Keep Calm and Teach English

The new curricula emphasize the need for students to acquire essential knowledge and skills, as well as to develop the necessary attitudes for the correct use of digital technologies for their personal and social growth. This requires educators who feel confident in their own digital skills. Visit our lesson in eclass  to explore a variety of digital tools and choose those that can be integrated into your daily practice in order to create an effective learning environment in your classroom. The material is the result of training received by members of the Imathia Teachers of English Association (Επιστημονική Ένωση Καθηγητών Αγγλικής Ημαθίας ΕΕΚΑΗ) as part of an approved Erasmus+ 2022-2023 project with reference code 2022-1-EL01-KA122-ADU-000075965. The project was fully funded by the European Union. The national agency for Greece is the I.K.Y. (State Scholarships Foundation).

AI tools can significantly aid teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in various ways, enhancing both teaching and learning experiences. Here are some of the key ways AI tools can assist EFL teachers: Fokus AI, Credit: Phonlamai Photo/Shutterstock Content Creation:   AI can assist teachers in creating custom learning materials or adapting existing ones to fit the specific needs of their students. This can save teachers a significant amount of time and effort. Differentiated instruction and targeted teaching:  AI can help teachers create or adapt material to fit any teaching situation. Lesson Planning:  AI can help teachers create lesson plans by suggesting relevant materials and activities based on the curriculum and student profiles. Engaging Activities:  AI can be used to create interactive games, quizzes, and other activities that make learning English more fun and engaging. This can be especially helpful for younger learners or those who find tradit...

Symbaloo is an interesting application that allows its users to visually organize their online resources and make them available anywhere, on any device. With a bookmark package (Webmix), you can organize a lesson or presentation with all the required resources available on your screen, without having to look for them.  I started using Symbaloo during the first quarantine as a way to help my students access all the digital resources they needed for their lessons easily and quickly. In this way Symbaloo can help support student organization so they don't get lost in the web.  To get started, visit the official Website , sign up (or use your Google or Facebook account). After logging in to your account you will create a new Webmix from the menu bar (press +). All the work from here on has to do with assigning the desired bookmarks to the tiles. You can change their appearance (colour, image), move them around, put them in groups, delete them. The material you collect on Webmixes...

The goal of s ummative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark and provide them with a grade or mark. photo by  athree23 The goal of formative assessment  on the other hand, is to monitor student learning and to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Students can but don't have to be graded for the learning activity. Constant feedback on student performance is crucial for students to enhance their learning. By reflecting on their learning they become aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Good assessment tools can engage students in their learning especially if they are enjoyable instead of stressful. And we all know that if learners are engaged, they become more responsible for their learning. Formative assessment is an essential part of the learning process and student success, so it...

Wheel Decide is a free online spinner tool that allows you to create your own digital wheels for decision making, prize giveaways, games, and more.The uses of Wheel Decide run as far as your imagination. In the EFL classroom and in education in general the wheels can be used for a variety of activities: Spin a wheel of questions, topics, or vocabulary terms. This is a great substitute for studying or revising, and since the topics shuffle, everyone stays on their toes. Pick a random student in class to answer a question or participate in a classroom activity. Engage your students by having them decide on the options whether they are questions, vocabulary or grammar items.  Use the wheel to randomly assign groups or teams. You can also randomly assign jobs to teams or individuals. Unlike you or your peers, Wheel Decide has no biases. Below you can find two wheels I made off the top of my head: one for playing vocabulary games and one for a pop quiz on irr...

LearningApps.org is a Web 2.0 application that allows you to create interactive teaching modules to support your lessons. It is very simple and straightforward in its use and requires no special digital skills. Every module created is public and can be used by any teacher interested. photo by  Karita88 Among the formats offered are games like 'Who wants to be a millionaire?", matching pairs, clozed tests, crosswords,  activities on  audio/video material, group puzzles etc.  If you feel it is too much work you can search  among the already made modules, like for example this simple matching activity I created for my 1st Grade (of Junior High) students. It can be used as a pre-reading activity for  Halloween related lessons .  

Welcome back and Happy New Year Holidays are (unfortunately) over, and we are all looking forward to new and creative lesson ideas to spice up our classes.  Below is part of a story created with the help of  Plot Generator , a helpful little site, which promises to give you "inspiration for your next novel, film or short story".   Students can have fun and learn how to build narratives by

This Advent Calendar is based on a lesson plan by Arjana Blazic, made for the Collaborative Teaching and Learning MOOC in the European Schoolnet Academy. The specific calendar is made purely for fun. There is something new behind each door, so make sure you come back everyday! You can make your own in Tuerchen.com , free and without registration. It can be easily embedded in eTwinning projects as well.

Writing letters is not usually considered a fun activity. If you have a computer lab available you can use the Letter Generator  which provides an interactive approach to the task. Ideal for young learners, it walks them through the letter writing process step-by-step and teaches them about each step along the way. It can be used for writing both friendly and business letters.  

An interactive that illustrates the basic elements of a good story, using the tale of Cinderella. A lively way to help students make sense of literary terms like plot, setting, characters, climax, resolution and so on . Elements of a story

Revising vocabulary can be tedious for students (and teachers). A fun and probably more memorable way of doing it is through crossword puzzles which you will have to devise yourself of course. There is a number of pages that can help you to design your own crosswords. One of the easiest and most helpful can be found in Discovery Education  where you can also choose from a number of other word puzzles to make, such as Word Search, Letter Tiles and more. You just add the words with their definitions in the box provided and your crossword is ready with the click of a button. Below you can find the crossword I prepared for our revision of Unit 6, QSE Intermediate, Andrew Betsis Editions. Words and definitions were copied from the book's glossary.

In a previous post I mentioned Wordle , a web 2.0 tool that creates beautiful clouds from words. There is another online application   Tagxedo , which offers even more variety of shapes and colours and can even create a cloud from a url, a twitter or a facebook acount. Here is a cloud I made from my blog: If you are looking for ideas for using these applications in the EFL classroom you can visit Christina Martidou' s blog. But I am sure that you can come up with some ideas of your own!...

Prezi is a web-based Presentation application which offers more flexibility and allows for more creativity compared to PowerPoint while the results can be really stunning. Among its many advantages there is one that is of particular interest to us EFL teachers (and teachers in general): Prezi allows you to collaborate with others on the same presentation thus making it a great tool for project work. It provides you with a link which the students can use so they can work at their own pace and time. Bear in mind that they first have to create an account and that the link expires after a week. Moreover the presentations you create remain online and anyone can see them unless you pay a subscription. If you don't mind that, Prezi is worth experimenting with. Below you can see the result of my experimentations, which are my idea of inviting my students to work on our next eTwinning task.

Our first mission in our eTwinning project was to answer the question "What does Music mean to you?". So what did we do? We brainstormed words and concepts that came to our minds hearing the word Music. We put most of these words in our poster. Recently I've heard about Wordle an online application that generates "word clouds" from words you provide. I put all the words we came up with in it and this is the result: The wordclouds are editable (you can change the font, the direction of the words and the colours) and they are printable. They make a cheap and fun way to decorate the classroom and can help students recall and consolidate new vocabulary.