What is your mission life?
It sounds like an easy question, but it requires you to think deeply about what your purpose in life is and what your values are. Even if you want to define your professional mission only, you cannot do it without…
Online Immersive Language Learning: In the Morning Break Show with Graham Stanley
I thoroughly enjoyed chatting about online immersive learning with Graham Stanley, who invited me to his Morning Break radio show. We talked about some of my favourite topics: ???? Immersive language learning in virtual reality???? The metaverse???? The need for digital skills…
FOELT Conference: What the metaverse means for language learning and how you can prepare for it
The 7th Future of English language Teaching Conference (FOELT) took place on Saturday, 11th June, 2022. The abstract of my talk There has been a lot of talk about the metaverse in the past year, and language teachers, teacher trainers…
Webinar: A conversation about the metaverse and virtual reality language learning
Teresa Bestwick from The TEFL Development Hub kindly invited me to give a presentation as part of their Facebook Live Webinar series. I happily accepted because, being a language teacher myself, I like talking to teachers about emerging technologies, in…
Reading: Increasing Your Happiness Quotient
I was surprised to find a chapter on ‘Increasing Your Happiness Quotient’ in a book on Professionalizing Your English Language Teaching. Transitioning from a challenging year for many to a new one with lots of uncertainty, I felt this was…
Innovation and creativity at work: innate abilities or learnable skills?
Is creativity a talent we’re born with or a skill we can learn? A quick search on the internet will show that it’s probably both. We are all born creative, but are educated out of it, and then have to…
Content curation and bookmarking: Wakelet
I’ve used several (social) bookmarking and content curation tools, apps and platforms (e.g. Diigo, del.icio.us, netvibes) over the years. My criteria This time, I was looking for an app that was I had a few other features on my wish…
Why I’m the best teacher
Now you’re thinking this is either clickbait or an arrogant person writing. But it’s neither…well perhaps a little of the former 😉 I’ve had many roles in my professional life starting from photographer, digital imaging editor, to teacher, to digital…
Revisiting virtual reality for language education: reuniting with my avatar
It’s been eight years since I left the 3D virtual world of Second Life after a few years of experimenting with teaching English, co-creating the SLExperiments groups for teachers interested in language education in SL, and conducting teacher training! A couple of…
2020: new teaching experiences, new role
New teaching experience I’ve taught ten and six-week EAP pre-sessional courses at UK universities since 2011. In 2020, I was supposed to be teaching my tenth course, but I wasn’t keen on travelling and mixing with so many people for…