Teaching with technology
12.03.2010
Helen Strong
With teaching tips and trends
Helen Strong is a business English trainer and teacher-trainer, with a keen interest in the use of technology in teaching. She is the author of Business Spotlight in the classroom.
Website: helenstrong.de
Website: helenstrong.de
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Two weeks ago Deborah Capras and I held a workshop at the Cambridge Day conference on how technology can help teachers to develop and deliver business English courses.
One of the tools we looked at was the social media platform Ning, which I first discovered at the end of last year, although it has been around for about four years. I now use it with all my courses, which include both university classes and one-to-one corporate clients.
Why did I choose Ning? Well, I'd spent a lot of time on the internet researching what online options are available for enhancing the learning and teaching process, and I'd investigated resources such as blogs, wikis and Moodle , before concluding that Ning would best meet my needs.
So what is so good about Ning and what does it offer to the business English trainer? Probably the best way to answer this question is to show you what it can offer, so please head on over to the Business Spotlight Ning group and start exploring it for yourself.
You'll see that it's a closed community (the Business Spotlight Ning group has been set to public, but you can password-protect your own groups for privacy) in which people come together to share ideas, discuss issues, upload documents and videos, post links to other websites, etc. I set up this group to show teachers who use Business Spotlight how they can best incorporate the wealth of materials on the Business Spotlight website into their courses, and how they can design a complete business English course around these resources.
In other words, Ning acts as an interface between the Business Spotlight online materials and the classroom, by allowing you to select and organize the materials you specifically wish to use. Can you see how this would work with the classes you teach? Why not try to set up your own Ning group — you'll soon see how easy it is and how beneficial it can be to your learners.
And finally, if you're still sceptical as to whether teaching with technology is for you, remember we all needed some help at the beginning:
If you have any questions about this blog post or the Business Spotlight Ning group, please leave me a comment below.
Take a look: Business Spotlight Ning group!
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