American English Dan

If you look at the reviews of online graduate level schools you will find them to have widely varied opinions.  I looked at those before and after I completed my Master's Degree from American College of Education (ACE) and noticed that most of the naysayers are people who did not complete the program and dropped out very early.  I understand that they may have dropped out because they felt they were not receiving the value they expected, but I also believe that you need to give a program a running chance before you lambaste it.  When you get to the graduate level the education you receive will be proportional to the effort you exert.  I already had some resident graduate level experience before I entered my program at ACE, so I have something with which to compare it.  In my experience, the online programs can have several distinct advantages over the residential programs.  The most obvious ones are the lack of need to be in a physical class or drive to sc...

My wife, who was born in Brazil, follows a number of online social media ESL teachers.  At this time I am not one of them.  However, she often comes to me with questions because she is confused about what the teachers are putting out there. It seems to very popular to discuss unusual expressions or idioms without including appropriate contexts.  I believe that language should not be taught without teaching appropriate, contextual usage at the same time. This also applies to teaching the rules and skills of native language to native language speakers.  Wheeler & Swords (2004)  made some interesting observations about how this can work in a classroom when trying to teach students with varied home languages to speak in a more formal way in the classroom.  Students are able to begin code switching - changing their language usage to a different variety - when they understand that there may be a difference in the variety of English that is appropriate for the...

When I was teaching at Wise Up school of English in Brazil, the administrator and owner of the school encouraged the teachers to research pedagogical topics related to our classroom experiences and then present them to the other teachers for discussion. We did this every Friday, and took turns presenting. I believe I owe a lot my success in my Master's Degree courses to the knowledge I gained from these in-house Professional Development sessions, both as a result of the research I did to present and the presentations of the other teachers. In that spirit I would like to share my presentation on Action Research with you. Action research can be a powerful means to help solve some classroom, or other localized school issues that you perceive as a result of your everyday teaching or leadership experiences. Citations and references are provided within and at the end of the presentation. The following presentation is a model of a formative Action Research Project. It is not an actu...

If you are like me, the word "Free" got your attention.  OK, so nothing in life is free, but if I don't need a large cash outlay to use something really useful, then that's OK with me.  Powtoon is one of those online resources that can make your multimedia stuff better without opening your wallet much.  This online app lets you easily create animated presentations.  Some feature require payment, but you can do a lot of things for free to start with.  If you need more features of higher resolution formats, then it may cost you.  I created this embedded "Mission Impossible" theme presentation in about 5 minutes.

So, the big question is, "Should we allow students to use smartphones in the classroom?"  In many classrooms, that question has turned into "How do we prevent it?"  Teachers have creative solutions like the cell phone jail block .  However, and please let me stand on my soapbox for a minute because there is no getting around it, nearly every student has a personal smart device, and they are going to bring them to school, instead of banning a perfectly awesome learning tool, teachers and parents could incorporate them into a blended learning model like the flipped classroom.   To begin, there are lots of awesome learning apps  that teachers can encourage students to use in class and at home.  There are also a lot of online reference materials, starting with online dictionaries .  When teaching ESL to my adult students, I always walk them through the steps of downloading at least two major English language dictionaries, not bilingual ones.  Normal...

I do not intend to turn this blog into a running obituary, but I believe it is important to mention that Bob Dorough passed away on April 24th, 2018.  He was 94 years old.  He was one of the creators of the Schoolhouse Rock animated musical series that ran during the period from 1973-1985.  They were created to help children learn and remember content they needed in their school classes. I can still sing many of these tunes I heard on TV when I was a child. There are many studies surrounding the Multiple Intelligences Theory of Howard Gardner ( Brualdi, 1998).  Gardner examines seven intelligences which he defines as   "the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings" ( Gardner  & Hatch, 1989).  One of the seven is musical intelligence.  People may possess and use forms of these intelligences in various mixtures with individuals having greater abilities in some areas than others....