Inspiration and fascination from TED

The TED website provides a brilliant range of short videos on fascinating topics. Great for assemblies, class discussions, G&T students and generally getting your brain going again after a hard day's teaching! This one is on a subbject close to my heart: babies' language acquisition.

Widgetbox

Unable to sleep because of a very sore throat (it seems strange to be up at this time without a toddler having woken me...), I've just been browsing www.widgetbox.com for some extra features for my subject blog. There are several "learn a word a day" widgets, and this (sidebar left) is my favourite. As well as presenting a key word it provides pronunciation, and an example sentence. In the case of verbs you can scroll forwards or back to conjugate in different tenses. Looks like a straightforward and useful widget which I hope to get my Year 10s looking at in the Autumn. Now for another strepsil and back to bed...