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Where is the Joy?
We have been trying to come up with a checklist we can use in teacher observations ( for HS teachers of English in Japan). It’s been harder than I imagined. We want to help teachers and their...
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Playful and Powerful: Stephen Anderson Makes You Think About Seductive...
I found Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences (New Riders, 2011) through a post on Julie Dirkson’s blog, where she introduced a set of cards that Mr....
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Making Teaching and Learning More Effective: Julie Dirksen’s Design For How...
This wonderful book by Julie Dirksen (New Riders, 2012) manages to do something that is very difficult: it is compact yet comprehensive, and it takes some fairly difficult topics and makes them clear...
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LET Kyushu-Okinawa Presentation
On June 9th I was lucky enough to be able to go down to Miyazaki for the 42nd Kyushu-Okinawa Chapter LET Conference held at Miyazaki Municipal University. I had a great time there at the small but...
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Mariele Hardiman’s The Brain-targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools
As a teacher, it is impossible to not be aware of the recent wave of influence that neuroscience is having on our profession. Everyday you see articles on the web, often in respectable magazines, about...
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The Social State of the Union: David Brooks Recounts the Life Story of The...
Like New York Times columnist David Brooks, I have read a lot of books and articles on evolutionary psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience in the last couple of years....
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Formative Assessment Pt. 3: Moving Right Along
This is the third post considering the implementation of Dylan Wiliam’s ideas on formative assessment in EFL classrooms in Japan. The ideas were gleaned from his wonderful 2011 book titled Embedded...
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Formative Assessment Pt. 5: Owning Learning
This is the final post considering the implementation of Dylan Wiliam’s ideas on formative assessment in EFL classrooms in Japan. The ideas come mostly from his wonderful 2011 book titled Embedded...
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EFL Gamification 4: The Downside and How to Avoid It
Not everyone is enamoured with gamification. Jane McGonigal wrote an entire book about using games as a force for good and avoided the term completely. And if you google “problems with gamification”...
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EFL Gamification 9: Jr. and Sr. High
In August, I gave–or I should say attempted to give–a presentation titled Gamification and High School EFL. Things did not go well. I tried to condense a previous 3-hr. workshop into an informative...
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