How to create effective ELT materials

Summary

In an engaging session hosted by the British Council, educators were welcomed to a live event focusing on creating effective ELT materials. Marcus James and Catherine Billsburg explored how to craft tailored educational resources that meet students’ specific needs. Catherine shared her journey into material writing, and discussed the importance of customizing content to align with learners’ backgrounds and interests. The session underlined the practicality of using authentic materials and emphasized the role of teachers in designing impactful learning experiences.

Highlights

• Catherine Billsburg shared her journey into ELT material writing, beginning with the British Council’s professional website 📖.
• Creating course materials that cater to local contexts and cultural backgrounds can be more impactful 👩‍🏫.
• Engaging students in material creation can significantly enhance their learning experience 📈.
• It’s essential to consider both the macro and micro space in material layout 🗂️.
• Emphasizing consistency in material instructions makes learning smoother for students 📝.
• Collaboration with local radio and utilizing PDF formats can aid students with limited internet access 🎙️.

Key Takeaways

• Personalized materials make learning more engaging and effective 🎯.
• Understanding students' needs is key to creating successful ELT materials 🧠.
• Teachers are in a prime position to design materials as they know their students best 📚.
• Authentic and localized content can greatly enhance student motivation 🌍.
• Collaboration with students in creating materials can boost involvement and interest 🤝.
• Teachers don't need to be native speakers to create excellent English materials 🗣️.
• Simplicity, consistency, and accessibility are crucial in material design ✅.

Overview

The British Council's live event provided a vibrant platform for educators to delve into creating effective ELT materials. Catherine Billsburg shared her inspiring journey and experience in material writing, starting from her initial work with the British Council. She emphasized the importance of understanding and aligning materials with the specific needs of learners to make education more impactful.

Catherine highlighted the significance of tailoring materials to fit local contexts and cultural backgrounds. She stressed that teachers, with their deep understanding of their students, are ideally positioned to design personalized and meaningful learning content. This customization not only enhances engagement but also ensures that learning remains relevant and impactful.

The session also covered practical approaches to creating and using materials in various contexts, including low-resource settings. Suggestions included engaging students in the material creation process and using community resources like local radio. Catherine underscored the need for simplicity, consistency, and accessibility in materials, advocating for a thoughtful approach to design that caters to diverse learning environments.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Agenda Overview The event is a special live-streamed community gathering on the British Council’s Teaching English Facebook page, hosted by Marcus James. The focus will be on creating ELT (English Language Teaching) materials, with guest speaker Catherine Billsburg.
• 01:30 - 05:30: Catherine's Introduction and Early Career in ELT Materials Writing Catherine expresses her enthusiasm about participating in a live session with Marcus, showing her eagerness to connect with a global audience of teachers. Marcus mentions the positive feedback and excitement they have received from their online community, highlighting the anticipation for this event.
• 05:30 - 15:00: Importance of Tailored ELT Materials The chapter titled 'Importance of Tailored ELT Materials' discusses the anticipation and excitement surrounding a session focused on creating the perfect educational materials suited to learners' needs. The session is part of a series of events with another session planned for Wednesday, where Catherine will explore career-related topics.
• 15:00 - 24:30: Student Engagement and Material Adaptation The chapter titled 'Student Engagement and Material Adaptation' discusses the creation of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. The speaker encourages teachers who are watching to share their questions and experiences in the comments section, indicating an interactive session. The chapter highlights the popularity of the session, with many teachers joining from around the world, emphasizing the global interest in the topic.
• 24:30 - 31:30: Leveling and Adapting Materials A group discussion is introduced, mentioning individuals from various countries including Georgia, Afghanistan, Italy, Canada, Greece, Japan, and Indonesia, all involved in teaching. The host addresses Catherine, asking about her journey into English Language Teaching (ELT) material writing, which likely leads into a conversation about educational materials and methodologies.
• 31:30 - 39:10: Addressing Cultural Context in ELT Materials This chapter discusses the importance of addressing cultural context in English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. The speaker reflects on their experience in the field of materials writing, mentioning that they will delve into various approaches to this subject during a presentation on Wednesday. The speaker shares their initial experience in the field, which began 25 years ago with writing materials for a British Council website, specifically the 'professionals' website.
• 39:10 - 50:00: Copyright and Legal Aspects in Material Creation The chapter covers the journey of the author's involvement in writing educational materials. Initially, the author volunteered to write upon a call for material creation in their teaching environment. This engagement led to their first substantial work—a course book, which was inspired by attending a teacher training event in Spain, where the author resides.
• 50:00 - 60:00: Using and Adapting Authentic Materials The chapter titled 'Using and Adapting Authentic Materials' likely discusses the application of authentic materials in teaching contexts, possibly focusing on language teaching. It includes an account of a workshop conducted for teachers on using games for teaching vocabulary and grammar. The speaker mentions being nervous as it was their first time conducting a workshop but felt confident due to having a wealth of ideas from personal and colleagues' experiences.
• 60:00 - 69:00: Materials for Low-Resource Contexts The chapter discusses the creation of educational materials, specifically English course books with a strong focus on games for primary education, aimed at low-resource contexts. A commissioning editor from a Spanish publisher showed interest in developing such materials after attending workshops and talks on games in education.
• 69:00 - 77:00: Key Elements in Creating Effective ELT Materials The chapter discusses the process of creating effective English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. It starts with personal anecdotes about how the author unexpectedly got into writing ELT content. The author shares the experience of writing a sample unit for a book, which surprised them as they didn't realize such opportunities were possible. Despite changes to their work, the ideas were appreciated, leading to ongoing writing projects. Eventually, the success of these projects allowed the author to transition from teaching to becoming a full-time writer.
• 77:00 - 83:00: Conclusion and Follow-Up Session Announcement The speaker reflects on how many people, including themselves, often stumble into their careers. They discuss how circumstances such as being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time can influence career paths. The speaker acknowledges that this has been a common experience among their colleagues.

How to create effective ELT materials Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello teachers and welcome to this special live streamed community event on the teaching english facebook page brought to you by the british council my name is marcus james and in a moment we are going to be hearing from catherine billsburg all about creating elt materials so let's go meet her
• 00:30 - 01:00 hello catherine how are you today hi marcus i'm well um wonderful day i'm very excited to be doing this live with you looking forward to connecting with teachers from all around the world it's a it's a real privilege for me well we are very fortunate to have you with us and judging from the comments on some of the facebook posts uh last week there's a lot of
• 01:00 - 01:30 uh anticipation and excitement uh about this particular session today so um as i said at the beginning there are uh two live streamed events this week so today we're talking about uh creating the perfect materials for your learners needs and then on wednesday catherine will be talking about the sort of the career side of
• 01:30 - 02:00 creating elt materials um so okay let's remove that okay so our teachers as you are watching please do uh write in the comments any questions you have for catherine or any experience that you would like to share with uh with us as well we'd love to hear from you and i can see lots and lots of teachers are joining us from around the world as we said uh popular session popular session we've
• 02:00 - 02:30 got uh a catarina in georgia um nawab in afghanistan rosanna in italy manal in canada alberta in italy olympia in greece uh mary in japan malwa in indonesia so many families only so many teachers right now okay uh so catherine how did you get into elt material writing
• 02:30 - 03:00 um that's a really good question and and i'm gonna talk a lot about different ways into materials writing on wednesday especially but it's a good question and it's a question i always get asked the very first materials i wrote were for a british council website the professionals website and this was about 25 years ago maybe as long as that
• 03:00 - 03:30 um and i was given the opportunity as i was teaching and they put a call out and asked if anybody would be interested in writing some material so that's the first thing i wrote and then the first big thing i wrote which is a course book that came about because i attended a teaching um a teacher's event like a teacher training event um in spain where i live
• 03:30 - 04:00 and i gave a workshop and i gave a workshop to teachers who were teaching children about how to use games to teach vocabulary and grammar it was the first time i'd ever given a a workshop and i was very very nervous but i knew that i had lots of ideas to share from my own experience and and from my colleagues um and at the end of the workshop as i was clearing up and getting my bits
• 04:00 - 04:30 and bobs together a woman came over to me and she was a commissioning editor for a spanish publisher and they were going to bring out a new english course book for primary and they wanted it to have a strong games focus so she was going to all of the workshops and talks that were related to playing games and teaching children and she asked me if i'd like to um
• 04:30 - 05:00 write a sample unit for a book and i was amazed i didn't even realize that kind of thing could happen so i wrote the sample they liked it they changed a lot of it but they liked the lots of the ideas and and from then on it's been non-stop really i carried on teaching for a while and then eventually i stopped teaching to become a full-time writer so that's how i got
• 05:00 - 05:30 got into materials writing in the first place that's really interesting i mean i think a lot of us just you know stumble into the careers that we sort of end up in uh being in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time um certainly has led many of my colleagues to you know where they are today myself included which is fantastic so um catherine
• 05:30 - 06:00 that we promoted this session as um helping teachers to create the perfect material for their learners needs um so could you give us an understanding of why that would be so important why can't any old material work why does it have to be perfect for your learner's needs
• 06:00 - 06:30 um good question so let's start with thinking about teachers and i firmly believe that every teacher creates materials for their classes now i know that when when people say to me when did you start making materials i say i started the day that i became a teacher because even if i had the materials or published materials i was always
• 06:30 - 07:00 supplementing them with other materials that i would make and i know this is the case for i honestly think all teachers to a greater or less extent but the thing is most teachers never receive any kind of training in how to create materials we just jump in at the deep end if you like and sometimes we're very um well we're usually very enthusiastic
• 07:00 - 07:30 about the things we create and i've seen some fantastic materials created by teachers for their students fantastic but sometimes we don't always give it the thought that we need to and sometimes i believe that by having a little bit more thought and a few tweaks we could make the good materials even better why well number one because i think our
• 07:30 - 08:00 students deserve the very best and also i think that we as teachers there is nobody better placed than a teacher to create the materials that their students need because they know them best and published materials very often as good as they might be will not always be exactly what your students need so you are in a great position to be
• 08:00 - 08:30 able to give them exactly what they need um and i suppose the first thing to do of course in order to give your students exactly what they need the very first thing is to find out what that is and the only way to do that is by getting to know your students as well as you can their their interests their strengths their weaknesses whether they are you know why they're learning english so is it because they
• 08:30 - 09:00 are sitting on an exam is it because they want to make friends and speak english etc um and the more you know about your students the better informed your materials can then be um i think it's worth pointing out too because i get asked this question and somebody asked me recently and i get asked it a lot a lot of times do you need to be a native speaker
• 09:00 - 09:30 to be able to create good english materials and i have the answer to that is absolutely not um you know it it taps into the whole debate of teaching doesn't it but i honestly look the some of the very best materials that i've seen have been created by teachers from all backgrounds all nationalities um you know some native english speakers i
• 09:30 - 10:00 hate that word actually i hate the whole concept yeah so some are l1 speakers some are l2 speakers but no you you know absolutely not anybody can can create materials what you need is is to be um to have a teacher's mind and also to have an idea of the kind of materials that work well in your context and that's the the best starting point i
• 10:00 - 10:30 think that's a very very good point actually um uh catherine we've got some sort of comments and questions you know if you want to take these as we go along or we'll save them for them yeah i'm happy to i've sort of got a list of about five or six points that are important to raise they're probably coming through the question all right well i mean these are just um a mixed bag really um so manal um asks can elt material be modified
• 10:30 - 11:00 based on social background excellent question um i would say that elt material can be modified based on absolutely any criteria that you as a teacher decide is important so for example if you're teaching um in an area which is low resource area if
• 11:00 - 11:30 you like and and your student might have low income it's for example you i i wouldn't want to be given the materials where they are seeing you know expensive cars holidays ridiculous you know money stuff going on so i would definitely change the focus this is when it might be a good idea to create some materials maybe bringing in um local
• 11:30 - 12:00 um issues i think localizing localization if you like is is key when you're creating materials for students and you're working um in a particular place you can make them very um tied to to that place which can be very motivating and very relatable rather than talking about you know a holiday in disneyland you might be able to talk about
• 12:00 - 12:30 you might be able to teach the same language by talking about a visit to a local park in your area which is popular with people to spend their free time for example because at the end of the day we always have to keep the language in mind um what are we teaching what are our aims and objectives so if the vocabulary is about spending a day out for example you know traveling somewhere hobbies things you do in your free time or whatever you can bring them more to a
• 12:30 - 13:00 very local context i think absolutely you can be you are the boss when you create the materials you are the one who who decides all of these things yeah exactly i've got a few uh comments as well this one from fernando who says material based on learners needs is much more meaningful and it'll promote more authentic engagement absolutely absolutely i've got a lovely
• 13:00 - 13:30 little anecdote that i'll share briefly i want some to do some teacher training to india with the british council about eight years ago i think it was and um i was speaking with some a group of women from all different backgrounds from all different schools and they were teacher trainers so it was a train in the trainer experience and we were talking about creating materials and
• 13:30 - 14:00 they i was trying to give the message that they can use any content as a starting point but the more familiar things are sometimes better so i chose some contents i wanted to teach them how to create materials around the vocabulary of food and food preparation so i took a menu from the hotel i was staying in with indian dishes typical dishes and then we were speaking about how we could make materials from this menu
• 14:00 - 14:30 and the women were amazing because they all suddenly realized that the language for creating food and that they might have that vocabulary but a lot of the teachers and the students might not actually have the vocabulary they needed to be able to explain to a visitor or somebody they meet online how to make a dish that's typical from their area so we might see in a course book you know how to make i don't know
• 14:30 - 15:00 fish and chips or a japanese dish or whatever but if you're living in you know norway for example you might decide you want to teach something else so absolutely they can be very motivating another thing you can do actually is ask the students themselves about topics that are of interest to them and ask them what they're watching what they're reading what they're listening to this kind of thing and then make make a
• 15:00 - 15:30 note and if you come back then and provide them with some materials which have at the core something that they've mentioned they will know that they'll notice and they will be extremely grateful i think and and they'll show you that yeah that because students pick up on these things absolutely that's comment from uh adult uh basically exactly pretty much says the same as what you just said there i
• 15:30 - 16:00 will it'd be great if both the teacher and the students share in the creating the activity and the material i mean that's what it's all about isn't it we want to engage our learners and what better way to engage our learners than make them part of the creation or the the process i think that's key i think that's an excellent point adele has made because it's nothing to stop us sitting down um it's an actually quite a nice thing to do with the class or if you're online
• 16:00 - 16:30 you can do it too to sit down with the group and talk about materials and talk about the kind of things they like exercises they find motivating or boring or you know to just get an idea of of things and if there's something that they've enjoyed doing a particular task there's nothing to stop you setting as a task um homework or whatever ask the students to create
• 16:30 - 17:00 some materials for the classroom which you can then maybe polish into something um more professional looking if you like and and together create those materials that then if you add their names to it you can then use it with another class and and you know spread it around a bit and then if students see that other students have helped create materials maybe they'll want to do it too and
• 17:00 - 17:30 you know the thing goes goes on and on definitely excellent um okay i just there was uh one more i'd like to raise where was it oh i mean this is an interesting one um [Music] uh kinga asks uh what makes an elt material in your opinion how do you level uh your materials what proficiency
• 17:30 - 18:00 system are they based on okay this is a really really good um question king has obviously got her elt materials writer head on today so how do you level materials level leveling your materials is absolutely key to get the right level so what i do normally if you're using a text
• 18:00 - 18:30 you can use um a vocabulary profiler or a language profiler now this is something that you can get and there are there are lots of them available and i think we might have a link to share to one that i use quite frequently which is called faux cab kitchen now this is what you do with this it's a free website it's a free tool that you can use so you get um a text that you're going to use maybe in the lesson
• 18:30 - 19:00 or some an exercise or something you've created you cut and paste the content of that into the profiler and press click and the profiler will tell you what level that text is so they color code the words so you can see they use the common european framework or you can use the academic word list it depends you can choose a number of them
• 19:00 - 19:30 other language profilers do similar things or they might do extra things but basically you can see at a glance the exact level of the text that you're using and then you can do one of two things you can keep it as it is if it's below level you can make it more challenging if it's above level you can either add support keep it as it is or you might want to rephrase things to bring the level down
• 19:30 - 20:00 a bit but yeah leveling level is key because if materials are too easy students might get bored and if it's too challenging they might get frustrated but of course the beauty of creating your own materials is that you can add in differentiation yes so if you want to create a worksheet whether it's a print worksheet or something to use online you can make
• 20:00 - 20:30 the worksheet and then you can change it in different ways so that you can end up with two three four versions so one version might be a slightly higher level one might have more support there are a number of ways that you can do this but that is the beauty of creating your own materials because you don't normally get that from published uh published materials so
• 20:30 - 21:00 yeah excellent thank you for that uh tip yeah so uh vocab kitchen.com is on the uh screen right now um uh because we've got a few uh comments um i was gonna summarize the bit of a discussion that's happening in the chat below about um adapting or localizing
• 21:00 - 21:30 cultural material um now there seems to be two sides here there's one side that says well uh no we shouldn't uh adapt it we should learn about other cultures so kind of leave it as something to explore and then the other saying that we need to i sort of connect it to the lives of our learners for them to understand um how the culture is uh what side would you
• 21:30 - 22:00 fall on okay i would probably fall on the latter of those two things but again i would probably ask my students what they thought so it would depend very much on what the topic was i think one of the things i'm very interested in is um the environment and the climate crisis this kind of thing and i've found that very often students are more engaged when it's the
• 22:00 - 22:30 local issue than they are when it's um an issue that's something going on so of you know they might um have a certain amount of interest in in the fact that an animal might become an extinct in a country the other side of the world you know on a human level they might be interested in this but they might be more interested in actually learning about an issue that's
• 22:30 - 23:00 happening on their doorstep because the language that they're learning then might be of more immediate use they might be able to engage more immediately in what's going on more locally again i think it would depend very much on the context and the students when when i started teaching most of the course books had a very anglo focus of um
• 23:00 - 23:30 materials so you if we were talking about food it might be british food if we were talking about travel it might be somewhere in the usa etc that changed and then it became more global sometimes still within english-speaking countries sometimes not and now i think we're seeing more of a localization approach so um you know there's a bit it's a bit of
• 23:30 - 24:00 everything really i think fundamentally that's something that you can work out with your students and why not do both so for example you might do something about um a more global issue but then you might just by tweaking your materials or making an extra little supplementary worksheet you could bring it local so you could say something you could actually ask students even on the board how can you
• 24:00 - 24:30 bring how does this issue relate to your personal context or something like this so always bringing it back to the students um thank you thanks for that kath um adam's got a quick update for teachers uh watching we did promise you um uh we don't usually do this but it's a special uh live event on the teach english facebook page
• 24:30 - 25:00 today so if you do stick around to the end i will tell you um how you can download your certificate of attendance for this live stream so stick around to the end and we will give you the details then now uh cathy got a few other comments and questions if you'd like to have a go at these this one's a bit of a
• 25:00 - 25:30 oh a toughy and from muhammad what assessment criteria should you use to assess material utility okay that's a tough one mohammed thank you for making me use my brain this morning um i think it would very again this is very context driven isn't it and it would vent if you're teaching children if you're teaching adults um i i would
• 25:30 - 26:00 probably my the easy answer to this question it to me is that i would use the assessment criteria that i've i use when i'm teaching using a course book or publish materials so um material utility that's quite an interesting concept in itself i'm to need to think about that a little bit and come back i think and post something in the comments
• 26:00 - 26:30 but i think for me if the students are engaged if the materials are designed to teach a specific um aspect of language so this is where i always say start at the end when you create a materials and work backwards first write down what it is that you hope to achieve which areas of language are you going to be practicing specific skills is it a reading reading skills is it um is it something
• 26:30 - 27:00 to develop writing think about sub skills think about other other things like um life skills will these materials help my students develop their skills in [Music] critical thinking or collaboration etc make a list of everything that you want to achieve create materials come back and look at them and see if you can tick those boxes
• 27:00 - 27:30 and then always i think after using materials do some self-evaluation look at them again afterwards did they work did they were they successful did they fail your students could also help you with that by joining in and filling in a simple thing to do you know you can there are ways of measuring this kind of thing i think but a really good question i would say for mostly mostly what i
• 27:30 - 28:00 always say to teachers is try to imitate what publishers do but on a smaller scale so publishers always do a lot of research first before they create materials to find out what people need so you can do that and they always have a writer but then they have editors so it's always a good idea to imitate that too so when you finish creating new materials show them to somebody else
• 28:00 - 28:30 who might notice something that you haven't noticed a spelling mistake or or something that's just been overlooked yeah because we we we always make little errors um another thing that publishers do they always check very carefully that materials are legal now that's a big one that's copyright and i think it's worth mentioning that we need to be very careful when we
• 28:30 - 29:00 create materials that we aren't breaking any copyright rules um one way we can do that is by using well learning about copyright a bit more um we can use images from certain websites that are free of copyright so we can they're free to use um i know if this unsplash is one and there are others too
• 29:00 - 29:30 you can find them i'll add them in the chat box later as well um there are plenty of places to go to find copyright free things that you can use if you're not sure whether something is legal to use or not then either don't use it or try to find out or contact the people who've created it and ask if you can use it i've done that
• 29:30 - 30:00 lots of times and usually people say yes they might have an email address or a contact or a weber website or something um and just be aware i think being aware is is the most important thing here um also when you create materials it's a good idea to add your name to the bottom of the materials or the top somewhere and to say that they belong to you so that then if somebody ends up
• 30:00 - 30:30 sharing them they will you will be acknowledged as the author okay because it's all about acknowledgement i think it's really important yes that's right it it it's a bit uh it gets a bit complicated as well over you know when you designed and created those materials were you on kind of work time does your institution sort of therefore
• 30:30 - 31:00 take ownership of that as well i mean there are so many um hurdles and certainly with the copyright and intellectual property but certainly you know um creating them yourself at least you will get that acknowledgement won't you yeah one one i've got a tip as well um one thing that some teachers might not know if you want to use an article from a
• 31:00 - 31:30 newspaper a video from youtube um something that already exists and you don't have the copyright for it you can still use it if you provide your students with an external link to go there to see it so for example if i wanted to create some materials around an interesting article in a magazine
• 31:30 - 32:00 that's online instead of cutting and pasting and copying that article into my materials i would simply provide the link and then give my students the materials that i create around it and then there are no copyright problems because you're not actually sharing the creation you're sharing a link so they can see that creation in the place for which it
• 32:00 - 32:30 was intended um excellent i've got a few more uh quick i'm going to try and pick out some easier ones um i think a lot of teachers do this we come across you know articles in in magazines or in newspapers or um you know a blog websites for example and we try to
• 32:30 - 33:00 incorporate that into our teaching side asks how to adapt authentic materials in elt so i think we there's a big desire to use authentic materials isn't there yeah i i think that sometimes we can use authentic materials as they are and sometimes we need to adapt them and again this comes down to the students
• 33:00 - 33:30 and their their level etc um one thing i would say is sometimes you don't need to adapt them sometimes what you need to do is to provide the support that students need to be able to understand them so for example if you have a text that has got some um above level language then what you can do is you can actually
• 33:30 - 34:00 extract that language and do something with it with the class with the materials before they actually come across the text so in the simplest way i'm talking about things like vocabulary you might provide them with a glossary you might provide them with a a pre-reading activity engaging with that vocabulary um etc and there are a number of ways that you can do this
• 34:00 - 34:30 and then you can actually simplify a text again it depends on the original text there's a place on the internet called the gutenberg project some of you might be familiar with it and on this website they've got thousands and thousands of um copyright free texts stories books etc i had a quick look today before this
• 34:30 - 35:00 session to just to check it was all still the same and they've now added a new section of contemporary self-published books and you can take these and use them as they are but you can also take extracts from them and change them and simplify them so you could do what i mentioned earlier put it into the language profiler pick out some words that are above level use a a thesaurus
• 35:00 - 35:30 um like like an online dictionary thesaurus where they give you synonyms of those words that are lower level and and change something that way so yeah i would sometimes we need to adapt something there are different ways of adapting obviously what you could do is write a summary and then you might like to provide the strongest students with the original text after
• 35:30 - 36:00 you've created the worksheet using or whatever using the adapted material so they can they'll already be familiar with the topic and a lot of the language and then they might be much better equipped to have a go with the authentic original material that's that's the whole session in itself i think authentic words yes for me i think a lot of these questions could uh sort of warrant their own
• 36:00 - 36:30 uh sessions as well i've had a few questions um about how to get into the sort of the career path of elt materials writer and karen who's moderating the comments uh has already responded that we'll hopefully be talking about that on wednesday um now obviously there's a lot of us you know who have moved online one
• 36:30 - 37:00 way or another and there are many learners out there who are in um low resource context we may be not able to connect online but still have that remote learning um so what would be the best teaching materials asks mary juliet to online classes for those students who don't have any access to the internet
• 37:00 - 37:30 that's a really good question too um i i know that in some parts of the world where the students have um low income low resources great things are being done and there's a lot of creativity going on there where for example materials are provided as pdfs that can be downloaded by a teacher and then shared
• 37:30 - 38:00 maybe sent by whatsapp or by phone etc um [Music] local radios i've seen places where local radios have actually got involved so if you were living in an area where students might not have access to online materials and listening materials it might be worth asking your local radio station
• 38:00 - 38:30 if you could have a spot once a month or something to to deliver some some what would be audio uh lessons etc that you could write and deliver there are lots of things that you can i think most most of the most creative materials i've ever seen have been created by teachers who have low resources because when we've got everything and we're overwhelmed by so much stuff
• 38:30 - 39:00 we don't need to be as creative because it's we've already got this we've already got that but when we have less we are much more creative so um [Music] that's a really good question so i would say the biggest point i would say is to keep everything as simple as possible so if somebody does need to print something off you know just keep it in in black and
• 39:00 - 39:30 white you know just don't have loads of colors um texts for example if they students are going to be reading them maybe on a mobile phone and make sure the texts are not too long you know you're not going to send them a text of 500 words it's better to send them five texts over 100 words you know so they're doing less scrolling and less yes so think about um
• 39:30 - 40:00 what the end user is going to be doing with these materials and the difficulties they might face in you know in using them if it's something too big too colorful too shiny yes so i know that during the um pandemic here in my local area when um i live in a very rural part of spain and a lot of the students here didn't have access to the internet and some teachers were actually going
• 40:00 - 40:30 out with print out like worksheets that they were delivering by tractor in some cases to farms etc so that you know children could have these worksheets to to actually work with so yeah well in fact uh mary comments here restriction brings creativity yeah absolutely mary i i absolutely totally agree with you there
• 40:30 - 41:00 100 and sometimes a good exercise in cultivating your own creativity as a writer as a materials writer is to impose restrictions on yourself you know to actually say okay you need to do this in one hour you need to do this using no technology you need to do this without resorting to whatever so you
• 41:00 - 41:30 when it when a professional elt writer receives a instructions from a publisher this this is called a brief and we're given we told exactly what we can do but we have a long list of things that we can't do okay and sometimes we have to find another way of doing something or we have to find ways of you know we we find ways of doing this and it's a really that's how you become experienced
• 41:30 - 42:00 so yeah it's a really good how to write something in an in a limited number of words etc etc so good point there from mary um excellent i think we've probably just about got enough time to tackle one more um kath i can see five uh that i've selected in front of me could you select a random number between
• 42:00 - 42:30 one and five three three okay uh question from fernando uh what basic elements should we take into consideration to create materials for both online classes and face to face okay that's a really good a really good question basic elements okay number one keep things simple simplicity is key we over complicate things all the time
• 42:30 - 43:00 sometimes trying to be a bit clever i know that's that i'm speaking from experience and simplicity isn't is an art in itself and you know that's that expression less is more i i'm a firm believer in this okay so keep creates material for the classroom all for youth online consider
• 43:00 - 43:30 things like the design of of a page whether that be a slide or a printed handout and think a lot about white space and this is something that i could talk about for for hours there are two types of space on a page and it's macro space and micro space macro space are the white areas maybe around the margins
• 43:30 - 44:00 maybe between different exercises or activities etc micro space is the amount of space between lines um between maybe a picture and a caption this kind of thing and it's a good thing to think about both of those things because it i'll read up a little bit more about them have a look on the internet um white space in design um negative space it's called sometimes because
• 44:00 - 44:30 this kind of thing can make or break um a worksheet it needs to be accessible to everybody so that's key i always think i always say to teachers think about your whole class and their needs as a group and also think about each individual student in that class and if your materials are not accessible for one of those students in that class
• 44:30 - 45:00 then you have failed i've said this a number of times and it sounds harsh but we can't do this to students so we need to make sure that students if we have a student with dyslexia for example talk to them ask them what makes it things easy usually i'm told they prefer to have things in one column instead of two for example that's something simple certain types of fonts etc but speak to the students and yeah accessibility has
• 45:00 - 45:30 to be um very very key i think keeping things simple consistency be consistent if you're using an instruction in a in a worksheet for example um read the statements and decide whether they are true or false that activity can be expressed as an instruction in about 50 different ways and it doesn't matter which you use
• 45:30 - 46:00 what matters is that you always use the same wording because consistency is something that makes your materials look more polished it makes your students it helps them understand what you're asking them to do if you if they have two worksheets and you're changing the wording on an instruction they might think or one of them might think that you're asking them to do something different when you're not so maybe keep a bank of instructions and just use the
• 46:00 - 46:30 same ones cut and paste each time that would be my my top um advice i think wow um well thank you so much for that kath for sharing by the way did that i i would gather um those are your tips that have come from experience yeah they've come from experience and they've come from my experience everything you can possibly do wrong
• 46:30 - 47:00 with materials i've done it and that's good because that's how i learned yeah but also in recent years i've been um looking at materials that other teachers have written and i've been given feedback on these materials and i always while mostly the materials i've seen have been really fantastic
• 47:00 - 47:30 in almost 100 of cases i've been able to pick up something small that i've been able to say to the teacher you could improve this by doing this or that or whatever so i i'm keeping a record of all the different kinds of um errors or area and also a record of all the brilliant things that i've seen teachers do which had never occurred to
• 47:30 - 48:00 me and which i've then started implementing in my own materials and i'll just tell you one of those because i think it's amazing um somebody that was showed me some materials and they they were for children who low lowish level and they had an answer box where they had to write their answer in on this in this particular worksheet yes so they had four or five activities and these little answer boxes where they had to write
• 48:00 - 48:30 and what this teacher had done was created different sheets with different size boxes so that some were bigger some were smaller so that those learners who got the one with the smaller box might be less able in english to to to write a lot and the message that they were getting was oh brilliant i only need to write this much fits in this little box but those stronger students with a
• 48:30 - 49:00 higher level were being told go on give it a go you can write this much you know and get in there so such a small tweak there and a massive impact that's what i mean about getting to know your students well yes i mean i think that's that's true for um whatever part of education you end up in you always take that with you you know knowing your students
• 49:00 - 49:30 and with me now working in social media i'm still you know got my mind in in my classroom my students the needs of theirs and the teachers how they can meet the needs of their own learners as well so uh kath catherine billsbrot thank you so much for being uh so full of fantastic information for this first um part of the two day
• 49:30 - 50:00 live session on wednesday you're gonna come back and we're gonna be talking about sort of the career path yeah we're gonna be talking about how we can share the materials that we create and sell them get paid for writing them find work paid work as materials writers i've been asking a lot of my colleagues for help on this one as well asking them how they got into
• 50:00 - 50:30 materials right and then there's loads of things that we can do because it's when you do create materials for your classes and they're actually really good it seems a shame that they're just sitting in a folder somewhere and not being used by other teachers and you're not being earning some extra money by selling absolutely very good point um so we will see you back here on
• 50:30 - 51:00 wednesday uh teachers watching um yes as we did promise earlier um karen will be putting a link in the comments of this video and pinning that comment at the top for you to download and edit your certificate of attendance if you're using a mobile device it might not be as straightforward you might have to wait until you're behind a laptop or
• 51:00 - 51:30 desktop i will also post a link in the event page as well so teachers watching thank you so much do continue the discussion in the comments below catherine will be joining uh karen and myself a little bit later on and of course we'll see you back here on wednesday bye-bye thanks