How to Teach With Technology

In some of his recent blog posts Nik Peachy has done a great job of showing us how to teach ourselves to teach with technology. He has used blog posts to publish a series of tasks that would prove really useful in supporting teacher training, or be of interest to anyone who wants to know how to use some of today’s popular e-learning tools.

He has devised a set of eight activities which are accessible from his blog, or available to download in pdf format to use offline. These activities are structured so that you can pick and choose which you would like to look at and just focus on those.

Here is what he’s covered so far:

1. Creating a learning journal – this task shows you how to create an online journal using Penzu.
2. Create online storage for your teaching images - In this task you create a Flickr photo sharing channel.
3. Create an online speaking activity - In this task you'll learn how to create an online speaking activity using VoiceThread.
4. Create a blog with a video activity for your learners – Here you can create a simple blog and use it to make a video based activity for your learners. Once you have created the blog can use it for other tasks in the series.
5. Create digital books with illustrations – Here you can create a digital image book which you can also embed in the blog you created in the previous task if yoiu so choose.

Nik has since added to these popular five activities and has now also shown us to:

6. Creating a video review activity - In this task you’ll learn how to create a film trailer review activity using film trailers from YouTube and an online notice board called Wallwisher.
7. Creating screenshots using Jing - Jing is a really useful free tool that allows you to create and annotate images grabbed from the screen of your computer. This can be really useful for creating instruction sheets like the ones used in this series and helps you to grab images to add into websites or other documents.
8. Create your own YouTube channel - Video has become one of the most useful resources on the Internet for language teachers.

These are great resources and a good way to get started with one or two tools to enhance your teaching practice. I look forward to seeing the series develop!


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