E V O L V E S C H O O L: TeachingEnglish Newsletter 2 March 2011

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TeachingEnglish Newsletter

2 March 2011

A new Guest Writer will be with us later in the year, but in the meantime you can check out the archive of articles and blogposts from famous ELT names, such as Carol Read, here.

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Welcome to this week's TeachingEnglish newsletter!

This week we have an article on 'devaluating' teaching which looks at how teachers are evaluated, and there is also a complete lesson plan in our UK Languages and Cultures series, this time focusing on Wales.

There's news of three day event in Russia that you will be able to follow online, starting from tomorrow. It should be an excellent opportunity for teachers to share ideas and best practice on a variety of topics. Finally, there's also news of this year's ELTons winners.

Best wishes,

Duncan
TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Devaluating teaching

Is our evaluation of teachers any better than our evaluation of learners? Of course, the first thing to say is that no teacher would ever agree to be evaluated in the same way as they evaluate their learners. Every school has in place some form of teacher assessment, but few, if any, are based on a true/false or multiple choice test the Head produced last night before they went to bed.
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Getting to know Wales

This lesson is part of a series of plans based on interviews with people from around the UK. It focuses on developing students' knowledge of a part of the UK, as well as practising their vocabulary and listening skills. It also aims to help their ability to take notes while listening to quite a challenging audio script.
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Winners of ELTons announced

Digital English language learning products were triumphant at this year's British Council ELTons. The BBC's Rinku's World and BBCe!, and United International College's Communication Station, were announced as winners in the UK Award for Innovation category at the prestigious awards ceremony held in London on 23 February 2011.
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E-merging forum online

From 3-5 March, the E-merging forum, organised by British Council Russia, aims to bring together teachers of English primarily from Europe to discuss and share best practices on a variety of topics. You will be able to follow all the action online here.

ELT blogathon: The great end

We are nearing the end of our competition. We've had a great response and the standard of the submissions have been very high. Special thanks to everyone who entered the ELT Blogathon. It's been great fun reading all the blog posts everyday and we have a tough job ahead of us choosing the winner.
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What's most useful about being a member of a Teacher Association?

TeachingEnglish recently launched a new area of the site for teachers associations called 'Networks'. This new section is intended to help teachers become members of, or form their own, teachers' association. If you haven't seen the Network pages you can visit them here. For those of you who already have experience of teachers associations let us know what you think is the most valuable aspect of membership by voting in our poll.
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