Remember Kodak’s slogan, ‘You Press the Button, We Do the Rest’? Kodak’s goal was to let amateurs take pictures without worrying about the technicalities. The process was simple: customers simply took their pictures, sent their cameras to the Kodak factory, and the factory – professionals – handled all the technical work, returning the finished prints. […] The post LESSON PLANNING WITH AI: SAVE TIME, KEEP THE QUALITY appeared first on ELT-CATION ..read more

Creative thinking has become a buzzword – much has been said about it, with many strategies and frameworks shared, some applicable, others suited only for a parallel universe. So, I’ll keep the intro short: this post shares a twist on the See-Think-Wonder (STW) routine and a set of activities aimed at developing creative thinking for […] The post DEVELOPING CREATIVE THINKING: IMAGINE-SEE-THINK-WONDER appeared first on ELT-CATION ..read more

I’m excited to invite YOU, the reader of this blog, to join the masterclass I’ll be delivering next Friday, September 27, on AI and multimodal storytelling for GTEFL by Gallery Teachers – an exclusive FREE invitation. Storytelling and Story-Based Activities, Multimodal Input, and genAI What you can expect from attending: New story-based activities: I will […] The post WEBINAR INVITATION: AI FOR MULTIMODAL STORYTELLING appeared first on ELT-CATION ..read more

or How to Quickly Make Your Materials Interactive Technically, I should start with a catchy introduction. But I doubt I can top an AI platform’s pitch for their AI-powered feedback tool (spotted their ad on Facebook yesterday): ‘I showed this to an English teacher at a conference, and she cried (happy tears, of course).’  Now, […] The post THINK YOU CAN’T CODE? FROM PRINT TO PIXEL appeared first on ELT-CATION ..read more

Sound Effects for ELT: A Sound Way to Energise Your Language Classes Or, a sound start to the new year after a relaxing break! A few weeks ago I was trying to find a good fluency activity that would make learners actually want to practise speaking and writing at the end of the year. You know that time of year – energy bars are depleted, and everyone (including teachers) is dreaming of vacation-land. What makes a good activity at the end of the year? It needs to be low on resource-consumption but high on engagement, something that would jolt those ‘worn-out batteries’ back to life (at least f ..read more

It’s Saturday. Your long-awaited day off at the very end of the year. A new ELT-related article pops up in your blog news feed.  C’mon, it’s Saturday! Who reads blog posts on weekends, anyway? Go to Card 2. Sounds fun, I’ll give it a quick read. Go to Card 1. There is one type of reading activity that works miracles in terms of student focus and engagement: choose your own adventure stories, or reading mazes. These activities offer students choice and variety, making them essentially the captains navigating the story. Can you think of any other reading activity where studen ..read more

So tomorrow is Shakespeare Day, remember? Have you prepared your arsenal of tried and tested activities yet? Or has the Bard become totally irrelevant? I’ve recently had an amazing podcast experience taking part in the British Council podcast on the impact of AI on language teaching and learning. One of the questions was on whether AI would make language teaching and learning irrelevant. And it got me thinking: what makes something truly relevant? Relevance isn’t static; it’s shaped by our perspectives and motivations. For some, language is merely a tool for manipulation, while for others, i ..read more

Looking for ways to support your neurodivergent learners? In my recent opinion article, Opportunity or Remix, to Larry Ferlazzo’s How To Use AI Tools to Support English-Language Learners, featured in Education Week, I outlined a few use cases of GenAI that can support language learners in impactful ways.  In this post, I’d like to expand on that list of potentially impactful applications by highlighting the potential of GenAI-powered tools to offer more personalised instruction and support for neurodivergent learners. Teaching neurodivergent learners means tailoring your approach to ..read more

Ready for a pronunciation challenge? As I am closing down My English Domain website for learners, and moving my ELTCATION blog to its own domain, I am moving some posts here to make them available for teachers. The modules and apps from the website will be featured in the Learning Design Projects. Additionally, I’ll be making a series of posts describing some collaboration projects to provide proper references and links, along with additional resources that may come in handy. The links to ELTCATION posts and pages appear to be functioning correctly; in case of any issues, just take out ‘myen ..read more

How do you structure small group discussions to ensure full student engagement? ‘Wise men speak when they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something.’ — Plato 'Reluctant speakers try to avoid speaking both when they have something to say and have to say something.' Every Classroom Teacher If you’re working with small and medium-sized teams but haven’t yet experimented with Nomination Cards, this post may come in handy. The Nomination Cards activity, designed by Tekhnologic, is one of the most efficient ways to structure discussions within small groups and en ..read more