They are definitely firing on all cylinders at the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) conference this year. A motion was put forward yesterday that
deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour
Though the term information superhighway seems to have been consigned to history, the internet, in many ways, resembles a demolition derby more than a sleek road. Every year I clear out the dead links from our ESL links database; even though we add a new link most days, we now how forty fewer links than we did at the start of the year.
Interactive whiteboards, heralded as a breakthrough in teaching, have come under fire as possible risks to eyesight. While the claims that TV and computer screens would ruin people's eyesight have largely not been shown to be the case, it is possible that there is a risk here.
The search engine Exalead offers some very interesting and powerful features for language searches. It's in a beta version at the moment, but the advanced search page offers a number of interesting possibilities.
We have added stemming functions to the database used by the Word Checker. This means that if you search for, say, a plural of a word, then the program will recognise that your search is derived from the base form of the word.
In the Word Checker we have added to the site, you can see whether a word is in the 2,000 most common words in the Brown Corpus.
We have recently added a Word Checkerto the site, which will look up a word or phrase against our databases of grammatical and lexical information. One of the things it will show is whether the word appears in the Dolch basic word list.
There has been some discussion about 'Open Source Teaching' recently. As I understand it, the idea is to build vast databases of reusable computer resources. I would like to suggest two other possible ways of doing this.
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