Redmeat

Do you know the comic strips under the name Redmeat? No? Well you can find it here, but carefull, they're so funny you could die laughing. What does it have to do with ELT? Well, here you can find so called Redmeat Creator - a nice utility to create your own Redmeat comic! And what's more, you can leave the dialog boxes empty and let your students fill them out! Or, you know, whatever.

Marc Prensky's Articles

A set of very interesting articles and samples of books written by Marc Prensky can be found here. You can find there things like digital native, computer games used for learning and much more.

A nice Youtube channell

Found a nice utube channell the other day. Useful to make students look at it at home. Here's the first video:

You're an apple

There are many varieties of jokes and some are characteristic for English. For example puns are widespread in English as opposed to Czech. If you want to include jokes, or humour generally, into your lesson, a good source of puns could be the "Annoying Orange." You can follow his channel on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/realannoyingorange?blend=3&ob=4), or even better, you can join his profile on Facebook and get your weekly dose of his new adventures there. Oh and btw, Why did the elephants get kicked out of the pool? Because they kept dropping their trunks! HAHAHA! You're an apple.

Helping students deeply scarred by dealing with their customers

When teaching English in a company, after some time you can tell the department a person works at simply by glancing at him/her. For example, you can always distinguish a receptionist from other women working in the company by the way she smiles. To be more exact, by the fact that she is alway smiling so one wonders if there is any particular jaw surgery that results in being a receptionist. Or you can tell that someone works in the engineering office by the style of their clothes which is almost remarkably bland. And you can tell the people from customer service by their shaking hands and their restless watery eyes. Whenever you ask them to say something about their work, you see their mouth twitch- a tell-tale sign of what just came to their mind- "I hate my job."

Some time ago, I came across a site called NotAlwaysRight - the full name being "The Customer Is Not Always Right" and was amazed by those stories. And I was even more amazed when people from customer support told me stories which were quite similar to those on that website. Since then I developed several theories on why people degenerate when they become customers. Also, I sometimes take stories from the site and create some activities with them. It's great because the stories are funny and my students can relate to them and add their own, so when teaching in a company, this is a site you can try.