Over the last couple of years the teaching profession has gone through huge changes and most of these have seen more demands put on teachers and greater pressure to spend more time using and adapting to new digital technologies for the remote and hybrid classroom.  Many of the demands and tools teachers have been presented with have required more of their time and a wider range of skills, so it's great to be asked to look at Teachwise which is one of those few technological tools that does the opposite.  Teachwise is a planning, time-management and productivity tool that can ..read more

  I often dread looking at 'made for ELT' songs and music (I actually have a degree in music and studied jazz performance), but I was recently nicely surprised to see what ELT Songs have been doing on their site. They really seem to have got the knack of  approaching and creating songs for younger learners well and with obviously very high production values.   If you check out the ELT Songs site you can find 58 units (with an additional 68 new units coming later this year). Each consisting of 6 videos per unit all of which are 100% aligned to the Cambridge Young Learners curri ..read more

 If you’ve read my QuickShout blog before then you probably already know a little about Quillionz and their awesome AI based app that analyses text and creates comprehension questions in minutes. Well now they have a new tool for us to enjoy. Quillionz Skim is a word cloud creation tool with a difference. It actually analyses the closed captions from videos and creates word clouds that play in parallel to the video. This is really simple to use, just register on the Quillionz Skim site, then copy the link from your video and paste it into the interface field. Next add a title and sele ..read more

I first wrote about Quillionz back in 2018 and it’s great to see how far the product has come since then. At that time it was a free product that used AI to generate questions based around any text that you entered. You could then select and edit the questions you wanted to use and print these for the classroom. These features are still available and there is still a lifetime free subscription available, but they have now added more features and developed some premium features that make this a product worth investing, especially if you need to create a lot of reading materials based around a ..read more

With the rapid and sudden increase in remote teaching and learning many schools and teachers are finding it hard to manage the smaller class sizes that remote learning supports and still give students the hours of study and practice they need to move their learning forward. Many schools have turned to blended learning to fill the gap, but soon discovered that creating high quality blended learning courses takes time, money and a specific set of skills which many of their teachers don’t completely cover. Luckily there is a solution to this problem that will enable teachers to create pedagogic ..read more

Over the last decade, video has become one of the key drivers of online learning and nowhere more so than in language learning. It has the power to reach beyond words and sounds and show students a range of non-verbal communication features as well as taking them to places and peoples around the world that they may never be able to access physically. Despite the power of video, one of the greatest difficulties of using authentic video with language students has always been level. Authentic video has often been seen as too challenging for lower-level students, and much of the graded, made for ..read more

In the rapid shift to online learning that’s taking place at present, there’s one thing that can easily get overlooked - the value of qualitative evaluation. What better tool to do that with than a digital portfolio tool like bulb? bulb is simple to use, works on mobile as well as in the browser and it gives your students the opportunity to collect and showcase their work using a modern and stylish design. Creating a profile To get started, all you need to do is create a free profile. All you need is an image and a short description of who you are. Once you have your profile created you ca ..read more

In these difficult times when schools and universities are rushing to develop credible and engaging online learning, Raptivity 2020 looks like a really useful low-cost tool to enable that process. For anyone who is familiar with the older 'Classic' version of Raptivity, the 2020 version is a real transformation and is capable of creating dynamic and media-rich learning that is adaptive across mobile, tablet and desktop screens. One of the striking things about Raptivity is just how simple it is to create great looking materials. When you log in, there are two parts to the dashboard, one area ..read more

Plexie is a really interesting web-based app and quite a hard one to define. Basically it allows teams to work collaboratively in a web-based document to produce digital content that can either be published and shared publicly or kept private for only limited team members. When you create your first Plexie, you create an online workspace. This allows you to create a number of digital documents that you can either work on with a team or keep private. Creating a new document is easy, you just click on ‘Create Plexie’ and give your document a name. Once you have your document in your works ..read more

Actively Learn isn’t just a great source of learning content for grades 6 through to 12, though if you are teaching adult learners much of the grade 12 content would still be appropriate. It’s also an LMS that enables you to create and track the use of learning materials across your classes, and a teacher development tool that enables you to train teachers in aspects of materials development and instructional design. Ready-Made Content for ELA Actively Learn already has a really substantial amount of readymade interactive learning content when you log in. The content is easy to browse or sea ..read more