Pete Sharma Associates

Mr. Postman has just delivered my copy of the latest BESIG Issues

The Learning Technologies page

In this edition of BESIG Issues, The Learning Technologies page explores one of the key issues raised at the recent BESIG conference plenary session on Business English in the digital age. It then looks briefly at a new pronunciation ‘app’ and finally at an interesting use of Camtasia, screen capture software, for annotating videos.

[For the rest of this article, please scurry post haste to p.30]

In this edition, Issue 79,  there is a tech focus on blogs…..

In Search of the Lost Chord IW board

All I want for Christmas summer is to teach with an IWB.

I was quite pleased with my first room on pre-sessionals. I cannot grumble – I had an IWB. It was an early Hitachi board. (Yikes – I hadn’t used Hitachi before, but I was pleased). However, I have to say the pen was somewhat chunky, the e-pen equivalent of Michael Douglas’s mobile phone in Wall Street. I never quite managed to dominate the board, despite some enjoyable squiggles, a combination of my fault and the fact that when you are full-time you are, er,well, teaching full-time, so not too much time for professional development.

Anyway, roll on the second part of the pre-sessionals. Today my high hopes were somewhat dashed – no IWB in either room. Staving off depression city, I clung to Jagger’s words (“You cannot always git what u want, but if you try sometimes….”) and sashayed down to a new and possibly exciting room with a Smartboard. I was slightly underwhelmed to find out it is booked out all month, but not Monday afternoons. Yeah. Happiness avenue.

So I’ll take my group down there… I even discovered a cache of Promethean voting devices secreted away, oh joy (oh will I ever work out how to set them up?)

Sadly, no normalisation of technology for me this summer, but always look on the bright side of life. (As the Python boys sang) Using my initiative, I can use it, I can prepare at home and bring in stuff on me memory stick….

I am writing various training materials for IWBs this summer, so it’s great to be able to use one. Still, I cannot help thinking of the various barriers which  often exist between the teacher (moi) and the technology. And I’m one of them super keen teachers dying to get my hot hands on an e-pen or three!

At least I feel my training sessions are sensitive to these hurdles, and do not assume that it’s easy to use this stuff (it ain’t) or that it’s ubiquitous (it ain’t). And I reckon I’m probably one of the privileged…..definitely, maybe.

The good people behind GLOBAL (Macmillan’s course book) have just posted a podcast. The listening is the author (moi) of the essay on this topic in the Teacher’s Book.

Click here to visit the page and listen:

Podcast on Blended Learning