Pete Sharma Associates

This is the last few days to catch the ‘Early bird’ registration for the Blended Learning course in Markdorf, Germany.

You can download a sample programme for the course.

Thanks to those booked on the course and the interest from others – just mail Paul East at Pyramid if you are interested!

Hope to see you soon – both f2f and on the Moodle support platform for the course!!

Pete

The third update to our title ‘Blended Learning: using technology in and beyond the language classroom’ is due out shortly from Macmillan.

The update focuses on a new piece of software, New Inside Out Digital, and includes a glossary of terms for interactive whiteboards.

The download will be available from the Macmillan website. Happy reading!

You can now download a sample programme for the Blended Learning course in Markdorf, 31 March – 4 April.

 Visit the Pyramid website.

OLL (Online language learning) have developed an online communication platform allowing schools and teachers to offer face-to-face lessons online using web conferencing technology. Their virtual classroom offers two-way audio and video with shared interactive whiteboard and text chat.

Visit their demonstration website at englishlab.

Participants taking the next Blended Learning Course (Markdorf, 31 March) will be able to learn more during the session on online tutoring.

The Boolean search symbol * is used in many database searches to represent any characters or set of characters. It can be used in Google searches to represent any word or set of words.

You can use this feature for collocation searches. This is very similar to the Collocation Tester exercise (see chapter 2 of Blended Learning).

Here’s a couple of examples for finding common business English collocations. Enter the following in the Google search box. They are contained inside double quotation marks to force Google to search for the exact phrase plus whatever words appear in the place of the * symbol.

“a * meeting”

The results of this search include:

• a regular meeting
• a special meeting
• a brainstorming meeting
• a consultative meeting

“we need to * an agreement”

The results include:

• we need to reach an agreement
• we need to negotiate an agreement
• we need to come to an agreement
• we need to find an agreement

This type of search can be used in vocabulary lessons. The learners could first predict the collocations they would expect to find before going to Google. They could say something about how common a collocation is based on how often it appears in the search results, for example, reach an agreement occurs more often than obtain an agreement. You can provide the search phrase or learners could create their own. This could result in competition between groups to see which phrase would produce the largest number of collocations for a given word.

A map of Markdorf, the venue of the next Blended Learning course, has been uploaded to the Pyramid website. A sample timetable will follow shortly.

For more information on the course, visit: Blended Learning course.

Just to confirm that this exciting new course is running next year.

There is more information on this site as well as on the Pyramid site, including details of the Early Bird offer, and an application form.

 We believe it is important to have ‘hands-on’ experience of using technology, and this course is ideal for teachers, trainers and Directors of Studies still under-confident in using new technology in their language courses.

Book now to avoid disappointment!

Pete has been pushing ahead with te4be’s venture into the virtual. Our premises are very soon to open. You will be able to click on our book cover to reach an in-world sales outlet, and read the latest ten posts from this blog. Click on the pictures below to see larger images.

The Books for Teachers Resource website is the latest edition to Macmillan’s website and includes, of course, Blended Learning along with books by ELT luminaries such as Scott Thornbury and Jim Scrivener.

Click on the image of our book to find links to Sample material from Blended Learning, access to the first two up-dates for the book and a couple of attractive mugshots of the authors of this blog.

Last opportunity to book!

We are taking bookings for this course for one more week only, so please contact Paul East at Pyramid Multimedia Consulting if you wish to book a place – registration closes 30th November.

Hope to see you there!

Bookings for the next course in March 2008 in Germany start in December this year.

All details of the course are here.