Treating every slide as if it were your last means that when people stop paying attention to you - and they do - they can still get the whole gist of what you were saying on a particular point. The other important value here: if they do miss a slide it’s not going to stop […]

Yesterday, Heather in the comments said that it wasn’t possible to get away with 72pt text on a slide if you wanted to fit everything in. True, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Many PowerPoints lose their power because of the quantity of text and - sin of sins - copious bullet points […]

I posted about the Young Scot Lab in a Lorry which is traveling around the country at the moment. Ollie also commented on how to reserve it. Hamish now comments the following, which I reproduced here as it could be of interest to many MFL teachers:
I got this from the physics sputnick group:
Apologies to those […]

This one is related to points four and five. First, if you don’t want to be a slide slave, don’t put up everything you actually wanted to say. Second, if you’re getting kids to make up slides and you do not want them to copy and paste half of Google and present it as their […]

From NewsWise:
Analyzing test performance and computer uses of 986 fourth grade students from 55 classrooms in nine Massachusetts school districts, the study found that the more regularly students use computers to write papers for school, the better they performed on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems (MCAS) English/Language Arts exam. This positive effect occurred despite the […]

CILT are looking for a UK participant to an ECML workshop on ‘ Language Quests’.  We are looking for material developers, teacher trainers specialized in second language acquisition who would be interested in attending this event which will take place in Graz, Austria  from 5 April - 8 April 2006.  
Candidates interested in being nominated […]

Students want to hear you, see you and talk with you - not the back of your head. Try not to read from the slides or, worse still, just turn round and stare at them. Engage with the people, not the slides.
Short and sweet today!
Update: More on how to do this might be found in […]

This is the mantra of many a teacher, and once was mine. True, you can have the bones of many a presentation sitting on your hard drive (or uploaded on the MFLE), ready to bring out once a year when the unit in your textbook dictates.
But changing the bones for every class you teach is […]

When I was a kid at school I loved getting the teacher off point. My favourite teacher for that was Mr Whitehouse, my Modern Studies teacher. Modern Studies was also one of my best subjects. I think there was a definite link between storytelling in Mr Whitehouse’s class, remembering the facts he gave us in […]

When I was a student I worked briefly at the Edinburgh Evening News’ Pink, the sports newspaper that used to come out 15 minutes after full time on a Saturday afternoon. If there was one thing that was key to a good story, it was to give the full-time result in the first sentence, and […]