Instagram - the most popular ELT tool for teens and tweens

Lately, all the teenagers seem to be highly active and addicted to the social networking app called Instagram. It is so popular that it tops the app store most popular chat all the time. In view of the prevalent photos and videos sharing community, teachers can integrate Instagram in ELT and interact with students' updates to get them interested in English and practice more with the unique format of Instagram. So English teachers who are interested in bringing a refreshing experience to their students by using Instagram in ELT, I will tell you more about how to make good use of the "InstaFever" as an ELT tool.

What is Instagram?

It is a social networking app for sharing videos and photos from a smartphone. Users have their own profile and will receive news feed of the users they have followed. They can set their account to be public or private which means only the approved subscribers can see their new posts.

Users have to upload either a photo or a video together with some texts in order to create a new post. The limit of each video is 15 seconds whereas there is no word limit. 

Screencast-O-Matic: Flipping the language classroom

In the previous posts, I have introduced a few education tools like Nearpod, Blendspace and Voicethread with which students can learn at home at their own pace. But all of them have the same problem - students feel rather distant with the teacher/ tutor as they can't really feel the existence of him/her. The tool that I'm introducing this time, Screencast-O-Matic, will totally solve this problem!

What is Screencast-O-Matic?

It is basically a presentation recording tool which allows users to record all of the actions on their computer as well as audio commentary and save the recording for sharing or future playback.

Nearpod - When ELT meets smart phones

When everybody literally can't live without a smart phone, what's better than incorporating smart phones with ELT? I recently encountered an amazing educational tool, Nearpod, which works fantastically both on a computer and a smartphone to make lessons more interactive than ever!

Twitter - making ELT on trend!!!

Almost everyone has a Twitter account now. You can find almost everything ranging from your friends' most recent status to private lives of Hollywood stars. Although being criticised for amplifying mundane, Twitter is a very powerful sharing community where teachers can find a constant supply of useful articles, website links, lesson plans and many more. Indeed, some teachers have already taken advantage of the Twitter's format to keep their classes engaged and up-to-date on the latest technologies. Like what the famous educator, Russell Standard said, "[Twitter] could replace regular search engines as a means of finding classroom ideas".