Pete Sharma Associates

The latest business English e-lesson - Holistic Holidays – is now available to download. The lesson is a veritable tonic for mind and body…. relax and enjoy it!

I’m looking forward to the London Language show this weekend. I’ll be there on Saturday – hope to see you at Olympia if you’re going!

My session – ‘Blended Learning – what’s new’ - is at 15.30 pm.

How fast is your Internet connection? Which country is best prepared for the high-speed future?

For the lastest business English e-lesson from Macmillan, on the benefits for businesses of fibre-optic cable connections, just click on the link, print-and-go! Enjoy…….

The graphics department of the Financial Times have been working overtime recently to provide visual and audio summaries of the events of the current crisis hitting the business and financial world.

They can accessed by clicking on In depth on the website’s main menu and selecting Global financial crisis.

My favourite is called Bank Street. This is interactive history of the recent changes in the banking industry as a result of collapses, take-overs and government intervention. I used this today as part of a tenses review as well as to give the learner some of the background to the subject which he has missed due to being on a language course and not at his desk for the past week.

The ft.com subscription and registration system can seem a bit erratic so, as always, it’s a good idea to check you can access these pages before building a lesson around them.

“One highlight of this course is the self-study DVD-ROM”.

To read more from this extract from the Book of the month – The Business (Upper Intermediate), John Allison and Jeremy Townend, with Paul Emmerson (Macmillan) - see the latest ‘Reviews in brief’ at the back of the EL Gazette, October 2008.

It was great to run a workshop for TEFLIS in the wondrous surroundings of Port Regis.

Please click to download a seven-page Handout of the final Power Point presentation – ‘New pedagogies’ -although pls note that the file size is about 5mbs. Enjoy.

As Pete wrote a couple of weeks ago, we’ve had problems with the email for te4be.com. To cut a long story short, we haven’t been receiving any. That has now been resolved and dozens of unread messages flooded into our in-boxes this evening.

So, if you’ve written to either of us via the website or our te4be.com email addresses or have made a request to receive our newsletter in the past few weeks and think we are ignoring you, we promise this is not the case.

We will start to reply to your messages as soon as we can and, again, actively encourage you to get in touch for whatever reason. We promise to answer every one.

Looks like everyone is talking about the world financial crisis.

If you want something topical on the current banking crisis for use with your students, Macmillan have just posted the latest e-lesson.

Hope you have a profitable experience!

The latest CALL review has been posted to the Learning Technologies SIG website.

It’s an unmissable issue………………..

Gavin Dudeney updates us on Second Life; Maurice Claypole revisits Hot Potatoes; Kevin Westbrook presages the beginning of the end for blended learning;Jason Byrne looks at a CALL platform – Edubuntu; Graham Stanley encourages us to use digital games as examples in the classroom?; Brendan Wightman test drives the mimio interactive; May Mikati explores English Teachers and Information Literacy; and Birgit Winkler explores Longmans Exam Coach.

Could you ask for more? Well, in addition, Pete Sharma makes his selections from the IATEFL Exeter Conference.

The latest up-date for Blended Learning is now available to download from Macmillan’s website.

It focuses on two topics:

• Things to consider when setting up a wiki for use by teachers in a language school or language training company with a number of schools.
• An introduction to mapping software and an overview of what is available.

If you have thoughts or questions about these two topics beyond what we have written in the up-date pdf, feel free to get in touch.