Life-long learning is an important part of us as teachers. Teachers are constantly learning all their life because it is very important for us to recycle ourselves, we have to become non-stop learners, to know new pedagogical strategies, how to motivate our students and adapt to their different learning processes...
In my opinion, a good teacher is a good life-long student. Therefore, some books you shouldn't miss are those found in Cambridge website, a great pedagogical free e-books collection from Cambridge University Press which has been designed for ELT professionals who wish to know more about language instruction. There are some topics like:
1. Teaching Listening.
2. Teaching Listening and Speaking: from Theory to Practice.
3. Teaching Pronunciation: Using the Prosody Pyramid.
4. Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom.
5. The Student-Centered Classroom.
They are not long books, you can read them in a few hours. Therefore, you have any excuse to read them, have you?
But what else is Cambridge University Press setting up for teachers? As Holly S. Longstroth, one of the organizers, told me, there will be an online conference called Exploiting Dynamic Content in the Professional English Classroom by Brendan Whightman on 6th March.
"This presentation will explore the varying types of materials that are now available to professional English teachers through the Internet. These include blogs, podcasts, infoquests and hot-off-the-press lesson plans that probe the latest issues wiht the immediacy that onyl the Internet can facilitate.
Referencing the free resources on Professional English Online, we will consider the advantages and the disadvantages of the Web's dynamic pedagogical content and how it compares to, differs from, and 'ultimately' can be integrated with traditional teaching materials.Brendan Whightman taught General and Business English in Poland and Italy for seven years before moving into technology-enhanced learning. He is an expert on blended learning and instructional technologies and his experience with e-Learning includes course design and software development for ELT, project managing interactive whiteboard CD-ROMs and teacher training. He now works for Cambridge ELT as Commissioning Editor for e-learning".
