A handful of teaching sites which may add a kick to your English lessons
A mindful teacher is like a hunter. I use the word ‘hunter’ in a somewhat provocative way. To be clear, I am against hunting in the conventional sense of the word, but I am an avid online hunter for good teaching ideas. Searching for and finding something new which I can incorporate in my lessons usually works like a booster that kills the routine and improves the quality of my work. From time to time I come across a real treasure – it can be a blog, website or video on YouTube. Some of them provide ready-to-use lesson plans, others offer useful tips for teaching and teacher development. And last but not least, in the list below you can find some ideas for using numerous online tools to help you create exciting lessons and enhance the value of your work.
https://quickshout.blogspot.com/
Do you know Quillionz, Text2Phonetics, SocialGo or Telegra.ph? If not, have a look at Nik Peachey’s blog which seems to be a real treasure house of resources for English teachers. Many of his articles are about online tools to help teachers exploit the Internet and make their work easier, faster and, above all, more exciting.
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teacher-development
The British Council teacher development section includes information about their training courses and many resources to help with professional development. I particularly recommend you take advantage of the CPD (continuing professional development) section where you can find plenty of teaching tips, webinars, blog posts, and other publications to help you develop in your professional practice. For more inspiration, including lesson plans for kids, teenagers, and adults, as well as some training courses and the magazine section go to the home page https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
https://americanenglish.state.gov/ae-webinars
This is my latest discovery. American English platform offers a long list of webinars for professional development. Each webinar is a professional training seminar with a video and all the useful materials to download in PDF. It is easy to find what you are looking for because all the webinars are put in seven different categories. Short descriptions of all the sessions make the search simple and fast.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/classroom_teaching
BBC Learning English has a special Teachers’ Room where you can find various teaching techniques and ideas you may use in your classroom. The tips are presented in a friendly way – in each session, you can find a video with explanations and examples followed by a quiz to complete.
This educational website provides both teachers and learners with a variety of free resources. Open the site and look at the long list of content. I’m sure you will find plenty of ready-to-use materials as well as valuable tips which may be very inspiring. There is also a special TEFL section with job offers and forums.
http://film-english.com/about-2/
Kieran Donaghy is a freelance writer, international conference speaker, and trainer. Among others, he’s also the author of books for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. His blog articles mainly focus on incorporating videos in lessons so you can find numerous lesson ideas based on films. Besides, you may download a free copy of his latest book ‘The Image in English Language Teaching’ (http://film-english.com/2017/11/04/my-latest-book-the-image-in-english-language-teaching/) whose aim is mostly to encourage teachers to use images as a significant component of communicating in a foreign language.
Another blog with plenty of teaching tips for ESL teachers including those who work online.
https://www.greatbigstory.com/playlists
Great Big Story site is a platform with high-quality short videos and series related to various topics such as nature, environment, sport, music, health, history, communities, social life, culture, human rights, etc.
https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/
Why don’t you encourage your student to create their own poems with some help from this poem generator? It can be a lot of fun.
This is a mind mapping creator which enables to organize ideas and thoughts online.
