4 Feb 2009

Life-long Learning


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".

You will find more information about it in the following link.

5 comments:

Thank you so much for this interesting post. The link for the books is great too;-)

Olá!
Amei seu blog.
Vai ser muito útil para preparar minhas aulas.
Sou prof de ingles para crianças no Brasil.
Visite-me!
http://inglesearte.blogspot.com

Hi Inma,

I would be very happy for you to attend this event. Please sign up for the event, so that I can invite you specially.

Btw, do you happen to know Scott Thornbury? He will be meeting us on Monday the 9th, if you are equally interested in this event, just mention it too and I will send you an invite.

Looking forward to meeting you in a virtual classroom.

Heike Philp
CEO of LANCELOT School GmbH

Hi Heike,
Thanks a lot for letting me know about Scott Thornbury conference!! What is he going to talk about? I was looking for this conference in LANCELOT events but I couldn't find any information about it. Please, could you give me more details? Thank you very much for your invitation.

Hi Inma,

Summer is always a great time to brows through old email and I noticed I failed to forward Scott Thornbury's recordings to you.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A2F8657307346BBA

More recordings for teacher training of this kind are on the www.youtube.com/lancelotschool site. We had as special guest Vicki Hollett and Henry Emery.

Rgds Heike

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