Before reading the following blog please take a look at the video below and follow the instructions it gives. The selective attention test shows how, by focusing too intently on a thing, we block out other information. We select what we wish to pay attention to, and ignore other information. It works in conjunction with […]
Have you ever done something where you looked up afterwards and thought “where has the time gone?”; an activity that you found incredibly challenging but fascinating at the same time, so much so that time and self stopped being important. If you have, then that activity could best be described as hard fun. Of the […]
Will Eisner is recognized as one of the grandfathers of modern comic books. His book comics and sequential are some of the best written introductions to the critical understanding of comic books. One of his examples from the book illustrates beautifully the advantages of using comics in second language acquisition (SLA). The comic book is a multi […]
For those of you who don’t know the story of Tom Sawyer white washing the fence you can read it here. In the story Mark Twain demonstrates some features of motivation that are not normally thought about when teachers engage in classroom design. The first principle of the sawyer effect is that any activity can be made […]
“People learn through play” is a statement that almost every teacher, psychologist, educational theorist and even politician can agree on. Play teaches a wide range of skills mostly in the area of procedural knowledge (how to do things) rather than declarative (how to explain things). It is an area that is under-served by the tell-then-test […]
I recently read a post on Lifehacker about how a guy had “gamified” his life by setting up a points system to incentivize behavior. In summary, things he enjoyed doing were given a cost value, and things that he didn’t were given a points value. He could then track the points he had accumulated and […]
Many EFL classrooms around the world are filled with what Bennett calls fluent fools. While these students are often very gifted in the English language, they struggle with even basic tasks outside of the context of the classroom. The language that the students use often appears overly formal and strange to the ears of native speakers. […]
It is sometimes too easy for teachers to see the bad behavior of their students. We can notice a student who is distracted, or not doing what they are supposed to, from the other side of the classroom. The students who misbehave often only get noticed when they disrupt the class. Most advice for teachers in dealing […]