Here at National Geographic Learning, we’re excited to kick off another month of the Life Around the World Contest! In last month’s photo, a crowd throws petals during the Flower Holi Festival, Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, India. The colorful Holi festival celebrates spring, love and the victory of good over evil.
Category: Teaching Adults
TED Talks can make technical language accessible – try it!
One great thing about TED Talks is that they cover a huge variety of interesting topics – big ideas that will engage both you and your learners. But sometimes, they can be fairly technical. Some teachers hesitate to bring technical material into the classroom because they feel they don’t have
How To Personalize Culture
If you’re familiar with materials from National Geographic Learning you’ll know that they include a lot of images, texts and topics about people and places from different countries. For this reason, you can often exploit the cross-cultural aspects of the material and help your students build their intercultural awareness alongside
Life Around The World: May Contest
Thank you for those who participated in the first month of the Life around the World Contest! In last month’s photo, artists perform the fire dragon dance during a celebration for Spring Festival at Wuhan Happy Valley, Hubei, China. Dragons are a symbol of China and are believed to bring good
Three New Literacies for Today’s Classroom
“Now is the time that we need to rethink what we mean by the word ‘literacy’.” – Professor Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer What does “literacy” mean? Traditionally, it’s the ability to read and write, but in today’s interconnected and high-tech world that definition may no
Two Frameworks for Teaching Creatively in the ELT Classroom
Welcome to the second post in this series. In the previous post we looked at definitions of creativity and talked about the importance of developing creative skills in our classrooms, not only for our learners but also for teachers! In this post I’ll be looking at a framework you can
Life around the World Contest
Welcome to the first post in the Life around the World Contest! Each month, we will release a photo from a cover of Life Second Edition on the In Focus Blog. We want you to submit your best guess of where in the world this photo was taken. Try to tell
Making learning last: Multisensory approaches
You may be asking why a whole post is devoted to the subject of multi-sensory learning when the other posts in this series have included two or three factors that influence memory. The answer is because multi-sensory learning really implies experiential learning, which accounts for much of what we learn
The Questions We Ask
Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley explore questions about vocabulary that give you more feedback from your learners. Perhaps the most common kind of question that many teachers learn to ask during initial training is Concept-Checking Questions (CCQs). The basic idea is that after explaining what something means, teachers need to
A Critical Look at Critical Thinking
Before taking a critical look at critical thinking, it may be useful to come up with a clear definition of the concept. One way to think about it is to focus on the type of thinking required: “Critical thinking is thinking that is clear, logical, open-minded, and based on evidence.”