The video features two speakers from Macmillan Education ELT who discuss teaching methods and digital tools.
Core Values for Teachers
Allison, the first speaker, highlights three core values for teachers:
- Variability: Recommends praising effort and quality over speed to accommodate different learning paces and providing quiet spaces for students to focus [00:07].
- Student voice and choice: Emphasizes creating a safe, anonymous space for students to provide feedback, which can lead to empowering experiences and improved classroom dynamics [00:50].
- Learner agency: Suggests giving students ownership of their learning through self-evaluation rubrics [02:51].
The speaker concludes by stressing the importance of shifting the mindset to believe that learning barriers are in the classroom’s design, not the students [09:14].
Digital Tools for the Classroom
Laura, the second speaker, provides a guide on incorporating digital tools into teaching, even with limited resources. She suggests using a daily tool like ChatGPT to generate lesson ideas [27:04] and several “special tools” for specific tasks:
- Perplexity for academic research [33:08].
- Mentimeter for creating interactive word clouds [35:58].
- Adobe Firefly for generating custom images to introduce new vocabulary [38:44].
- Diffit for simplifying texts [40:50].
- Eleven Labs to convert text to speech [44:11].
- Canva for creating visually engaging materials [47:48].
- Google Forms for surveys [49:27].
- Kahoot! for gamified quizzes [50:11].
- Suno AI for creating songs from lyrics [50:53].
- Macmillan’s Test Generator for customized assessments [52:45].
The video ends with a promotion for the Macmillan Education Everywhere app and an upcoming event called “New Voices.”
