English Online

Please forgive more than a hint of self promotion (Well I am a blogger so what can you expect?) in this posting. I've recently written an Action Research Toolkit, aimed mainly at language teachers, but it may well be of use to teachers in other disciplines too, which has now been published on a pretty impressive new British Council website in China.

The action research toolkit is split into various components with articles on a possible research cycle, planning research as well as suggestions for how to use video and audio recordings in your research, how to design questionnaires and even some downloadable tasks and tip sheets.

You can download the complete kit from here

The Toolkit is part of the British Council in China's English Online site which has been designed with sections for both teachers and learners.

The section for teachers has some pretty handy tools like a flashcard archive , some video footage from inside the classroom (which is always useful and often hard to find) as well as a photo library for teachers to use.

What I like best about the site though is that it's one of the British Council's bravest attempts to really build a site that is very 'Web 2.0'. They have really tried to take on board and encourage the building of a sense of ownership and community within the site's user base.

Registered users can create their own blogs, get involved in forums and vote, comment on and rate the content.

I think this is a bold step forward for the British Council and a site that's well worth checking out whether you are based in China or not.


Best

Nik