Skip to main content

Teachers Media

I see that the old Teacher's TV videos are now available at a new site hosted by the team behind Teacher's TV! They say:

"Teachers Media is the new professional development service for everyone working in UK education, brought to you by the team behind Teachers TV.


This site contains a free library of over 3500 high-quality videos to help you and your team develop your professional skills, and support teaching and learning in your school and classroom.

Whether you're looking for great lesson ideas, how to take teaching from good to outstanding, or help with behaviour management, we have something for you."


http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/

It did occur to me that there just might be something positive in the slash and burn approach of the government. Many of the best intiatives which have helped teachers have come from teachers themselves or private organisations. In the MFL field I think of languagesonline.org.uk, mflresources, TES Connect, for example. On the other hand the Teachers' Resource Exchange is now defunct mainly because it was not hugely used or valued. That's why it got the chop. I recall in the early days of shared resources on the internet the government was offering a National Grid label to web designers whose sites met official criteria. This soon disappeared because it served no purpose.

Now, for every poor government-inspired initiative you could probably find a good one, but I have a feeling that that some of the best online tools for teachers are not the fruit of a ministry. This is not the case for Teachers' TV, but at least it is now in alternative hands and maybe those people will find a way to make it viable through advertising, selective sales, sponsorship or overseas deals (the videos are only free to UK residents) and even expand it with new material. Good luck to them.

Not sure where it leaves....

http://www.schoolsworld.tv/ who are also claiming to be about to offer the same videos as Teachers Media.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g