Spice up your lessons

If you want to give your lessons a touch of humour, here is an idea that has given me good results with my students. The idea is called Lateral Thinking and it basically means that we should think in an unorthodox way. Visit Paul Sloane's website. There you have some riddles with their solutions. I usually post them in my school's website (in a forum) and give the students a week to find the answers and comment possible solutions to the riddle. Then I post the solution. This usually interests them. You can also use them in your lessons straightaway. If you want to find more riddles of this kind, just type "lateral thinking" in Google.
Have fun!

Get rid of textbooks!!!

Hi, everybody. I'm starting to work on my textbook for 1st BAT for next year. After having a look at MALTED and seeing that it crashes quite often, I think the best option is EXE LEARNING. I've already got a plan for nine lessons and I'm in the process of looking for materials. Any comments and/or help will be welcome.

Let's get rid of textbooks!!!

We all have to contribute to overcome the crisis. I think it is really a shame that we are still using paper-made workbooks when we have Internet and most of our schools have computers and multimedia projectors. Let's make the most of those resources and get rid of textbooks. That would imply a huge saving for our students' families and, furthermore, that's an investment that could pay huge benefits for the future. I mean, we can create materials that we can adapt in the future, thus not obliging our students to buy new books every year. I'm starting to make my materials for next year and I wouldn't mind sharing them with anyone. If you are interested, please let me know.

Creating a digital coursebook for Bachillerato

Hi, I'm seriously thinking of creating my own digital coursebook for English bachillerato, according to Spanish curriculum. Obviously, all should be done with a Creative Commons license. The idea is to create materials (most likely with Malted) so that students don't have to buy a coursebook. Students would be given a CD (or USB pen) with the book contents and there would also be interactive exercises in our school's website. So far the big problem I've found is how to find audio and video that can be shared freely. I'm thinking of using TED talks, but I'd be grateful if someone could give some hints. Needless to say, materials would be shared with any school interested in this project.