELT Learning Journeys
Online lessons must have become a bit of a thing lately. Our second post on online classes is written by fellow Live Classes teacher and Pearson teacher trainer Michael Brand. Ways to use the chatbox, to use breakout rooms, ways to make our learners active protagonists: you’ll find all of these and more in the post.
3. The Masked Classroom: 13 engaging activities you can still useELT Learning Journeys
In further proof that blog posts providing useful practical ideas are widely shared, this post by Harry Waters on activities you can still use respecting social distancing makes an appearance at number 3. And it’s still relevant.
4. I don’t believe it! 5 guessing games for your ELT classELT Learning Journeys
Moving away from posts on solutions to a new reality, we’ve got a post from Michael Brand on guessing games – communicative activities to get your students interested and talking. How many of them have you used?
5. Ten top tips for learning English over the summerELT Learning Journeys
Is it too early to be thinking about summer in January?! Possibly there are more of us doing it this year than in any other year, as the freedom and respite it hopefully brings will be particularly welcome. Look forward to sunnier times with this blog post.
So, that rounds out our five most popular blog posts from 2020. I wonder what the themes of the most popular posts this year will be. Only time will tell!
