As English language teachers, we constantly search for innovative tools and techniques to assist our multilingual learners of English (MLEs) in their language acquisition journey. The conversations ..read more

Years ago, talk about blogging for English learners was all the rage. Teachers were getting their students on Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, and more. One of the most powerful ..read more

YouTube videos have long been a go-to reference point for teachers to give English learners (ELs) a range of opportunities to practice listening, to understand grammar points, and to get examples of natural English use. Innovative teachers ..read more

An incredible amount interest in artificial intelligence (AI) launched late last year and has gone through the stratosphere since I wrote about ChatGPT in December. Since then ..read more

On the last day of November 2022, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab, launched ChatGPT into the world, and launched an avalanche of concern, curiosity, fear, and hope all at once. For those who haven’t been watching, ChatGPT is a chatbot that generates incredibly sophisticated responses to pretty much any question or statement you feed to it ..read more

It’s always fun to explore shiny new tech with your students, but we should always remember that the classics never go out of style. Over the years, I’ve fretted over the best ways to get students’ voices recorded and put online in a quick and easy way, and I’ll admit that one of the easiest of all is one that I often forget—the answering machine ..read more

Halloween is upon us, and whether you’re in a country that celebrates it or you’re teaching to students who have seen versions of the holiday on television, every culture has some history of telling scary stories that they can connect to. Many English language teachers like to have their students tell or write scary stories for the season, and while specific lesson plans are beyond the scope of today’s post, there are lots of ways teachers can use tech to supplement scary storytelling. Read the rest of the post at tesol.org ..read more

Whether teaching in-person or online, we’ve all learned to count on projecting—on a real screen, or using screen share—resources from the internet to help make connections with our students. Some of us like to share videos, others like to bring up Google Docs to show composition ideas, and still others just want to share articles in the news.  ..read more

Ah, PDFs. The inevitably problematic file format that we all have to deal with. If you’re like most teachers, you’re loading up some version of Adobe Acrobat, or maybe a PDF reader that came preinstalled on your computer ..read more

This article came from the August issue of TESOL Connections, the TESOL newsletter. As we start to prepare for our new semesters, many of us have begun to reach into our toolbox of “Would you rather” questions, “Find someone who” bingo sheets, and “Two Truths and a Lie” type activities ..read more