5 Free Edtech and ELT eBooks

This is just a quick post to share 5 very short ebooks that have been taken from my award winning ebook - Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers.

Winner of the 2016 British Council Award for Innovation in Teacher Resources

The ebooks come from chapter 9 of the manual which contains 12 more entries like these. As well as the explainer text, which shows you how to use the tools and gives suggestions for tasks you can do in your classroom, each ebook also has a video tutorial.

Each ebook is available either as PDF from Payhip or from the iBooks Store. I hope you enjoy these free ebooks and find them useful.

Digital Classrooms - TedEd

TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content. It’s an ideal tool for building blended learning.

Digital Classrooms - MoveNote

MoveNote is a great tool for getting your presentations online. It enables you to add a talking head with voiceover to guide your students through the materials. These can be embedded into online courses or webpages. It’s ideal for creating flipped learning.

Digital Classrooms - MailVu

MailVu is a great tool for creating asynchronous interaction in either an online course or as part of a blended learning unit of work. It enables asynchronous interaction with just a web-browser and a webcam or there is a free mobile app that runs on most platforms.

 Digital Classrooms - VideoNotes

VideoNot.es is a great tool for building your students’ digital literacies and their abilities to use video to study online. It enables students to take time stamped notes while they watch video content and save them alongside the video file.

Digital Classrooms - Wideo

Wideo is a great tool for creating simple animated movies. It enables you to create a range of teaching materials that explain simple theories. It’s also easy enough to use to get students creating their own animations.

I hope you enjoy these ebooks and find them useful. If you like them then please check out more of my ebooks at: PeacheyPublications.com and sign up for my Edtech & ELT enewsletter to be kept up to date on all that's new in digital learning.

Related links

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best

Nik Peachey

Digital Tools for Teachers

Over the last few months I have been working on a new book project and finally have it completed.

The new book is Digital Tools for Teachers.

This book has been written and designed primarily with English language teachers in mind though the majority of the resources and tools contained in the book will have much wider use than just language teaching.

The book is available at the introductory price of £1.99 from:

• iBook Store
• Payhip

The book contains more than 70 tools and resources and these have been hand picked because they represent a broad cross-section of what is at present available.
The chapters of the book are divided into simple pedagogical tasks that most teachers need to carry out or help their students with and the descriptions of the resources are suitably concise to make the book easy for a stressed teacher to access and browse in a few spare moments between classes.

The sites, apps and resources within the book have been divided into the following chapters:

• Reading Tools
•  Writing Tools
•  Speaking Tools
•  Listening Tools
•  Grammar Tools
•  Presentation Tools
•  Poll & Survey Tools
•  Infographic Tools
•  Course Creation Tools

You can download the first two chapters free here:  Digital Tools for Teachers

At present each chapter contains between 5 – 10 different sites that have been selected to help you make a quick choice of the tools you need.

All of the tools and resources selected for the book are either free or have a useable permanent freemium offering, so you will never be forced to pay for any of these resources in order to sustain the work you are doing with your students.

Over the coming years it is my intention to regularly review and expand on the contents of this book. If you would like to be involved and assist in this process you can do so by:

•  Suggesting tools to be included in future editions
•  Writing an entry about a tool you have used and found useful
•  Reporting a dead link or a tool or resource that has become commercially unviable for teachers
•  Reporting a typo or factual error.

Anyone who contributes in any of the ways above will get a brief mention in the next edition of the book along with a link to their own blog or website.

Related links

• Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers
• Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 
• PeacheyPublications 
• Tools and alternatives for creating presentations
• Technology, Autonomous Learning & a Decline in Critical Thinking

Best

Nik Peachey

Thinking Critically through Digital Media

Although the use of internet and digital materials in the language classroom has come a long way over the last 20 years, still the vast majority of web based material that finds its way into the language classroom is used for information input or comprehension purposes. The students’ interaction with the materials is as such largely passive with the teacher controlling the suitability of the materials selected and deciding what information the students will extract from it.

In Thinking Critically through Digital Media I have tried to build on this model, but develop it and take it to deeper and more critical levels of analysis that go beyond the superficial linguistic level and help to develop students not only as English language speakers, but as capable information literate participants in the global knowledge economy.

The book uses as its basis the development of key digital literacies. These include the ability to understand visually presented data, the ability collect and analyse data using a range of techniques and survey tools and the ability to create and deliver a range of presentation types using digital media tools.

Whilst developing these digital literacies students are also encouraged to assess the validity, credibility and underlying bias of the information they study and are given a range of research tools and techniques for reassessing the information and evaluating how it fits within their personal framework of belief systems and values.

The book itself has four main chapters. The first three chapters contain a range of activities that teachers can use with students to develop their abilities to understand and create infographics, develop research polls and surveys and create and deliver presentations. These activities give students hands on exposure to a range of recommended tools and develop students as active creators of information whilst developing their abilities to work collaboratively in digital online environments.

The fourth key chapter of the book is a collection of lesson plans that teachers can use to take students through a complete process from accessing their existing knowledge about a topic, understanding new input, examining how the information fits into their existing value scheme, checking the credibility and validity of the information, carrying out their own parallel research through social media to finally sharing and reevaluating what they have learned.

I believe that the skills and abilities teachers can help students develop through the use of these materials are ones that are sadly lacking, not only in the English language classroom but also in the general education of many students around the world. Through the use of these materials I hope teachers can develop more actively and intellectually critical students who approach digital media with the ability not only to comprehend and consume information but also understand the possible bias, motivation and underlying values of those creating the information. I believe these skills and abilities are key to creating a more tolerant, open-minded and critically aware global society.

Related links:

• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 
• PeacheyPublications 
• Tools and alternatives for creating presentations
• Technology, Autonomous Learning & a Decline in Critical Thinking

Best
Nik Peachey

Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking

This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook 'Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking'.

Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy, which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students.

The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet.

Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills.

Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Series which started with the award winning Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers.

The series is intended to help teachers, teacher trainers, materials writers and course designers integrate digital technologies into their classroom practice in a pedagogically sound and impactful way.


I hope you enjoy these books and find them useful.



Related links:

• My Lesson Materials

Nik Peachey

10 reasons why you should buy my book

Over the last year I have been working on the first in what I hope will be a series of books to help teachers exploit new technologies in ways that will enhance their students learning. My first book - Digital Video - A manual for language teachers - was released in August 2015 and here just a few of the reasons why I think it's worth the price of a cup of coffee.

1. It’s a ground breaking ebook that combines text and images with 26 embedded video tutorials.

Here's an example:



2. It combines instruction on how to use the best in new technologies with creative practical classroom activities.

3.It gives an overview of how new technologies can be combined with existing methodological approaches such as TBL, CLIL and Flipped Learning to make students’ learning more engaging and effective.

4. It shows you how to build your own technical and pedagogical skills to enable them to create their own materials and activities for students.

5. It helps you to see beyond the concept of using video for comprehension and consumption and looks at ways you can exploit the amazing power of handheld devices to encourage students to use video creatively to develop their skills.

6. It includes annotated links to some of the best free video based apps and resources that are available online.

7. It shows you how to build the technical skills and confidence you need to gradually start introducing new technologies to your classroom.

8. It helps you to see how you can make the transition from classroom teaching to blended and online teaching.

9. It’s the cheapest good quality 400 page full colour multimedia ebook for teachers that you can buy online. (Price at present is below £1 / $1.99 so around the price of a cup of coffee)

10. The money raised from creating the sales of the book will help to ensure that I’m able to produce similar books like this at a comparable price.

You can buy the book from:

• The iBook Store for Apple users: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/digital-video/id1025275485
• For other platforms Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/doc/276137280/Digital-Video-A-manual-for-language-teachers 

I really hope you enjoy the book and please do leave a review.

Related links:

• Lesson plans and activities for exploiting video
• Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers 
• Using Scribd to monetise your writing work

Best
Nik Peachey

Publishing 3.0 - A new model for independent educational publishing

My New Years resolution this year was to start work on a series of ebooks for iPads, e-readers and other digital devices. This has been my ambition since I published my first book Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers back in 2009, but I’ve never felt that the time, the technology or the market was at the right place.

Significant changes over the last couple of years though have led me to believe that now is the time to look at a new model of ELT publishing, at least for the realm of teacher development books.

The changes I mention above include

• A proliferation of increasingly low cost e-reading devices and tablets.
• The development of powerful free software and applications such as iBooks Author for the development of media rich ebooks.
• The combination of these applications with secure and reliable marketing platforms, such as Lulu and iBookStore.
• The development of crowd-funding platforms such as KickStarter and Indigogo.

I believe that the combination of these developments is now enabling individual teachers to write develop and launch their own products to the market on a commercially competitive basis with established publishers.

So why is this a good thing?
Well anyone who has ever approached a publisher with an idea for a book will know how difficult it can be to get it accepted. The established publishers are, by necessity, cautious about taking on new, innovative or risky projects. Producing and distributing paper-based books is a hugely expensive endeavor and in the case of teacher development books, the returns are likely to be small for both the publisher and the writer.

The changes I mention above, however, have the potential to liberate writers from the established publishing process and give them the freedom to develop their own projects and products independently.

• The proliferation of low cost mobile devices such as e-readers, tablets and iPads provides a really useful and accessible medium on which to publish teacher development materials. Instead of having your books at home on the bookshelf you can now carry them around with you on your device so they are on hand at the moment of need.
• These devices and the applications used to develop content for them are capable of providing a media rich experience with colour interactive images, audio, video and a range of interactive learning apps, none of which is possible in a traditional paper-based book.
• The combination of these applications with established secure marketing platforms means that writers with the commitment to see their projects through to completion can easily market them internationally and actually get a reasonable financial return on the work they put in.
• Crowd-funding platforms like KickStarter and Indigogo enable writers to raise the funds they need to develop good quality professional products that the market wants.

I’ve put the crowd-funding platform at the end of my list, but really it should be at the beginning, because crowd-funding doesn’t just supply the money to launch the product, it also acts as a market research tool to see if there really is a market for the product. If the people for whom the product is intended aren’t willing to invest in it to get it created, then it’s likely that there isn’t really a viable market for this product.

So this brings me back to where I started with my New Years resolution. I have launched my own crowd-funding project to try to create the first in a series of ebooks in a series that I intend to call The Digital Classroom. The first of these will focus on the use of online video as a tool for learning.

You can find out more about this project by following this link Digital Classrooms - Online Video or watching the video below.



If you think this is a product you would be interested in having them please do support it buy either buying and advance copy of the book or by sharing the link with others you think may be interested.

You can also get an idea of the kind of content the book will cover and even contribute your ideas for what the book should contain, using the crowd-sourcing questionnaire below. Just add your ideas and vote for the things you would most like included in the book. That way you can ensure that I produce the book that you need to help support and develop your teaching.


powered by tricider

You can also follow the project on Facebook by going to The Digital Classroom and clicking on 'Like'.

I hope you find the project interesting and that this post gets you started thinking about how you can produce your own book too.

Best
Nik Peachey