SIGN UP NOW! How to deliver an engaging online lesson to teenage learners

 

🔵Are you a teacher of teens?🔵

🔵 Have you been asked to teach your students remotely?🔵

This webinar by Pearson teacher trainer and Live Classes teacher Michael Brand could be what you’re looking for. We’ll look at planning, pre-lesson tasks and follow-up, digital delivery tools and platforms, the use of video and ways to build in interaction all with the aim of helping English teachers of teens to find their feet in the world of online teaching.

Sign up to one of the four different sessions available:

Friday 10am and 12pm,

Monday 9am and 2pm.

 

 

Supporting distance learning during coronavirus outbreak: reglada

TO ALL TEACHERS WORKING IN PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS (REGLADA)

Dear Teacher,

The adoption of health prevention measures this week due to the recent Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak has led to a temporary interruption of education activities in many regions, and represents an unfamiliar situation for students, teachers and families in many parts of Spain. At Pearson, we would like to offer all our support at this critical time to help you deal with this situation in the best possible way:

Access to all your Pearson content from home

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Pearson & Anaya events go online…and everyone’s invited!

Due to growing concerns related to the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak in Spain and abroad, we have decided to hold our upcoming training events for Secondary school teachers planned  for Saturday 14th March in Madrid and 21st March in Zaragoza online.

These 45-minute webinars on a variety of topics are a great way to access professional development from the comfort of your own home.

Have a look at the sessions below and click on the links to get more information and register:

Order! Order! Getting our students presenting and debating (Michael Brand)
Being able to give a presentation or engage in constructive debate are essential skills, but ones that many people lack – possibly they didn’t get much practice or skills development in school. But all that is beginning to change, with projects such as Global Classrooms in Madrid evidence of this. This session will explain approaches and activities to get our students presenting and debating confidently and successfully.
Saturday 14th March 10:00

Reading and writing just got exciting (Phil Brownsword, Michael Brand)
Reading and writing are tested extensively in external and university entrance exams, but our lessons to develop these skills needn’t be dull! In this talk we’ll look at some activities that will get our students working collaboratively to get better at reading and writing – activities that will improve their skills and bring our lessons to life.
Saturday 14th March 11:00
Saturday 21st March 11:00

Scaffolding in CLIL. Make your students BLOOM (Emma San José)
This session will offer an approach to Bloom’s Taxonomy in a CLIL context. Considering CLIL as a content AND language integrated learning methodology, teachers quite often have to face some issues like the requirement for content teachers to help students acquire the language despite not being language teachers.
Bloom’s Taxonomy and its different levels in cognition offers support and turns out to have a very practical application in CLIL environments. It can be used for scaffolding content AND language, modelling, differentiation and also guides teachers in how to survive the challenge.
Saturday 14th March 12:00

Connecting with the video generation (Michael Brand)
For entertainment, interacting with friends, or just trying to make sense of the world, the medium of choice for today’s teens is video. The implications for our classes are clear: If we want to engage with them and help them learn more effectively, video is a vital ingredient. But which videos should we choose? How can we best present them in our classes to make them both fun and educational? And how can we get our students making their own videos? In this session we will deal with these questions and provide a wealth of practical activities for you to try with your students.
Saturday 21st March 10:00

I don’t believe it! 5 guessing games for your ELT class

You’ll never guess what I did last weekend!  *answer revealed at bottom of blog post.

People like guessing. And they like getting other people to guess. Think of your own experience. Before revealing something to someone, have you ever invited your listener to ‘have a guess’, hyping up what it is you were about to reveal? And you might have given your listener a few guesses, turning the interaction into a sort of game.

Speaking guessing games are a mainstay of ELT lessons. Sometimes used as warmers, fillers or even the main speaking activity, they add a game element, provide a task for the listener which encourages them to listen, and often allow our learners to speak about themselves. In the blog post we look at five.

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5 more Christmas adverts with ideas for class

Christmas is just around the corner! Many of us will be grading exams, putting marks in the system and, hopefully, teaching the odd Christmas-themed lesson. A nice alternative to your standard worksheet is to use Christmas adverts, which are something of an institution in Britain (and elsewhere) with brands vying to make the biggest splash. These short videos are great material as they tend to tell a story and include lots of Christmas vocab. Here I’ve taken five and offered ideas and activities to exploit them in class. If you like what you see, check out last year’s post too!

NB. Some of the speaking activities listed here presuppose a  knowledge of Christmas vocabulary, so preteaching vocab may be necessary: perhaps doing one of those worksheets first isn’t such a bad idea!

Advert 1

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Of Chocoholics, Flexitarians and Frankenfood: the joy of portmanteaus

Calling all language enthusiasts! What’s your favourite word in English? Do you have a favourite idiom? Is your language geekiness so acute that you have a favourite tense? 

My favourite word is ‘muffled’, my favourite idiom ‘as cool as a cucumber’ and I don’t have a favourite tense in English, although I do in French. Or at least I did, until I found out that the subjunctive is a mood and not a tense. 

Perhaps one of the more interesting features of English, and one which seems to be much more prevalent than in most other languages, is the existence of portmanteaus. 

Do your students ever speak Spanglish? Do you know any Shopaholics? Chocoholics? Workaholics? What’s your perfect brunch?  Ever stayed in a motel? Seen a Bollywood film?  All portmanteaus. 

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British Council Teaching for Success Conferences 2019

The annual Teaching for Success conferences, hosted by the British Council for ELT teachers are a great way to start the year and Pearson will be in attendance at the events across the country: in Bilbao and Valencia on 21st September and in Madrid and Barcelona on Saturday 28th. Whether it’s to attend one of our workshops to get some ideas for your lessons, or to drop by our stand to have a look at our materials, we’d love to see you there!

What’s on the programme? 

Bilbao: Brian Engquist will be delivering Teens: it’s hard to B1 and Developing Learner Confidence

Valencia: Michael Brand will be delivering Teens: it’s hard to B1 and Developing Learner Confidence

Madrid: Liz Beer will be delivering Teens: it’s hard to B1 and Putting some sparkle in speaking

Barcelona: Michael Brand will be delivering Teens: it’s hard to B1 and Developing, not testing, listening skills 

Liz Beer, Michael Brand, Brian Engquist

Interested? Have a look at our abstracts to learn more about the workshops:

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5 simple ways we already work on mediation with our students

Welcome to our third and final blog post in our series on mediation. The ‘M-word’ has been on all teachers’ lips in Escuelas Officiales de Idiomas across Spain this year and we’re starting to see it pop up more and more often in other teaching contexts (eg. secondary schools) too. It’s a fast-moving story which shows no signs of slowing down! We began our series by getting a crash course in mediation before moving on to consider some of the challenges in creating mediation materials. Let’s finish by having a think about how we’re already developing our students’ mediation skills in our lessons.

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Cyberbullying: a video-based lesson

The teens and tweens we teach are too young to remember a world without the internet. They take for granted the benefits it brings, such as access to all kinds of information at the click of a finger or the ability do a video call with someone on the other side of the world. However, admiring the skills these ‘digital natives’ possess has given way to the realisation that they need guidance on how to properly use the internet in general and social media in particular. For example, 50% of boys and 26% of girls don’t consider it to be dangerous to meet someone they have met online in person. In this two-part blog series, we’ll look at video-based ELT lessons to raise awareness of two key issues: cyberbullying and protecting your identity.  

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Grammar Guessing Games: 3 activities to practice grammar orally

Grammar lessons sometimes get a bad press. Perhaps that’s because they might typically have involved long, drawn-out explanations and activity upon activity of mechanical form-based practice. Explanations and closed practice are necessary of course, but in this blog post, let’s look at three activities that allow the students the chance to personalise the grammar and use it more creatively. All the activities include the game element of guessing.

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