1. Chris Farrell from the Centre of English Studies is offering a month’s free trial of the online learning programme they developed as part of the PRELIM project in exchange for a little feedback. Visit their platform https://cesdirectlearning.podia.com/ and choose the course(s) that interest you most. The coupon code ‘BC’ will give you free access to all the courses for one month, until June 14th.

There are language courses from A2 to C1 and a range of teacher development courses, each made up of six half-hour lessons, including teaching the four skills, CLIL and Hybrid Learning. Chris would be delighted if you arranged to take a course together with colleagues from your school or district or teachers association.

Full details in the PDF below and link to feedback survey here https://tinyurl.com/57v89h3w (I’ll repost that survey link in three weeks’ time.)

2. Another good, free FutureLearn course has just started, on Communicating across Cultures https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/communicating-across-cultures Twelve hours, spread over three weeks – perhaps the sort of thing that your more ambitious older students might like to try? The course itself, with participants drawn from all over the globe, will be a chance to practise the theory they’re learning.

3. A friend who works in a museum, Henrietta Lidchi, has thought and written a lot over the years about the colonial past of many museum collections, and she introduced me earlier this week to this short video, First Contact, by Stephen Paul Judd about the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in the not-yet-united-or-even-invented states of America https://vimeo.com/145098773

If you have more than a passing interest in the issues of colonialism, collections and return, you might like to read the wide-ranging afterword to Henrie’s book, Dividing the Spoils: Perspectives on military collections and the British empire, that she kindly agreed I could share with you – PDFs of afterword and book flyer below. I don’t think Henrie’s expecting too many of us to buy it at £80, though!

4. And, finally, I’d always thought my colleague Michael was a bit of an Abba fan. Not true! Try this wonderful Bob Dylan series that he’s just recommended http://www.themetimeradio.com/